Summer Rain

It's been a busy few days since I got home from my visit to Mom and the 'fam in Tennessee.

Thursday I was outta there at 4 AM to attend meeting back in Atlanta at 8 AM. My very thoughtful brother hauled himself out of bed at that ungodly hour to make coffee and see me off, and I managed to walk into the office just as they were closing the conference room door to start the meeting. The rest of the day was a blur--an insurance audit that was drop-dead-due by close of business on Thursday was finished just in time, then I arrived home with ten minutes to spare before our friend Didi arrived for a visit and dinner. Friday was more of the same and after Morley and I went out for a quick dinner we crashed and were asleep by 9 PM. We are crazy rock stars.

Saturday was a catch up day. Morley went to the office early and I met him there a couple of hours later. We got home a bit after 5 PM and just as we were trying to decide whether we wamted to go to the boat for the night a huge thunderstorm rolled in. The lightening was intense and the storm was full of driving rain, so we elected to stay home. And because we are crazy rock stars, we were in bed asleep by 8:30 PM. Please forgive me for talking so much about our glamorous, thrilling life.

The upside of all that rain--other than sleeping like a rock (star) during the storm--is that it was just what the doctor ordered for our gardens. It has been dry here and my flowers really needed a good, long drink. This morning when I took Shelby out to do her urgent Morning Dog Business, I was struck by how lush the garden looked after all that rain, so I took my camera outside and walked around in my jammies taking photos.

This is the new flower bed I started earlier this year. It's doing great, although now I can see I needed to plant the Elephant Ear behind the hydrangea:

And here's how the garden around the pond is doing. My banana tree (to the left of the pond under the cedar tree) has finally decided to start growing tall. For awhile there I was worried I had a banana tree with pituitary gland problems, assuming of course that banana trees have pituitatary glands.

The flowers in the flower bed around the deck are taking off. Those white flowers are "David" phlox that I searched high and low to find earlier this year. I grew them at my old house and loved them; they'll keep filling in the rest of this year and come next summer this area will be a solid mass of white blooms:

And here's a view towards the vegetable garden. See those red things lying on the stone wall? They're tomatoes.

Here's a closer view. This is how many tomatoes we picked yesterday afternoon after we got home from work. We didn't bring them into the house yet because...

...we haven't finished eating these three bags of tomatoes we picked the day before. And we haven't finished the three bags of tomatoes because...

...we're still working on this basket and this platter full of tomatoes we picked the day before that.

We have tomatoes coming out of our ears. We are the Rock Stars of Tomato.