The Patio Table

This is one of my favorite roses in our garden. It starts out bright orange, like this, and after a few days the blossoms gradually fade to a sort of dusky pink. So we wind up with flowers of multiple shades between orange and pink, all on the same bush, before they drop their petals. And the insects like them because the flowers are open with accessible centers.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, after I gave all the houseplants their weekly watering, I decided to assemble our new patio furniture. Remember, it was delivered Friday, in a disturbingly compact box? Well, I opened the box and pulled out all the bits, and there weren't as many as I feared -- basically two chair backs, two seats, four pairs of legs, a tabletop, three table legs and a center brace. And a ridiculous number of nuts, washers, screws and little plastic things you put on top of the bolts so the ends aren't exposed. And a mini wrench and screwdriver. And two cushions.

I spread it all out on the floor in the foyer and went to work.

Olga supervised from a comfortable spot on the dining room carpet.

It took an hour or maybe an hour and a half, but the process went smoothly and with no major gaffes. At the end I wound up with this:

That was yesterday evening, when Dave and I had our French onion soup on the patio for dinner. (Yes, Dave made French onion soup, on a nearly 90º day -- I tried my best not to question the lengthy use of the stove and the oven in such weather, but I did point out that it was an interesting choice. He said he was trying to use up all our surplus onions, so points to him for wasting nothing. It was good.)

Anyway, patio table done, I got to work on some garden projects -- mowing the grass, staking up some plants and trying to widen some of our paths so that we can move around without too much hindrance. Around this time of year I start to get impatient with having to shoulder my way through undergrowth like Henry Stanley. Olga, meanwhile, lazily enjoyed the sun on the grass:

She's lying by my feet now, watching squirrels, as I blog from our garden bench.

Here, by special request, is the "beaded farmyard" as I mentioned yesterday -- sheep, frog and pig. (I guess a frog isn't a typical farmyard resident, at least not in any formal sense, but whatever.) I bought the tiny pig and the frog in Botswana -- the pig was a gift for my father, because he collected them. I reclaimed it after he died.

It's much cooler today, with an expected high of 81º F (or 27º C). I'm going to do my best to catch up on some reading.