Inman Park loves to decorate for Halloween. People get pretty creative with their displays, and they especially love skeletons. Here are some views from around the neighborhood. For me, it’s particularly fun to see decorations on the historic houses. Enjoy!

The annual Scarecrows in the Garden tradition takes place in October with scarecrows displayed around the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

The scarecrows are all handcrafted by local schools, families, artists, businesses, and nonprofits, and there were over 100 imaginative creations on display. Some were based on famous people, others made reference to famous works of art, and others were just whimsical.

There were several scarecrows of famous musicians:

The movie industry was represented:

There were nods to famous artists and artwork:

In addition, the garden was decked out for autumn with over 11,000  pumpkins, squashes, and gourds. At the end of the month, the garden will donate as much as possible. Some will go to food banks and restaurants. Some will go to the zoo. (Apparently, the rhino loves pumpkin.) Anything that isn’t donated will be composted on site and used to fertilize the plants around the garden.

There was even a famous architect. Mies Van der Rohe was a German and American architect, and he was a pioneer of modern architecture in the 20th century.

And then there were lots of whimsical scarecrows.

In addition, the garden was decked out for autumn with over 11,000  pumpkins, squashes, and gourds. At the end of the month, the garden will donate as much as possible. Some will go to food banks and restaurants. Some will go to the zoo. (Apparently, the rhino loves pumpkin.) Anything that isn’t donated will be composted on site and used to fertilize the plants around the garden.

The L5P Halloween Festival & Parade takes place every October in the historic commercial district of Little 5 Points. But first, a little history…

The arrival of the trolley car in the late 1800s in Atlanta created booming city neighborhoods further from downtown such as Inman Park and Candler Park. As a result, Little 5 Points became one of the first commercial districts outside of downtown Atlanta and attracted businesses such as movie theaters, grocery and drug stores, barbershops, and restaurants. 

Despite early success, the Great Depression hit L5P hard, and the community soon suffered from severe urban decay. With a proposed highway coming through, the local citizens (including those in Inman Park) decided they’d had enough. In the early 1970s, they formed coalitions, acquired funding, organized demonstrations, and united for a common cause: to take the neighborhood back. Soon the City of Atlanta began to award L5P community grants and funds for public improvements, and by the 1990s, L5P was booming. The entrepreneurial spirit of community-based businesses helped spur the revitalization of L5P which today is an avant-garde arts and shopping district home to a wide variety of shops, restaurants, bars, services, live music venues and performing arts theaters.

This weekend was the 18th annual Little 5 Points Halloween Festival & Parade. This is the biggest Halloween celebration in the Southeast with tens of thousands of people coming to the L5P commercial district to party and get their spook on.

The two-day festival included an artists market with lots of and lots of booths lining the street, live music, local food trucks, and street buskers. There were also some fun events such as a pet costume contest, pumpkin smashing, and a children’s area where kids could create their own Halloween monster stickers.

Of course, my favorite part of the festival was the parade! It lasted for well over an hour and included elaborate floats, marching bands, local businesses, dance crews, political groups, and others, and there were Halloween costumes aplenty. All in all, it was a fun way to spend the afternoon on a beautiful fall day.

This past weekend saw the annual Pride Festival in Atlanta. Activities were canceled on Saturday as Hurricane Isaias blew in from the Gulf Coast. The rain stopped around 10:30 on Saturday morning, and it turned into a cloudy but nice day. However, here in Atlanta, we’ve learned to be better safe than sorry when it comes to weather. The city learned a hard lesson several years ago when a snow and ice storm came through which shut down the city for 3 days and stranded thousands of people on the roads. Luckily, the events on Sunday were still a go, so I headed over to watch the parade and check out the festival.

Atlanta’s first Pride parade took place in 1970 with 100 demonstrators carrying “Equal Rights for Gays” posters. By 1976, the parade had swelled to over 1,000 marchers, and Mayor Maynard Jackson declared June 26th to be Gay Pride Day in Atlanta. After facing backlash, Mayor Jackson proclaimed another Civil Liberties Day in Atlanta in 1977, and parade attendance skyrocketed. In 1981, Atlanta started celebrating Pride Week which included a live concert, radio show, art show, film festival, history symposium, block party, and voter registration drive. 

In 2009, Pride was moved from June to October to avoid the heat of summer in the South and to coincide with National Coming Out Day, which is why I found myself attending the event in October 2026 with approximately 350,000 other people.

The festival is held in Piedmont Park and includes an artists market, corporate sponsor booths, drink vendors, food trucks, a community history exhibit, a kids zone, a wellness zone, and music stages. I learned that Georgia-natives The B-52s performed at the festival in 2000, and local Atlanta duo The Indigo Girls performed in 2005 to a crowd of 320,000 people. Wow! I didn’t recognize any of the performers this year. I also didn’t realize that the AIDS Quilt was on display in the park. I totally missed that. Phooey.

The parade was definitely the highlight. Today, the Atlanta Pride parade is the largest parade in the city. Over 300 groups participate with a total of 5,000 marchers. In addition, an estimated 100,000 spectators watch the parade. The parade route travels through 21 blocks of Midtown, and it lasts for 4 hours.

Since 2000, corporate involvement in the festival has grown. Not only does the festival have big corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines whose financial donations help pay for the operations of the festival, it seemed like 80% of the groups marching in the parade were corporate. I saw Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Ralph Lauren, Kohl’s, Delta Credit Union, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Hyatt, Atlanta United, Inspire Brands, and so many more.

I also saw many non-profits and small local businesses such as several local churches, Atlanta Botanical Garden, a Jewish community group, local colleges and universities, Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, and local gay and lesbian bars.

The parade was wonderful. There were lots of wacky costumes, the ubiquitous rainbow flags and balloons, and lots of disco and dance music. All in all, there was a real sense of coming together, community, acceptance, and celebration. It was really a fun and inspiring event.

Summer weather started late this year, but when it hit, it was with a full, Southern vengeance with killer heat and humidity. This last week, it finally started to cool off. In addition to spending time apple-picking on Saturday, I took advantage of the nice weather and went on a long walk on Sunday afternoon.

Atlanta is known for its festivals. Many neighborhoods such as Inman Park have their own festivals. Others are sponsored by breweries such as Sweetwater 420 Festival or by arts organizations and take place in parks around the city. Of course, there are also music festivals such as Shaky Knees, Shaky Boots, Midtown Music Festival, and others.

We skipped the festivals during the heat of the summer this year, but there were two on Sunday that sounded interesting, both within walking distance of our house. I decided to go to Sweet Auburn Music Fest and made the 25-minute trek on foot to check it out. One of the great things about walking to the festival instead of driving is that I noticed little details that I wouldn’t otherwise see.

The most significant building that I saw along the way was Howard Middle School. This building first opened in 1923 as an elementary school for black children. Martin Luther King, Jr went to school here as a child. In 1948, it became Atlanta’s first black high school. It closed in 1976 and remained vacant until 2021 when it reopened as a neighborhood middle school after an extensive renovation and expansion.

Sweet Auburn is an historic neighborhood that was the first black neighborhood to grow in the city after the Civil War. It became a prosperous black business district and was famous around the country. I’ll make a more detailed post about it at a later date.

The Sweet Auburn Music Fest is an annual urban music festival with performances, food, and arts vendors reflecting black culture in Atlanta. When I arrived, a young girl had just taken the stage. She was about 9 years old, wearing shiny gold pants, and belting out gospel music. A man in front of the stage was dancing and saying to everyone who walked by, “That’s my grandbaby up there! That’s my grandbaby!” He was so proud of her.

The festival was smaller than I had expected, only 3 blocks long. However, there were a few hundred people there. Not surprisingly, I only saw about 9 other white people walking around.

I walked through the festival, looking at things for sale, listening to music. As I left, an older lady had taken the stage with her husband and was signing more gospel music. People were dancing and clapping and singing along. It was fun.

I still had some gas in the tank, so to speak, so I decided to walk over to the Old Fourth Ward Arts Festival, about 25 minutes away. On the way, I again saw some interesting things.

The Old Fourth Ward Arts Festival was pretty small, about 30 vendor tents. There were the usual paintings, watercolors, custom t-shirts, ink drawings, homemade dog toys, candles, body butter, essential oils, knitted things. 

Surprisingly, there was only one food tent which served gyros, and there were zero port-a-potties. The festival was held in Historic Old Fourth Ward Park which is across from Ponce City Market, so I guess people could walk across a street, across a large parking lot, and into a massive building to find a bathroom and food alternatives. After strolling through that festival, I did just that and walked over to Ponce City Market to use the bathroom and then connect to the Beltline for the 30-minute walk home. 

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, so the Beltline was pretty busy. I always enjoy that walk as it passes through different neighborhood zones with businesses, residences, and landscape areas along the way.

When I was about halfway home, I came upon a third festival that wasn’t on my radar. We’re in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, and there was a Hispanic Heritage Festival in a large grassy field next to the Old Fourth Ward skate park. There was a stage with Latin American music that made me want to boogie, lots of food booths, and arts and crafts vendors. It was a nice surprise to take a detour through this festival on my way home.

All in all, I think I set a world record by attending three festivals in one afternoon. I covered 4-1/2 miles over the course of 2-1/2 hours. It was fun to see festivals that I hadn’t seen before, and I got to see and appreciate parts of the city at a pedestrian pace. Would do it again! 14 out of 10!

And just because these flowers brought me so much joy, here they are again:

This weekend we drove up to the North Georgia Mountains to go apple picking. This was our fourth year visiting Red Apple Barn Farm in Ellijay. In fact, we like that orchard so much, we went twice last year.

The farm has 19 varieties of apples, and picking season runs roughly from August 15th to October 30th. The varieties include Gala, Honeycrisp, Ludacrisp, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, September Wonder, Suncrisp, Jonagold, Mutzu, Crimson Crisp, Rome Beauty, Cameo, Pritchett Golden, Stayman Winesap, Granny Smith, Fuji, Pink Lady, Arkansas Black, and Yates. The Ludacrisp variety makes me giggle, because the rapper Ludacris lives in Atlanta.

We got up bright and early, actually before sunrise, so we could leave the house around 7 am, stop for breakfast along the way, and get to the farm at 9 am.

We stopped at Waffle House, a Georgia institution with locations all over the place. In fact, we passed 14 of them on our 1-hour and 20-minute drive to Ellijay. The restaurant’s tag line is “Good Food Fast,” and it serves breakfast all day. I’ll write a separate post about Waffle House at another time. We stopped at a Waffle House in Ellijay, and we were in and out of there in 30 minutes.

We arrived at Red Apple Barn at 9:08, so excited to be one of the first visitors to arrive. Turns out the farm’s store opens at 9 am but the u-pick activity doesn’t start until 10 am. So we decided to drive back into Ellijay and walk around the town square. And I’m glad we did! There was a little farmers market going on, so we bought some chicken eggs, duck eggs, and 4 containers of local honey.

Happy with our unexpected purchases, we went back to Red Apple Barn at 10 am. You pay for admission to the farm, and there’s a selection of bags and baskets that you can buy to fill with apples. Then you catch a tractor ride up to the top of the orchard.

At the top of the hill, the tractor drops you off, and there is a info stand where employees tell you what is ready to pick and where to find the different varieties around the property.

We spent a couple of hours walking around, filling our basket and bags. We would taste-test each variety before deciding if we wanted to pick that particular kind. 

During our first trip to the farm in 2024, we discovered Mutzu apples which are huge, the size of softballs, and which are really crisp and delicious. Both last year and this year the Mutzu were disappointing, so we only brought home three of those.

We were also really looking forward to the Pink Ladies. We could fill a whole bag just with Pink Ladies, but again, we were disappointed this year. Those apples fell into two categories: 1) small, green and not ripe, 2) ripe but blighted with some sort of fungus or insect infestation and rotting on the tree. Boo. I was only able to pick four Pink Ladies.

We did find other varieties to fill our bags including Jonagold, September Wonder, Cameo, Enterprise, and others that I can’t remember.

In addition to apple picking, the farm has two cows and two calves that you can feed. They love to eat apples. There are also a couple of children’s play areas, because so many people come with their little kids, as well as a pumpkin patch, u-pick flowers, and various games like cornhole and horse shoes.

When we were done at the top of the hill, we decided to walk back down through the orchards instead of catching a lift on the tractor.

It was a long but productive day. In the end, we came home with 8 or 9 varieties of apples for a total of 30-35 pounds of fruit. This is not our record haul. Last year, since we made two trips north, we harvested 66 pounds of apples. And now the fun begins as we make dried apple rings, applesauce, baked apples, and rustic apple tart or just pick up an apple and enjoy it as a snack.

Fall has officially started here in Atlanta, and we’ve been blessed with a couple of cooler days this week with highs only in the 70s. But that will change next week when the temps creep back into the 80s. Summer heat keeps hanging around.

With the cooler weather, Chad and I have started going for walks after work again. Today was a long walk down the Beltline, and then we cut back through the neighborhood to come home.

The kids are back in school. In fact, they’ve been in school so long already, since August 3rd, that they are already on fall break this week.

Speaking of school, Chad and I are taking an online Intermediate Italian course this fall through a language school in Boston. Our teacher is native Italian and is a professor at Boston University, so she’s a great fit. Plus, there are only two other students in the class, so we get lots of individual attention. If things go well, I might attempt the citizenship language exam in February. Otherwise, I’ll take it in June. (It’s only offered four times a year. It’s also only offered in a few cities in the US, so I’ll have to travel to take the exam, maybe to Miami, maybe to Boston.)

I’m back at work full time, and it’s so nice to be on a regular schedule again. I’m still doing PT exercises, but my shoulder is 98% healed. I’m guessing a few more weeks of PT to work out the final bits of pain, and then I will be back to normal. I’ve decided, however, that I’m going to continue doing several of these exercises for the rest of my life. They are good for maintaining flexibility and building strength, and it will be good for me to keep this up as I get older.

The farmer’s market is having a bumper crop of late summer / early fall produce, so we have been eating lots and lots of vegetables. I’ve been making gazpacho every week. Yum! And this last weekend I made a big pan of ratatouille which is so healthy and delicious.

Our yard is full, almost overgrown after a long summer, and it’s getting ready for fall.

There are lots of late summer flowers blooming around the neighborhood. I love that things bloom for so many months of the year.

And finally, people are starting to put up Halloween decorations. I don’t have any photos of that to share, yet, but I did spy this fun guy on a walk today. This structure is a holding cell circa 1900, located in a park down the block from my house. Back in the day, a policeman, on foot, could arrest someone for something like public drunkenness and lock them in this little compartment until the paddy wagon came around to pick them up and take them to jail. I call this compartment The Drunk Tank. Here is its visitor today:

I first fell in love with dahlias in 2013. We were on a mini-sabbatical in Paris where we had rented an apartment for five weeks. One day, I saw a poster for a mushroom festival in Parc Floral, and I thought, “I bet Chad would enjoy that.” Parc Floral is in the southeast area of Paris on the edge of the city. The mushroom festival was cool, of course, with specimens on display that had been foraged by amateur mushroom gatherers from around the country. Parc Floral had much more to offer, however, including a bonsai tree collection and an international dahlia competition. The dahlias were planted directly in one area of the park, and I was fascinated with all of the different varieties. Chad went back to the park a second time specifically to photograph these flowers. We now have a large print of one of his photos hanging in our house.

This weekend was the annual Georgia Dahlia Show showcasing hundreds of dahlias grown and cultivated by members of the Dahlia Society of Georgia, and it did not disappoint. What is quite astonishing to me is that dahlias come in a great variety of shapes, sizes and colors. It’s hard to believe that some of these flowers are even related to each other.

The dahlia show is a judged competition, and the flowers are organized by variety and size. Categories include Anemone, Waterlily, Pompom, Stellar, Collarette, Orchid, Micro Peony, Micro Waterlily, Mignon Single, Orchette, and Ball. When the category references another type of flower such as Waterlily, Peony, or Orchid, it is because that particular variety of dahlia looks like another type of flower. It really is quite fascinating how different all of the dahlias can look.

I took photos of most of the winners. Here are a few:

Honestly, most of the flowers in the room had a first or second place ribbon, even those not assembled on the winners tables. This somehow made perfect sense to me since I think all dahlias are beautiful and are winners in themselves!

Every summer, the Atlanta Botanical Garden features one particular artist with installations around the property, and it’s always interesting to see the art in the context of the garden environment. This year, the featured artist is Niki de Saint Phalle. Her works on display are full of energy, movement, whimsy, and joy. 

The Niki Charitable Art Foundation has this to say:

Born Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle in 1930, she was known to family simply as “Niki.” She was, by every measure, a rebel. Raised in an upper-class French-American family with rigid expectations, she eloped at 18 with her childhood friend to escape their control.

In 1953, she suffered a nervous breakdown, and it was during her hospitalization that friends encouraged her to try painting as a path toward healing. That small act of creative recovery changed everything. Though she had once dreamed of acting, Saint Phalle chose art – and art, in turn, chose her. With no formal training, she forged her own path, associating freely with the era’s most experimental artists, writers and composers.

Her art was never quiet. She used bold color, raw emotion and fearless scale to push back against a minimalist art world that had little room for joy, or for women.

She became best known for her “Nanas” – voluptuous, exuberant figures of women rendered in fiberglass, resin, mosaic glass and mirror that seemed to dance rather than stand still. Animals, mythical creatures, totems and sports heroes populated her world as well. One of her greatest life’s works, the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, is a sculptural landscape inspired by tarot cards – a surreal, walk-through universe she spent decades building.

Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, believed that connecting with the natural world was essential to the human spirit, and she created sculpture gardens and outdoor exhibitions across the world to prove it. But here, among the blooms and canopy of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, her work lives on, as joyful as ever.

I was really looking forward to seeing this summer’s installation, and it did not disappoint. I found myself inspecting one sculpture and then spying another across the way and rushing over to it to inspect that one. I originally thought that I would just post a few photos of some representative works of art, but you know what? No. I decided to post every photograph, and I’m pretty sure that I took a picture of every piece of Niki’s art that was on display. Each work of art gave me a sense of wonder and, indeed, a sense of joy.

“I used to think there was a need to provoke, to attack religion, and the generals. And then I understood that there is nothing more shocking than joy.”

-Niki de Saint Phalle, 1968

When I went to the Abbott family reunion, I took advantage of the fact that I was flying into Baltimore and arrived early so I could spend the afternoon at the National Aquarium. I love going to aquariums. The animals are always fun to see, of course, but it’s also interesting to see how the exhibits are designed and how the building architecture is organized to support the visitors’ experience.

The National Aquarium is located on two piers in the Baltimore inner harbor. The aquarium is in a very touristy part of the city, and neighboring attractions include an immersive Titanic exhibit, a WWII submarine that you can tour, paddle boats for rent, and city parks to rest your weary feet. Plus lots of restaurants and bars, of course. 

The area between the two piers of the aquarium is the Harbor Wetland, a recreated salt marsh exhibit constructed directly in the harbor. It recreates a marsh environment like those that existed in Baltimore hundreds of years ago. This new salt marsh is so successful, native species have already moved it and made it their home.

The main entry to the National Aquarium leads you into the Australia: Wild Extremes exhibit. This exhibit is enclosed with glass walls and a glass roof, so it is very light and bright, a real contrast to most aquarium exhibits which don’t have any windows. The exhibit includes crocodiles, turtles, fish, birds, and other reptiles.

The central atrium was the most surprising space to me. It’s 4 or 5 stories tall with ramps criss-crossing the space as you go up, so you can view the pools and tanks from various levels. The coolest thing, though, was the size of some of the animals in the shallow pool on the bottom level. The rays were huge! I’m guessing 4 to 5 feet across. There were also several sharks and plenty of fish swimming around.

My second favorite exhibit was the Upland Tropical Rain Forest. This is another area that is surrounded by glass, so it has lots of sunlight. Plus, the environment is maintained at 80 degrees and humid, so I was sweating in about 30 seconds. However, it was all worth it because I saw sloths in person! We’ve twice been to Panama where sloths are native, but we never saw them in the wild. I was so excited to see two different sloths literally hanging out in this big room.  In addition to the sloths, there are 27 other animal species and 160 plant species in this exhibit. It was super cool.

The Shark Alley exhibit holds 7 species of shark. I also saw a largetooth sawfish which is a species of ray and not a shark. I learned that there are 5 types of sawfish in the world and all are either endangered or critically endangered. 

The Amazon River Forest exhibit contains over 50 species of animals including ripsaw catfish, turtles, tree frogs, and river stingrays.

The Atlantic Coral Reef area has over 1,000 animals. I saw moray eels,  porcupine fish, sea turtles, and so many fish.

The Dolphin Discovery is a huge pool with 6 bottlenose dolphins. I think they give performances throughout the day, but I didn’t catch one. I did see them swimming around in their pool, though.

Here are some other animals that I spied during my visit:

And finally, my favorite type of exhibit is always the jellies. At the National Aquarium, this was originally intended to be a temporary exhibit, but Jellies Invasion became a permanent part of the Aquarium due to its popularity. It contains 8 different species and over 300 animals in total. Species include the blue blubber jelly, upside down jelly, pacific sea nettle, and japanese sea nettle. I can always sit and lose track of time watching jellies float around in their tanks. They are mesmerizing and so peaceful to watch. My heart rate slows down, and every part of me relaxes. It’s such a calming experience, so I’ll close with that for today.