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8 SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | AUGUST 2018 By Sherrie Chaparro, Resident For June's trip, the Garden/Bonsai Group visited Grand Tradition, a gorgeous wedding venue in Fallbrook with beautiful lush gardens and water features. As has been typical for us this year, the weather cooperated, and we were able to stroll the gardens in comfort before we enjoyed lunch at the fabulous Veranda restaurant. This month we are featuring a speaker from our landscape company who will help us program our sprinklers to take advantage of EMWD's water conservation recommendations for Hemet. September brings us another trip, to the Mission San Juan Capistrano, with lunch at the Cedar Creek Inn. Grand Tradition By Dick Roppé, Resident Please indulge me as I meander through this month's presentation. Part of the fun I have writing comes from the opportunity to explore new ways of looking at words. So, in the spirit of exploring, I'm going to share some thoughts. The other day I happened to think – the word verb is a noun. That led to another observation. I heard an actor on TV say, "I'm down with that." Then I heard a commercial with the actor saying, "I'm up for that." In other words in today's jargon, down is up and up is down. Wow, two words that are opposites and yet they mean the same thing. Go figure! That brings me to another interesting area of language - the oxymoron. An oxymoron occurs when two contradictory terms are combined. Its meaning comes from ancient Greek and is itself an oxymoron - oxy meaning sharp, and moron meaning dull. As Charlie Brown would say, "Good grief!" In that spirit, let's create a little story. Can you spot the oxymorons? Last week, after I had finished a pretty ugly round of golf, I told Lynn I'd barbecue a couple of steaks for the evening's meal. The steaks I pulled from the fridge had a bad case of freezer burn, so we decided to go out for dinner. Before we left, I had to stop by the Lodge and drop off an original copy of my birth certificate to prove that I'm a legal-geezer resident. When we departed the Lodge, we headed east on Mustang and I made a left on Fisher. We came to the stop sign at the corner of Fisher and Thornton where I made a rolling stop. Traveling east again, this time on Florida, we saw a restaurant with a sign in the window proclaiming: Early Bird Special, Jumbo Shrimp, only $5.99. There was already a small crowd inside but we were seated right away. Because I love shrimp, I asked the server if I could have a few extras thrown in. He looked at me, clearly confused, then said, "That's a definite possibility!" After this bittersweet adventure, time was growing short and we headed back home. When we got home, I went down to the Lodge to see what was up! Or would that be up to the Lodge to see what was down? That's all for now. So in the words of the Bard himself, "Parting is such sweet sorrow." Hodgepodge, Mishmash & Other Meanderings