Umbrella Upgrade

When you know you’ve got important house guests in your future, it can motivate you to finally do some stuff around the house that you’ve been meaning to do for a while.  In our case, that meant paying some attention to the backyard.  We picked up some brightly colored cushions for the patio furniture and replaced our faded and cracked Cinzano umbrella — which had served us nobly for two and a half years — with a bright red Campari umbrella.  The combination of the cushions and the umbrella bring a lot more color to the back yard.

To my knowledge I’ve never sampled either Cinzano or Campari, but I do like their umbrellas.

Friday Night On The Patio

Last night Kish made a wonderful dinner and then she, the Carroll County Cousin, and I moved onto our patio for the evening.

We sat in perfect temperatures, sipping glasses of wine and chatting as dusk fell and the last glimmer of sunlight faded from the treetops.  At full darkness, the summer insects performed their nighttime symphony, and the pleasant background buzz of chirps and chitters rose from surrounding bushes and shrubs and grass up to the stars above.

A football game was being played at New Albany High School.  For the most part the announcer’s voice was muddled and just one more part of the background noise, but from time to time his words could be heard with sharp clarity.  At one point during the halftime show we heard a his excited announcement of “Sweet Home Alabama” and the first few notes of the band’s no doubt rockin’ arrangement of the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic.

It was a classic middle American moment, hearkening back to an era when electronic devices did not rule our lives and people spent their evenings in the warm late-summer air, enjoying the simple pleasures of a good night-time talk.  We sat there for hours.