Happy Holiday weekend

Today, I'm off work, and just enjoying the day. The spousal euphemism and I are off to a wedding reception later this afternoon. The wedding is actually at two, but the euphemism couldn't get the day off even though I had booked it (before the wedding). This is what happens when friends have surprise weddings they announce 3 weeks in advance via email, scheduled to happen at 2pm Friday afternoons. You end up with more than a few guests who just come later to the dinner reception, crude as Miss Manners might find that to be.

Since I wasn't even sure until this week if we were going at all, I spent part of this morning trying to look presentable at the last minute. Manicure and a hair wash/style. Luckily, I live a short walk away from numerous salons and on a Friday morning of a holiday weekend, most people are heading up to cottages or camping, so they could take walk-ins.

Now I'm stuck here for a couple of hours and can't do too much with a fresh french manicure on - I wreck manicures nearly instantly, or at least by bedtime of the day they are done. So, while knitting seems OK, I'm a bit slower as I don't want to scrape my nails on the needle, and housework and gardening are out.

Speaking of gardening, our just-retired superintendent complimented me today on the clean-up of my little patio-yard. I have zero gardening experience, and just a few vague ideas about what I want, so I did pay someone to do the hard work of digging out old crap, re-soiling the beds and drawing out a plan for me. Here's some of my progress:



That is my little Pixie cutleaf red Japanese maple. I hope she's doing OK. She's a clump-form tree, with 6 branches grafted onto the root ball, and 4 of them are leafing up lovely. The other two have lost every leaf they had and are looking a little twiggy. I'm going to wait it out for a bit, maybe she just got too cold as I bought her a teeny bit early in the season, but Grobe Garden Centre does provide a 1-year guarantee so long as I follow their planting instructions, and I did.

This one:



is a wee cute Blue Star Juniper who has lived her longer than we have. She was in the opposite corner of the patio and I had the gardener who cleaned up the back move her over. So she and Pixie are sharing a patch.

Along the other patch, I've planted a hedge of miniature spirea, a couple clumps of ornamental grass, and a few of these:



I know, doesn't look like much now, but look at those teeny little green and red points - those are going to be gladiolas! I love glads, and since I couldn't afford the total outlay for two banks of designer perennials at once, I picked up 3 inexpensive daylilies and an armload of gladiola bulbs, as you can buy mix-and-match for about $0.25 each. I don't even remember all of what I bought or where I put them, but as long as they grow I'm sure I'll see them again.

Yay! I have a garden.