Oct 9, 2013

Colors of fall enhance our valley, but there is no brightness, being muted this season.  It is like looking through a tinted lens that removes intensity of red, orange, yellow and lime green.  

There is no walking through fallen leaves, listening to the crunch, recent rains have softened those sounds.  For the upcoming hunting season those hunting will consider this a plus.

The Eldon and Danita Wilcox family is home from the Philippines where they traveled to attend their son Jesse’s wedding to Annavelyn Malate.  The wedding took place in the Manila LDS Temple. Being the last in the family to marry, as many relatives as possible traveled to witness this event: besides his parents there were  three sisters,Elise Hardy, Brittany Durrant, Ami with her husband Tom Fenton, and his uncle Forrest and Patti Christensen.  The group toured as much as possible in their two week stay.  Annavelyn’s family is from the Bicol region of the country, home of the Mayon volcano, a live volcano and very tall.  They swam in the ocean, visited a nearby island, did lots of shopping and visited friends of Jesse’s.  The Wilcox’s are a tall family and certainly stood out amongst the smaller Filipino people.   There were places they just didn’t fit!

 Riding on the pudjaks, bikes with a sidecar, a means of public transportation, was an event in itself.    They found travel crowded with many people walking on the roads, as a result it took a longer time to go between places.

The family took in some historical sites:  Corregidor Island, location of WWII battles, and the American Cemetery in Manila.  Here they were impressed with the perfect grooming of the lawns and the exactness of the monuments. They spent some time on Luzon Island. The group was there for two weeks and tried to take advantage of every day to tour as much as possible.   Their return flight to the states was held up for a few hours due to a typhoon that moved in.  Jesse and  Annavelyn are still in the Philippines, with Jesse  now called to serve as a counselor in a local bishopric.  This was a surprise to all, even though he had served a mission there several years past.  Not sure how the visa thing works in this situation.

My apologies to those of you who look for this blog on the same day that the newspaper comes out.  I was out of town for a couple of days and I forgot all about the blog for several hours.

So far we have had a wetter fall than usual.  It is cloudy and threatening as I post this.  But the big freeze has held off for some reason.  Just in the last few days have the more fragile flowers frozen.  I still have hopes of my chrysanthemums blooming once more if all is favorable.  They made it last year, perhaps it is too much to hope for two years in a row.