Pumpkins in Niagara

This must be pumpkin festival weekend.  Halloween is this week and there are a number of big pumpkin farms in Niagara.  A few years ago I was doing on the escarpment and came upon a traffic jam and gridlock.  It was Howell's Family Pumpkin Farm.  This is a farm amusement park, with sand boxes, bunnies, animals, tractor tire play area, hay play area, straw ump barn, haystack jumping pillow, a tricycle track, the giant maze, and so on.  These are all activities for little ones. Their website is ahowlinggoodtime.com  At Warner Ranch and Pumpkin Farm in Welland, there is something every season - for  winter activities there are horse drawn sleigh rides of various sizes of sleigh. For autumn, their pumpkin patch is extensive, and they distinguish themselves from Howell's with free admission to the park.  Various activities have prices - pony rides $4.00, petting zoo and corn maze, $2.00 and so on. They have Rainbow the Unicorn for birthday parties.  Here's what they say:  "Rainbow does not live here at the farm, being a Unicorn he resides in the enchanted forest and can be reached at 289-673-1729. And close to us is Puddicombe Farms, right on Highway 8 with a train around the orchards and fruit wine production.  The train ride is a "scenic 30 minute ride around our 100 acre estate".  Here are two of the models from the Minneapolis Show this year.

Weather Relief, Please

Relief from the muggy conditions...that was our weather headline this week.  It is only 18 degrees outside compared to earlier in the week when it felt like 40 degrees.  The greenhouse temperature was the same as outside yesterday.   I notice that we have a 'love it' and 'hate it' relationship with summer heat.  People either love it or hate it.  It is my sense that we don't have this contrast with winter.  My theory for winter is that there is a graduated scale of 'hate it'. August itself is not hated, though.  The 2005 Gallop poll and a current ranking site identify October as the favourite month, with December the second most popular.  June is third. Where is August?  It is eighth and ahead of March, April, January and February.  I did find two August jokes: Knock, knock?… Who is there?… August… August Who?… A gust of wind over 74 MPH could be the start of a hurricane!  Knock, knock?… Who is there?… August… August Who?… A gust of wind knocked me over!  Oh well, they were pretty meagre jokes.  However, we are heading into some favourite months and weather, so I expect better jokes ahead. Remember our boat from yesterday?  I found a more complicated boat-themed tree house in Toronto  - the article is HERE.  It has a price tag of $30,000.  I don't think Grimsby's has a price tag like that.  It likely isn't in violation of any building and zoning bylaws either. We're off to the Narrow Gauge Convention next week.  It is in Minneapolis - the home of Mall of America.  Here are a few pictures from last year at the same time.

Grammarians at Play

Because of his name, Santa can join the grammar joke club: What do you call Santa's little helpers? Subordinate clauses! Here are the Grammar Walks into a Bar Jokes A pun, a play on words, and a limerick walk into a bar. No joke. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They Drink. They Leave A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave. A question mark walks into a bar? Two quotation marks "walk into" a bar. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking a drink. The bar was walked into by the passive voice. The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. A synoynm ambles into a pub. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink. A hyperbole totally ripped into this bar and destroyed everything. A run on sentence walks into a bar it is thirsty. Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapsed to the bar floor. A group of homophones wok inn two a bar.  Our pictures today show our visit to rainy Chama to see the trains in the yard.

Spoons and Spoons

Spoons have been around a long time. Spoons with handles were used in ancient Egypt for religious purposes as early as 1000 BC.  When it came to consuming food, the most common material was wood, which was easily available.  The wealthy had spoons made of bronze and silver during the Greek and Roman empires and on into the Middle Ages.   Spoons have also always been ceremonial.  Before the coronation of every British king,  the monarch would be anointed by a ceremonial spoon.  There were apostle spoons during the Tudor and Stuart periods.  The practice of giving christening spoons started then.  The spoons we use today took on their form in the 18th century. There is a famous rude spoon in the restaurant joke.  You can check it out by clicking on the link.  As spoons are so common, I thought there would be many spoon jokes, but that doesn't turn out to be the case, and spoon quotes are mostly about the 'silver spoon' metaphor, so seemed a bit tedious to me to read famous people claiming they weren't born with a silver spoon... Edward Lear's 'runcible' spoon popped up on my searches.  It turns out that "runcible" is a nonsense word invented by Edward Lear. The word appears (as an adjective) several times in his works, most famously as the "runcible spoon" used by the Owl and the Pussycat. I guess one could use a runcible spoon to eat "the frim fram sauce with oss-en-fay with sha fafa on the side." Today's train layout has the most remarkable trees.  I know you will enjoy them too.

Maine Live Steam

Here's the drive-by at the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad.  The idea is for the crowd to form a line so that everyone has a clear view of the train for pictures.  We don't want lurkers in the background or creepers in the foreground.  This is particularly important for those capturing the scene on video.  We are all to remain silent, too.  The train drives by with the whistle blowing and the bell ringing.  Once that's done, the train backed up, we all got back on and went to the Roundhouse for the look around and another photo shoot.

Congratulations to 'They'!

We're still on the theme of headlines, and the word of the year has been announced with a delightful headline from Voice of America: 'They' Wins as Linguists' Word of the Year  "Its usage has been a source of contention since the times of Shakespeare and Chaucer — both of whom, for your Grade 3 teacher’s information, used “they” to refer to a single person on occasion. Puritanical grammar nerds have been sticklers, however, for pairing singular subjects (for example, “the suspect”) with singular pronouns (“he” or “she”) — even when the person’s gender is not known. The rationale is that “they” should only refer to multiple persons, not just one. So traditionalists would rather see this: “Everyone took his or her chances on the roads that day.” Than this: “Everyone took their chances on the roads that day.” That’s started to change, slowly: The Washington Post, for example, changed its style guide last year to accept a singular “they.” But this kind of “they” got a thumbs up from some of the nerdiest word nerds Friday evening, when an overwhelming majority of the American Dialect Society cast their annual words of the year ballots for:  “they: gender-neutral singular pronoun for a known person, particularly as a nonbinary identifier.” Congratulations to "They"! On to our pictures of the day:  The Ontario Regional Lily Society has its flower show at the Royal Botanical Gardens atrium each year.  The natural light in the atrium and the tall open space showcase the flower colours and forms beautifully.  I stopped in the perennial gardens and the conservatory, and found a cornucopia of flowers and model trains. They seem to be together a lot.