July 21 2024 - July's No Joke

 

July is the seventh month and gives rise to this Seventh Theme Joke: A man wakes up on the 7th of July at 7 o’clock When he wakes up, he checks his phone and sees that he has 7 missed calls and 7 messages from 7 different persons. He finds the coincidence pretty funny, gets out of bed with a big smile and gets in his car. Before starting the engine, he checks on his phone the location of his meeting, when he notices that he has to go to the 7th floor of a building located on 7 Ann Street 7 minutes away from his home. He thinks that this is probably the biggest coincidence he has ever seen in his life and laughs for a few seconds. After that, he wants to check how much money he has left, so he starts counting how much there is in his wallet. And to his surprise, he notices that he has exactly 777 dollars in bills. He thinks that this is much more than a mere coincidence and that today is his lucky day. So instead of going to work, he decides to drive to the nearest sports bar to bet on a horse. He waits for the 7th race of the day then bets all of his money on horse Number 7. The horse came in 7th. Here are pictures at the Niagara Falls Table Rock restaurant from Friday's Fun Run.  Thousands of people everywhere.  As we were leaving, the moon rose above the falls.

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Aug 4 2023 - Christmas in July

 

We are past the timing for Christmas in July.  That’s July 25th.  I think it has become a Hallmark item now.  It used to be for Southern Hemisphere countries to have a wintery Christmas.  For the Northern Hemisphere it is considered an ironic celebration.  July parties with a Christmas theme seem like a silly and fun thing to do. The Hallmark Channel runs "blocks of their original Christmas television films in July to coincide with the release of the Keepsake Ornaments in stores, thus literally making the event a Hallmark holiday (an accusation that Hallmark Cards officially denies).” There are yearly traditions in various places - Venice - where they have summer celebrations of Christmas. Denmark is reported to have these celebrations.  It may be that our commercialization of various celebrations and traditions have made us resistant to such ideas.  Particularly with Hallmark making it obviously commercial.   My reason for thinking about Christmas is that the Rotary’s Fantasy of Trees activities are underway. It is time to organize some of the decorations.  We will make a few more wreaths for the display, and start to look for Christmas ornaments and decorations on various themes.  That activity really starts in October.  There’s an overlap between Fall festivals - Thanksgiving and Halloween overlap with Christmas.  I found this out in the last few years.  There are very enthusiastic celebrators who go out early and get their Christmas purchasing done.  If you go into a Michaels store now, the fall decorations of pumpkins and autumn leaves are all on display.   I went looking for a suitable image and little did I realize one I created in 2022 is perfect for the July theme.

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July 31st Last Day of Summer - really?

It seems true, doesn't it, that July 31st is the last day of summer.  We know that August will bring "Back to School" ad campaigns.  We are eternally going back to school regardless of our ages. So August has become an in-between month.  In the gardening realm, there aren't any garden tours.  Most garden societies don't have an August meeting.  Most of the garden centres have reduced stock and hours. The general state of things can be seen in the August celebrations:  sandwich month foot health month national catfish month romance awareness month national water quality month I found a 'get ready for kindergarten month'. What was notable in August each year was the arrival of the Eaton's Catalogue.  Janet and I would look at every page and decide on our favourite items amongst the products available.  Well, we didn't exactly look at every page.  We looked at all the ones related to house, home and apparel. This had no relationship to purchasing. Things were not often purchased from the catalogue, only rarely.  And definitely not by us.  But it became a consumer's bible, training us from an early age to discern between product design, features and price.  That now seems like a lot of training in making simple choices and decisions. I took this picture while visiting with the Buffalo Walk front porch gardener in yesterday's picture.  She was as surprised as I was to see this.

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July's Calendar

Here's the July Calendar.  This was taken at the Canada Blooms Forcing Greenhouses in February.