Aug 5 2024 - What are the Five Top Compliments!

 

What is the top compliment?  Supposedly it is "I love your cooking."  That comes from an English Grammar Class website and is the top retrieval on Google.  That just seems strange to me.   It looks like the question can be complicated.  Do you want to compliment the "whole person?"  These are the proposed compliments: I appreciate you. You are perfect just the way you are. You are enough. On a scale from 1 to 10, you're an 11. You've got all the right moves. Everything would be better if more people were like you. You are an incredible human. You're wonderful. What about compliments for friends?  Well, that's different: You make people feel comfortable. Your personality really shines. I'm so grateful to have you in my life. You're such a great listener.   You're so funny, you always make me laugh. Your confidence inspires me. Your friendship means the world to me.  You're the brightest person I know. What about a little humour? I found this one on Reddit: You are looking a lot better since you won that massive super-jumbo lottery. I guess that's because I found the article about the 18-year-old student, Shea Glover, who in 2015 took photos of other students, or maybe videos.  She did a before and after - that is after telling them they are beautiful.  I found the article HERE.  Her actual line was:  I'm taking pictures of things I find beautiful. Is there an update on Shea Glover?  There seems to be one HERE.  Sort of.  Or maybe it is a retelling of the project.  No Shea Glover website so far.   It isn't hard to look at these Gerberas and see how beautiful they are.

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May 21 2021 - Gerberas all around

 

I drove to various garden centres and wholesalers yesterday picking up the last of the donations to the Grimsby Garden Club Plant Sale which is today and Saturday.   At almost every wholesaler that I've picked up material at,  I've gone in the wrong entrance or location.  So many places named Westland, and so many Bayview locations and who knows where shipping and receiving is without any signs.  The main offices and shipping and receiving areas are consistently an experience from the late 1960s into the early 1970s in office style, paint colours, furniture and so on.  What a reminder of how far offices have come.   My experience yesterday reminded me of this.  I went to the Bayview location on Jordan Road which I remember from the 1970s.  Brian knew the original greenhouse owner.  I walked in the front door and found it was a house whose little rooms were each converted into offices.  There was an open door in the back, and it led to a large area that was the packaging warehouse.  There was tremendous activity with a dozen people putting cut Gerberas into plastic wrap, into bundles, into buckets onto carts that taken away.  Lots of noise from the equipment. Everyone ignored me walking in. This is typical - perhaps it has to due with COVID.  But I generally think this is due to these being closed environments without visitors.  Everyone has their own job.   I stood and waited for a short time to find out if someone in charge would come over.  I looked in at what reminded me of a 1960s factory that I worked in.  Mostly women and immigrants on the lines doing repetitive tasks - lots of machinery around making noise. I did connect with what appeared to be the managers - who explained that I should go to the other location -  the  big grey new building at Jordan Road and Fourth Avenue.   That had an office environment that was new and shiny.  What a long way the greenhouse business has come in Niagara.  From those little greenhouses at Bayview to the massive acres of glass.   Gerberas came to the floral trade in the 1980s.  I remember buying my first one in the Eaton's floral shop and being entranced.  Little could I guess that they would be everywhere with us - the cheerful daisy is the fifth most cut flower in the world.

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Mar 15 2021 - Which Kind of Nap?

 

It's another Women's Day today - International Women's Day.  In comparison in the US, it is National Napping Day.  I wonder if that is their answer to the stabbing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March.  HOW TO OBSERVE #NationalNappingDay Catch some zees! Be sure to nap early enough in the day so as to not interrupt your regular sleep cycle. Take a relaxing nap and use #NationalNappingDay to post on social media. How many kinds of naps are there? There's the power nap, a snooze session, and a full-on nap. Wait!  Psychology today says there are 9 different kinds:  The CEO nap. · The Nap-A- Latte. · The New Mom nap. · The Sports nap. · The Disco · The Siesta. The Shift Work nap.  The Teen nap. The Jet Lag nap.   Full details about each nap are Here.  There's definitely different opinions on how many naps.  Here's five different kinds of naps: 1. Dysregulative Nappers · 2. Restorative Nappers · 3. Emotional Nappers · 4. Appetitive Nappers · 5. Mindful Nappers ... What to make of all this?  I have an answer:  This is also Everything you think is wrong day! This is a day where decision-making should be avoided, where nothing goes right and everything seems to go wrong.   So the clear solution is to pick a nap of your choice and take it.  Our pictures are about Gerberas today.  Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

April 17 2020 - Make My Cake Green Tea

My interest in coffee mugs started with wondering about tea cups and when saucers came about. Tea cup saucers turned out to be dull yesterday.  Today I was wondering about  buildings and their windows.  But what do I retrieve? A picture of the beautiful tea cafe  at the Choui Fong Plantation. The Tea Cafe building was designed by IDIN Architects and won the American Architecture Prize of 2017. This is located in northern Thailand near the Myanmar and Laos borders in Chiang Rai.  Choui Fong Tea is the largest producer of tea in Thailand growing several distinctive types of tea such as Assum, Green, Oolong and Black Tea in the highlands at an altitude of around 1,200 meters above sea level and in a plantation area of over 1,000 rai.  One acre = 2.529 rai. It turns out that land measurement in Thailand does not follow Imperial or the Metric systems.  Their website has pictures of the Tea Plantations HERE.  The facebook page has the tea cafe as the banner picture - very beautiful. The pictures of their cakes match the setting. New York style honey lemon cheesecake with locally produced organic honeycomb decorating the top.  Green Tea Tiramisu:  rich taste, light, super fluffy and melt in your mouth. Mango cheese cake, Macademia cheese cake.   They, like us, are impacted by COVID-19:  Due to the current epidemic of "Kowitt-19" virus Chachui Fong Farm is postpone the announcement of the photo contest. From April 1, 2563 postponed to December 15, 2563 or until change. Those who are interested in sending photos to the contest, you can continue to send photos to join the contest. Here are pictures of the tea cafe from IDIN Architects.        A Gourmet Magazine in their area had a beautiful article  HERE in September 2017.   What a lovely armchair tour - there's something about the rolling hills and curved rows of tea plants that is soothing.  Gerbera flowers from last year's greenhouse tour are our photo subjects of the day.

Glittering, Glittering!

Do you know about glitter?   I read the New York Times article in December 2018 explaining what glitter is and I still am perplexed by it. It is all over the floor of the Museum, the result of many trees of decorations.  There will be more as the trees are taken down tomorrow and Wednesday.  I quote the second paragraph of that entertaining NY Times article HERE to give you a sense of its presence in our lives today. "Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precision-cut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a car towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (I’m paraphrasing). In homes and malls and schools and synagogues and banks and hospitals and fire stations and hardware stores and breweries and car dealerships, and every kind of office — and outside those places, too — it shines. It glitters. It is glitter." I hope you hop over and read about this strange and amazing substance that is now completely part of Christmas.  I found a joke to brighten up our Monday morning:   I saw on the news that a truck carrying almonds collided with another truck carrying glitter. Apparently the road was covered with with almonds and glitter. And I thought, "That's pretty nuts" This 'field' of red Gerbera's makes a nice December picture.

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May the 4th be with you!

In 1977 Star Wars was released to very receptive audiences.  Line-ups were the norm in Toronto.  But then, back then, line-ups was normal in Toronto for most movies, and even in winter.  It was a movie-going town with lots of great venues with big screens and great sound. Maybe that's how the TIFF festival got to Toronto - knowing the audiences were already there. There are many articles - 20 facts, 30 facts, and so on  - things you didn't know about Star Wars.  These seem to be tidbits for diehard fans. So I have turned to finding jokes, and Reader's Digest supplied some puns: Q: Which program do Jedi use to open PDF files? A: Adobe Wan Kenobi Q: Which website did Chewbacca get arrested for creating? A: Wookieleaks Q: Why did Anakin Skywalker cross the road? A: To get to the Dark Side. Q: Why is Yoda such a good gardener? A: Because he has a green thumb.  Q: How do you get down from a bantha? A: You don’t. You get down from a goose. Luke and Obi-Wan walk into a Chinese restaurant. Ten minutes into the meal, Luke’s still having trouble with the chopsticks, dropping food everywhere. Obi-Wan finally snaps, “Use the forks, Luke.” The Star Wars text crawl walks into a bar. “Get outta my pub!” the bartender yells. “We don’t serve your type here.” These are the gerberas from the greenhouse tour a few weeks ago.   I am so taken by their complex centres with tiny pistols and petals looking like confetti.

I had thought the latest royal baby was expected at the end of April.  Today, at the beginning of May, the stories are still flowing but there's nothing from London yet. Today's news says that they will not be publishing pictures of the newborn on the day of the birth, that they will celebrate privately as a new family.   Harry's itinerary is being scrutinized to figure out the expected date.  The article says he is to make a 'surprise' two-day visit to Holland next week.  I expect that actual surprise would be if he cancels at the last minute.   There are so many questions for a royal birth: where will the family live, will they have a nanny, who will be the godparents, what title will the new royal baby have, where does it fall in the line of succession, and the key question what will it be called and will it be a boy or girl. I can't imagine being a Royal family reporter. Looking for something new to say every day when there isn't any progress.  But then, they self-select for the work.  The articles about royal reporters talk about them being 'friendly-ish' with the royal members.  That likely is the big draw - to be in the centre of the action - even if the action is quotes and gossip.  And of course, the scandal stories that are so sought after.  There's an article on thetalko.com with 16 scandalous pictures the Royal family tried to bury - what a strange work life that would be.  I received a finalist and a second place finish in this month's Better photo contest.  Here's the second place finish image.

The Spaghetti Harvest Celebration Day!

Before we find out if there are any amazing April Fool's Jokes today, let us revel in the past. Here is the link at CNN telling us their top ten April Fool's jokes of all times.  Number 1 on the list is pasta growing on trees.  It is a BBC joke from 1957 showing the Swiss spaghetti harvest.  This has been ranked Number 1 by the Museum of Hoaxes.  The Museum's listing is HERE. This is the pinnacle of the year for this website and its day to shine.  At this site you can read the top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all time, or find out the early modern hoaxes from 1500 - 1700, Hoaxes of the 1990s, Television hoaxes, Journalists hoaxed, and so on. They are listed by decade - all kinds of listings and stories. After the Swiss spaghetti harvest, the Instant Colour TV of 1962 is the second joke - tv viewers in Sweden were advised to pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen and the images would appear in colour. I liked the Taco Liberty Bell hoax of 1996, in which the Taco Bell Corporation took out a full-page ad that they had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it to the Taco Liberty Bell.  "The best line of the day came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It would now be known, he said, as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial". Look out for our hoaxes today - and all completes by noon.

Bicycling Under Glass in Niagara

Lucky us in Niagara.  Some of the commercial greenhouses had open houses in support of charity yesterday, so we got to look in on some amazing displays.  They included North America's only cut amaryllis grower, cut statice grower, COSMIC orchids, eggplant production houses, lavender and campanula pot plants, and gerbera growers. The most massive facility was the St. David's Greenhouse.  That's the one along the North side of the QEW at Martin Road in Vineland.  At that facility they grow eggplants.  They use bicycles to get around the greenhouse.  There are 70 acres in production under glass at their two locations. The sophistication of all of these growing facilities is remarkable - each one is organic with biological insects to control pests.  They feed CO2 to the plants to boost growth.  They grow in 'natural materials' raised off the ground.  There is automation to pot plants, and move plants around. The most spectacular sight was the gerbera greenhouse.  That is where 120,000 gerberas are harvested each week.  This would mean we saw millions of gerberas in bloom at the Van Geest Brothers greenhouse on Seventh Avenue in St. Catharines.