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SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | SEPTEMBER 2022 15 By Theresa Rossetti, Resident This month's "ful" is useful. I hope you find the following information useful. How annoyed do you get by spam/robocalls? The "your car warranty has expired," "your Amazon account has been charged $600 for a new laptop" calls or some other nonsense are getting to an absurd level lately. Fake calls are on the rise again due to the use of spoofed phone numbers. Spoofing is a way a caller deliberately falsifies the information transmitted to your caller ID to disguise their identity. These calls look like legitimate, often local, numbers but are not. Americans received more than 4.3 billion robocalls in June, up 8.5 percent from May. While the FCC has ordered phone companies to stop the warranty calls, there has been little improvement. What, if anything, can we do to lessen the amount of fake calls we get? Here's what I've found helpful. First, register all your phones on the National Do Not Call Registry. Call 1-888-382-1222, TTY 1-866-290-4236, or register online at www.donotcall.gov. Then, make sure your home and cell phones Contacts lists are updated so the names you know or do frequent business with will appear on caller ID. Then, if your cell has the ability, turn on Silence Unknown Callers and Silence Junk Callers (those are iPhone term, they may be slightly different on other phones). These calls won't ring, they will be routed directly to voicemail. Since turning both on, my phone only rings when the caller is in my contact list. But what about landlines? You're probably already blocking calls and/or seeing "Potential Spam" or similar when your phone rings. Most landline providers offer Call Forwarding. This comes in very handy if you're away from home. If you've silenced unknown and spam on your cell, these calls are treated the same way as above. The majority of fake callers don't leave a voicemail, but if they do, they're easy to delete. These changes are working for me. So far today I have had 14 calls and my phone rang once, when a friend called. By Cindy Ponce de Leon, Resident Agritourism is a booming business, and a not-so-recent one. An agritourist is one of tens of thousands of people annually who visits farms and ranches nationwide to learn from and enjoy a rural experience. If you think this doesn't apply to you, wineries count! As city dwellers grew weary of the summer heat in the 1800s, they visited family members who remained in the country. They thought it was fun to sleep on haystacks, quaint to bathe in a nearby stream, so scrumptious to boil potatoes and eat them with hand-churned butter. Wooden huts with thatched roofs were charming. Children ran wildly amongst roaming cattle and ducks. Meanwhile, the apple industry was booming. Early settlers mainly used inedible, bitter apples to make cider: "The chief purpose of the colonial fruit garden was not to grow fruit for the table, but rather to secure a supply of 'most excellent and comfortable drinks,'" according to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (BBG). Party on, pilgrims! But as more farmers experimented with innovative grafting, new varieties of apples multiplied with names like "Father Abraham," "Monstrous Pippin," "Roxbury Russet," and "Maiden's Blush." In the mid-1780s, Thomas Jefferson boasted in a letter from Paris, "They have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin." Though the popularity of farm visits later dipped, the post-war American family sought a return to traditional ideals and the pick- your-own movement took up yet again. Dude ranches and roadside farm stands offered packaged glimpses of country living. Knott's Berry Farm started in 1920 and by 1958, recreation in general surged to a $34 billion per year business. Today the US hosts more than 25,000 agritourism sites with products valued over a billion dollars. These include campsites or glampsites if you prefer; target-shooting facilities, and even rural wedding venues. How fortunate we are that we don't have to travel far to enjoy such recreation! Tis the season to get out and pick some apples, slurp some cider and drink a little wine. By doing so you will be supporting the economic viability of our rural community and their small businesses. A Ye Of "Ful" ARE YOU AN AGRITOURIST?

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