Long Weekend

Not a long weekend as in a holiday weekend, the sort of weekend where you have all kinds of free time to work in the garden, or spend time with friends, or maybe fire up the barbecue.

Goodness, no. It wasn' t that sort of long weekend at all.

What it was was a very busy weekend at work, with all sort of special events and guests thereof to host and manage and keep moving on schedule and when possible, happily so.

Fortunately, the weather worked with us for a change. While we had some heavy showers move through Friday evening (as I took that sunset and clouds photos which wrapped up the last post, actually...), the rest of the weekend has been delightful and sunny, but with reasonable temperatures and not lots of humidity.

Having seen the forecast for the weekend, however, I did manage to get out for an abbreviated watering session in the garden early yesterday, before heading off to get things set up for the day's first event.
I'm really happy with this lantana plant (left), which is doing quite nicely in its hanging basket on the front of the house. I'd grown this once or twice before...or tried to, but with only moderate success, since I was working with lesser exposure to full sunshine.

Of course, all the sunshine in the world isn't helping the Early Girl tomatoes live up to their name, as the first of those tomatoes--looking sort of apple-like, I think--are only now beginning to get the slightest blush of color.





Now of course, it's Sunday and all the business of work (save a visit to the office shortly to address some paperwork) for the weekend is happily behind me.

And it wasn't all bad, really. Certainly, it was a long and tiring string of parties, but for the most part, all of our guests were quite lovely and some very memorable and fun.

The events biz is, of course, rife with uncertainty and the need to adapt schedules and think on one's feet. Like when you have to delay dinner for over an hour because half of the guests speak a language other than English, which you've learned has seriously delayed the conclusion of the wedding rehearsal they're coming from.

And then realizing that same language barrier is making it surprisingly difficult to get across the idea that the party has come to a conclusion and all the other guests have left and "it's time you did the same so we can clean up and go home" without simply turning out the lights and pointing toward the door.

Or dealing with the self-important and drunken guest from a culture that doesn't value women as it should, who becomes angry when you defend your female employee's hard work at keeping tables at his family's party clean and orderly because she may have taken away his last half inch of watered-down scotch.

Which might actually have been consumed by the under-aged guest you've been playing cat-and-mouse with all evening.

But as I said, there are plenty of great moments, too, and for the middle of our trio of parties this weekend, we celebrated/hosted the wedding reception of some of our neighbors from here on Not Wisteria Lane. Congratulations and best wishes to Jen and Kevin!!

In the process, I was able to meet some more of our lovely neighbors here. Of course, now they know what I do for a living, they are thinking I might be talked into organizing the annual fall block party. We'll have to wait and see about that one, though.

It was just nice to get off my feet last night and relax a little with a bit of blog-and-comment reading before falling into bed finally.


All in all, it's been a pretty great weekend, even if the work schedule did mean I had to practice brevity with my earlier blog posts.

That's okay. Sometimes, I really enjoy sitting back and letting the garden speak to all of you, and see just what it encourages in you lovely people who come back regularly to visit the Midnight Garden.

I hope the weekend was a beauty for you and that all your hopes and dreams for what was hopefully a few days off came together exactly as you hoped, or maybe even better!

Before wrapping up, I'll just offer my thanks to my pal Meredith, who worked with me throughout the crazy weekend of ups and downs and kept a smile on my face and a laugh never far from my lips...even if we did have to hear the "Chicken Dance" more than once.

: )