Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today just to make a post for little or no purpose. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Just Another Post”, among at least a few others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
There was a magpie in the tree. I couldn’t figure out what it was saying, but it was pretty raucous.
We saw a whole flock of magpies on one of my walks, a few days ago. The guy I live with said there used to be magpies here pretty regularly, but not so much any more, so it was kind of cool to see all of them.
Talking about birds, but much littler ones, we’ve been getting a lot of hummingbirds lately. This is a broad-tailed hummingbird, but we’ve also had black-chinned and maybe even a calliope.
The guy I live with changes the sugar water every day, but now we’re running out of sugar.
We don’t have many plants for them right now, though there’s a zauschneria flowering in the front yard, and Salvia darcyi, too, but most of the plants whose flowers attract hummingbirds need more water than they get here, because they’re adapted to flowering when the monsoon comes, in places like southern Arizona and New Mexico, and northern Mexico.
We are getting a little bit of that monsoon rain, but not much in the last several days.
The rain we had was enough to cause this salvia, Salvia greggii ‘Grenadine’, to start flowering. The color here is a little off; it’s more like, well, grenadine.
On our walk the other morning, the guy I live with said that the canal looked really nice, the way it curved and everything, and the light.
The guy I live with said he was “at loose ends” today, which is a phrase I’d never heard before, but I could tell what it meant just by watching him. He couldn’t think of anything interesting to do.
He scrubbed parts of the kitchen floor, pulled some weeds in the garden, read a little, cut a few mats out of my coat, and maybe a few other things, but I could tell he wasn’t having a really great day.
This happens every so often.
The obvious reason for this is that there are days when he really misses his wife, and all the little things they did together, like going for walks at night at this time of year and looking for katydids with a flashlight, or just sitting at home watching The Simpsons. When they first met they would go to the movies a lot, too.
The other reason for this listless behavior is the weather. The guy I live with says it’s oppressive. I would have to agree.
It’s looked like this for days, now. Like rain, but hot (over ninety degrees F every day), and nothing happening. Sometimes it thunders, and I have to go to my Upstairs Fort for a while. And then we get ten drops of rain.
That’s a flicker in the top of the tree. It probably doesn’t care about the weather, and isn’t lonely, even though it’s by itself; just doing the things that flickers do.
The guy I live with said flickers don’t have all the emotional issues and silly ideas that humans do, and that’s why they can sit alone at the tops of trees and be perfectly content.
I don’t have all that stuff, either, though I don’t like thunder or firecrackers, but I do have a Kitchen Fort and an Upstairs Fort for those things, as well as a live-in chef who knows how much I like salmon, so I’m all set.
I also have the ancient couch, in the living room. The guy I live with hogs it in the afternoon, when he takes a nap, sometimes, but I know it’s main purpose is to make me happy, as you can see here.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 