Garden Dinner

Recently we purchased some new patio furniture from Lowe's as it was on clearance. Megan claims that this isn't some attempt at making me rip up the old falling apart concrete patio and replacing it with paving stones, but I don't really believe her. It's pretty nice stuff, but I have to admit that sitting at it might be more cool if say the patio was even somewhat level. :-)

Earlier in the day, we'd gone mountain biking and worked up quite the appetite. It had been a hot hard ride so we decided to have a garden dinner on the new set. I grilled some chicken and picked raspberries, strawberries, and peas, while Megan worked on boiling some (garden-grown) Yukon Gold potatoes and then added some (garden grown) peas and corn to it. She also made up some salad with lettuce and mixed greens from the garden. We have, for the first time ever, full heads of romaine this year. We've always had some romaine, but they've never developed full heads until now. -shrug- I guess that's to balance out our very pathetic two spinach plants that came up this year. For drink we had a bottle of Bella Sera pinot grigio. Dinner was darn good, as you can see.
While we were out there, we took Calvin out and put him on his leash. He likes being outside while we're out and spends most of his time chasing bugs, sleeping under the raspberries, or getting his leash completely tangled on any available object, including himself. He also vastly prefers to be out when it's cool (I imagine we would too if we walked around in a fur coat all day). He was having a good time running around. As soon as we sat down to eat, over came Tina, the neighbor's cat. She's been hanging out over here quite a bit. At night, Calvin runs from window to window talking to her. It's kind of funny for, oh, about the first 10 minutes. Then it's just kinda loud and obnoxious. Anyway, Calvin last saw Tyler outside and Tina had been over at the same time. When he saw Tina, I think he thought Tyler was coming back too. He whined and cried and ran around like he did the morning after Tyler was hit. He finally calmed down a bit, and then started trying to play with Tina. Tina generally doesn't want to be played with it seems. She does however love tormenting Calvin, although I think it's unintentional. Calvin is of course dragging a big string around and darn it if that's not fun to play with if you're Tina.
We've posted a few more pictures of the garden as it is now. If anyone wants to come water and weed it while we're gone, let us know. We'll let you eat all the raspberries you can stand!