Pifflefests

We had a nice pifflefest in Atlanta on Friday. Judith (Dean, darling, you're being a cat) and I were the Atlanta contingent, and we had Ann (no nom, I think) from Durham, England and Anne (Maternal Young Woman) from Memphis, Tenn. Ann and Anne just happened to have visits that coincided--Ann was visiting family, and Anne was here for a convention.

We met up at the Hyatt Regency where Anne was staying, grabbed coffee at the Starbucks there in the lobby, and just settled in at a bar table in an area that wasn't open for business at that hour. We talked for a good hour and a half before Anne needed to head back to Phillips Arena for more of her convention. Then Judith and I waited with Ann until her family arrived to pick her up, and of course we kept chatting all the while. Getting together with other pifflers is almost always like just resuming a conversation with good friends--no lack of interesting topics of conversation.

We did get a passing bartender to take pictures with all the cameras: I'm hoping someone else's came out better than mine, which rather crops off the edges (plus I have my usual weird expression, but that's, well, usual). Just in case not, here it is:

Gardening

I finally began an attack on the weeds in the garden this weekend. I pay a lot more attention to my back yard than to the front (I go through the back yard to my brother's house, and that's the area where I allow the cats out for a few minutes at a time, etc.). The front, therefore, tends to look pretty bad before I notice. Most of the front is mulched areas under the trees, with some plantings mostly along the front walk and then a strip of lawn at the street to the corner (where I removed the grass and put mulch around the forsythia bush) and up the side street.

The area on either side of the front walk looked particularly bad, and the corner near the forsythia was right behind it. Saturday I pulled weeds for 45 minutes or so at the front walk then spread a bale of fresh pine straw. Today I went out again trying to beat the storms that hurricane Dennis would bring, and ended up spending 4 hours pulling weeds. The storms held off long enough for me to get just about every muscle sore. The front walk and the corner both look a lot better, though, and I also did a little transplanting of some of the impatiens that re-seeded on the corner, trying to recreate a cluster under the hickory, then a swath swings around the tree and across part of the mulched area. Lots more to do on that, but at least I got a start. Dennis is now watering my transplants for me...