We bought new patio furniture a couple of weeks ago because our 15-year-old furniture was banged up from flying off the deck so many times during our Sacramento winter storms and, not to mention, one of our chair bottoms ripped apart. I bring this up so you know that we don’t run out to buy every new thing whenever possible like many consumers, because we’re not all that consumer driven. We don’t crave every new product shoved in our faces by advertisers. We won’t be wearing Apple watches, I’m afraid. I don’t even wear a watch anymore.

However, have we used our new patio furniture, I venture on to ask? It arrived several weeks ago, and we haven’t sat on any of the chairs or enjoyed the fact we have new furniture. It just sits there on the patio looking odd because it now has a brick red umbrella instead of a bright blue umbrella, and every so often I catch a glimpse of it out of my eye and for an instant, just a split second, am bewildered because something is out of place. I wonder if this how you feel when you become senile and completely lose your mind? Although, I imagine at that point bewilderment is a constant state of mind that morphs into the real world, so it doesn’t bother you at all.

It was a bit odd though when my husband asked if I would like to dine outside on patio furniture and I realized he wasn’t talking about in our yard. He suggested we run over to a Midtown place with outdoor dining for dinner. I suggested Mulvaney’s but we were kinda dressed in our “weekend attire,” aka like slobs, so he brought up Ernesto’s. Then we realized, oh, crap, it’s 7 PM on a Saturday night in Midtown. No reservations. Hard-to-find parking.

I popped over to Open Table when it dawned on me that we always have the Iron. If we weren’t so hungry we could walk there in 20 minutes. It used to be called the Iron Grille but they changed the name, for unknown reasons. You probably passed by it a million times and never noticed it because it’s sorta sandwiched on Broadway between an autobody repair place and an Asian market. The Iron features a patio on 13th Street, and another patio on Broadway, facing the lovely graffiti-free side of Target.

We live in Land Park, but we often seek out restaurants in Midtown. The Iron features wonderful salads and decent faire, including steak and lobster. The service is a bit slow at night, unlike for lunch, but that could be because our server was also bartending. It doesn’t negate the fact that we should support our local businesses though and not always, on auto pilot, think of dining out solely in Midtown when Land Park has restaurants like the Iron, the Riverside Clubhouse and Taylor’s Kitchen. Not to mention, there is still our back yard in Land Park, where our unused patio furniture sits.