My favorite garden gate, at The Atlanta Botanical Gardens. I’d love to have one of these at my house, but with all the crime lately, someone would steal it and turn it in for scrap metal:

As I navigated my way throught the treacherous sidewalks of Candler Park (I’m talking tree roots messing up the concrete, not criminal danger!), I stumbled upon this charming little planter. Don’t you just love coming across something unexpected like this? It’s such a great representation of that neighborhood – full of funky, cute bungalows and cool, fun, diverse, creative people that live in them.

For those of you in Atlanta this weekend, the Modern Atlanta House Tour is a can’t-miss event. $35 gets you into the party on Friday and a tour pass for Saturday and Sunday. I highly recommend allowing time on both days to hit as many properties as possible, and if the map sucks as bad as last year, realize you’ll likely need an hour or two to mapquest everything if you don’t have GPS the night before you tour. For more information about where to get tickets and the homes that will be featured, click here. For a little sampling of how good the tour was last year, click here. The house I shared with you went on to be featured in Metropolitan Home a few months later – Modern Atlanta is not messing around!

If modern gardens are more your thing, you may want to attend the High Museum’s Artful Garden Tour this weekend. Click here for more information. I would try to do both, but I am going to see Coldplay on Sunday night and it’s just too darn much.

As for Saturday night, the K2 Modern Art Series will be celebrating the modern design aesthetic from 8-11. For more information, click here.

Atlanta has this big new area full of hotels, exhibits (will “Bodies” EVER leave? The billboards are GROSS!), stores, condos, apartments, and even temporary Cirque de Soleil tents called Atlantic Station. I think they planned this project fairly well except for the fact that there is no MARTA station onsite. However, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in this city thusfar is this:

I mean, we had an Eiffel Tower at King’s Island Amusement Park in Cincinnati, but an amusement park is the proper context for such a folly. Couldn’t they come up with something more original? Is this supposed to fool us into thinking that the road to IKEA is the Champs-Elysees? Does that make the Chatahoochee river the Seine? Does your city have anything as stupid as this? Do tell!

I just wrote a post for my other blog that is sort of my frivolous fun thing with no focus, no technical know-how, no cool graphics or layout, with more Atlanta-centric talk and with about 12 readers if you include my mother, but I simply had to share this creative, trashy, and YOUR FACE political incident that’s going on in the way-outer ‘burbs of Atlanta.

IN A NUTSHELL: A mayor ratted out a City Councilman to code enforcement for having a messy yard. In getting it up to code, said Councilman saved the toilet that was formerly on its side next to the driveway, and decided to make it a planter, which he calls “folk art.”

The Councilman could spin this as part of a green design as it is an example of reuse. Perhaps it’s a message to the Mayor.

photo by Shane Blatt for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I wonder if as he set up his shot, he laughed and said to himself, “I can’t believe the s*** I have to do at this job!”