A true bounty

Well, the garden is going crazy. Even with all of the blight on our tomatoes, we have way too many! We've also recently harvested:

• green, yellow, and orange bell peppers (with more of each on the way)
  
• cayenne and anaheim peppers (more of each on the way along with a second big batch of jalapenos)
  
• the last of the blackberries
  
• the last of the potatoes
  
• onions (4 different kinds and also some green onions which we grew from seed)
  
• pole beans
  
• garlic (really tasty and strong)
  

It looks like we'll have some vine peaches soon (these are peach-sized cantaloupe, but with a taste that's a bit more tangy like a peach), carrots, and, most exciting to me, grapes! We have concords ripe right now - I know this as I just ate one! We were supposed to have seedless grapes, but at least the concords weren't. I'll have to dig through the mass of leaves and see if any others are ready.

Tyler and Calvin are also getting along well. Sorry that pic is so dark - it looked fine before I uploaded to flickr. Anyway, they were eating from the same bowl earlier (with a mix of kitten and adult food in it as each likes the others') and spend a great deal of time chasing each other around the house.

Finally, after over a year, Megan and I got the new back door installed. For those with "short" memories, we bought a new pre-hung door to replace the old, weather-beaten, 1/16" plexiglass window, door handle about 6" too low door. The reason this took so long was that some previous owner had decided it would be a good idea to pour about 3" of concrete over the sill. -sigh- This dampened our enthusiasm slightly. We ended up having to chisel out a 3' x 3" x 3" chunk of concrete to make way for the new door. Even doing that though, we were not going to be able to use the frame from the pre-hung door - there just wasn't room and we were not going to chisel out more concrete so it would fit! Chiseling out the concrete took 5 - 6 hours with us alternating back and forth. We hung the door today and installed matching handles and locks on both back doors. We can actually come in the back via the short way now. The old door only had a dead bolt so it was "out only" unless we wanted to leave the back door unlocked.

It's a boy 2!

After a weekend with Megan's family (including Brandy's new kitten Savannah), we decided that Tyler really needed a little buddy. The vet's office had a very cute kitten so we took him home and now we have 2! Our new guy's name is Calvin and as you can see he's all gray. He and Tyler have already been chasing each other around the house. Calvin's about 10 weeks old or so. He's certainly a lot noisier than Tyler was at that age. He seems to be enjoying himself immensely - we just wish he and Tyler would stop chasing each other around when they wake up at 3 AM!

In other good news, we found someone to do our siding for a very reasonable cost (much less than the $20k or so Sears wanted). We'll sign the contract in the next couple of days and then we should have new siding up by the early fall (we haven't set a timeline yet). We also recently bought some new speakers (Boston Acoustics CR95s) for the house to replace my old and blown (thanks to a house sitter) BA A40s.

Finally, if you live nearby and want some tomatoes, please make your way to our house and take whatever you want!!!! Thanks, and please come again!