July was also a very busy month with a holiday weekend and a vacation to North Carolina but I still was able to get ten items crossed off my list. Activites were a little more varied this month - trying a new fruit, watching a couple of movies and shooting Peeps, to name a few.
Several activities this month were solitary ones that took me back to my childhood. I have loved writing letters (and receiving them!) since I was a child. Email, text messaging and free long distance phone calls have all but eliminated that pastime and finding stationery (not note cards) was, not surprisingly, difficult. I finally found some I liked online (because stationery stores are also a thing of the past... sigh...) and wrote a letter (#14) to a friend of mine who is in her 80's and not able to get out much. Although I send her cards somewhat regularly, this was the first, but hopefully not the last, letter I've mailed her.
Although I still have some puzzles I enjoyed doing when I was younger, I bought a special jigsaw puzzle to put together - a 1000-piece puzzle in the shape of the state of Arizona with iconic Arizona places and things as part of the picture - which took us about a week to complete (#3). Of course there was a saguaro cactus, a roadrunner, a gila monster, the Grand Canyon, Indian ruins, golf courses and the like but imagine my surprise when a Green Bay Packer player appeared in the middle of my puzzle (and not on the picture on the box!)! An email to the company cleared up the mystery; it was a misprint and the puzzle was pulled and is no longer sold. Yippee - I have a limited edition!!
From the time I was about eight until I left home to get married, I loved to sit on the patio with my dad and watch a summer rain storm - thunder was a bonus. As the years have passed, I have taken less and less time to just sit and watch a storm which is why it was on my list (#41). We had a doozy of a rainstorm on July 16th and I watched it for over an hour as I sipped my iced tea on the patio. I enjoyed the melodic plink... plink... plink and later the swoosh of the water pouring out of the downspout. I embraced the cool drops on my skin as I moved some pool toys to a more secure spot. When the rain stopped, I could smell the sweet, clean scent that comes after a desert rain. And when I thought it couldn't get any better, I was treated to a most fabulous sunset (#9) that I watched for 20 minutes. It was a truly outstanding way to spend a late afternoon!
Lots of retailers promote Christmas in July but we found Christmas in July in two unexpected places. The new fruit I tried (#6) was a Santa Claus melon (of the muskmelon family), a football-shaped melon with a very thick green-striped rind and creamy white flesh. It is a sweet melon with a distinctive flavor that tastes a little bit like a casaba melon - quite delicious. In the US they are grown in California and Arizona and are harvested from June to October with July being peak season. So why the name Santa Claus? Because they keep until Christmas! We also went to an outdoor concert (#12) in Glendale on a hot July evening. The Glendale Summer Band just finished their 47th season and is the longest-running community band in Arizona. Musicians from middle schools, high schools, colleges and adults of all ages and professions join together to perform eight concerts in June and July. I loved watching a young trumpeter and two old-timers animatedly talk about the music they were about to perform with each learning something from the other. The concert we attended was a tribute to the music of the movies and held the audience captive for over an hour! So where was Christmas? For their encore, they played a tune with Stars and Stripes Forever and Jingle Bells merged together. We could discern each song separately, yet it was together in a new song. Amazing!
Friends are important to us. The 4th of July is our annual Peep Shoot with our MR KLUD friends and, as always, we had a fabulous time shooting Peeps with our BB/pellet guns (#33). Later in the month, another friend hurt her back and I took dinner over to them (#37). While I had intended to pick a friend at random to take dinner to, this friend was picked for me!
Finally, we watched two movies that were released in July - Back To The Future (1985 and #26)) and Lone Ranger (2013 and #21). Back To The Future was every bit as fun now as it was 28 years ago! Although most of the critics did not like Lone Ranger, we thoroughly enjoyed it. It was especially fun to see the places in Canyon de Chelly that our Navajo guide showed us last year (he was a guide for the actors in the movie).
So far, I've completed 21 things on my list of 50 things to do this summer. You can see why August has been busy, busy, busy!! Stay tuned...
