Flowers for your birthday Mom

Dear Mom, Happy Birthday!!
Moses 2: 31.  And I, God, saw everything that I had made, and, behold, all things which I had made were very good...

We thought we would send you flowers for your birthday!
 

Our birthday blogs are limited to our children, their spouses and children, and our moms, but now that Melvina has left us, you are our only living mom.  It gives one pause, on so many levels, and makes us all the more grateful to celebrate your life.

We hope you are having a SMASHING time on your river cruise in Europe!!—just what all 80-plus ladies are doing I hear—but we also hope you have a chance to check your internet and see our good wishes for you birthday,

Some of my earliest memories are of you stopping and pointing out to us something lovely.  We’d be busy, going fast, not paying attention, maybe quarreling in the car, or running ahead of you on a trail, and you would make sure we didn’t miss the beauty around us. Sometimes it was a sunset, a herd of elk, or a particularly beautiful garden.  

Often it was a flower. 

Later, when Jack came into our lives, he added another whole dimension to flower viewing.  He’d do whole day trips filled with nothing but flower photography, and back then, with pre-digital cameras, it was no easy task to get a clear close up of a tiny flower.   He could make them look so surreal, like he had invited us into another world, where the intricacies of a tiny flower were visible and startling.

Well, Dean has been capturing flowers everywhere we go, here on our island and the next, and though the skill required now is not commensurate with that needed back in the day, his patience and good eye, and knowledge of his camera’s capabilities have produced some really great results. From the first few weeks we were here he was already taking flower pictures, and I told him we should save the flower pictures for Mom’s birthday.  We amassed quite a catalog of flowers of Negros Oriental for your enjoyment.

Because of your life-long love of flowers, your determination to help us notice them, the fact that you are the one who gave me names for most of those I know, and your green thumb and dedication in growing them even now, I can truly say, like the Primary song, “Dear mother all flowers remind me of you.”   

Next week in our blog post we will tell a story of some flowers recycled from one wedding to the next.  When you read it, remember the story is also part of your birthday flowers blog post and is dedicated to you.  I arranged for the flower exchange--to the bride who had none--partly due to the appreciation you have given me that loveliness matters, that God’s bounty enriches life, and that people feel God’s love through His lovely creations.

 

We hope YOU enjoy this display of the flowers WE enjoy every day. Thanks Mom for teaching me to see them, name them, and love them. And thank you for your example of always giving freely of your bounty so that others could feel God's love through you.

Enjoy the show!!

often you see this--it's just an added decoration--if a plant has no flower, they add eggshells all over it

this one just slays me--never saw anything like it!!

We love you Mom

Happy Birthday Simon!!

Dear Simon,

Happy Birthday!  

Wanna hear some stuff about this place we are living in?

This guy lives permanently outside our kitchen window.  We see him every day

Most of the houses that people live in here in the Philippines are very small.  Since it never gets cold here people don't have to worry about heaters to keep the house warm.  Actually, many people build their houses to let as much air in as possible to make it cool.  Although, there is more than air that gets into their houses. 

Many homes have BIG house spiders and also lizards.  They don't mind these critters in their house because they eat flys, mosquitos, ants, and anything else that is little and moves. I am glad we are big or we might get eaten. The house spiders here are really big but they don't bite people.  Sometimes we will see little kids carrying big spiders on a pencil--we have seen that many times.  And we have heard that when their friend has a spider on a pencil, they will put the pencils together and let the spiders fight each other. 

When we go visit a certain family, this guy is always there eating bugs on their wall. They call this big kind tohkoh

and this one live in our house,  They call this smaller kind teekee.

It’s pretty cool I bet. 

Heavenly Father has created such a magnificent world for us to live on.  Here in the Philippines, I am always amazed at how much food there is.  Mango trees, papaya trees, jack fruit trees, banana trees (by the kagillions), coconut trees (bazillions), and many more varieties. It is like the Garden of Eden.  Then there are all the vegetables. 

one of those ant highways

Then there are the ants!  Anything that is living or was living, if it stays still or is dead, the ants come.  Thousands of them.  Highways of them.  They find everything that can be eaten.  Sometimes we find ants eating something and we see the ant highway connecting what they are eating to their nest.  It is so amazing that the ants have lookout ants so far away from their nests that are looking for food.  It is also amazing how fast they can send the signal back to the nest that there is FOOD or danger.  I think they have little radios connected to their antenaes that they can transmit signals back to base and the rest come running or dash for cover. 

Let me tell you a story about that. We had the missionaries over to our house for pancakes one morning.  Scratch pancakes with oatmeal--some of Grandpas finest.  Well we ate all but one of the pancakes.  That one pancake I left on the counter in the kitchen.  It was in there for about one hour.  I went into the kitchen about an hour later to eat that last remaining pancake and there were about 1000 tiny ants munching down that pancake. 

the coolest bug we've seen--he was on our screen door

I wondered where they came from because we never usually see ants on that counter. How did they all of a sudden know?

I think Heavenly Father made ants to be the clean-up critters that eat whatever is left over and what ever dies.  Almost every time I kill an ant (or about a 1000 of them), I think that these little critters are so small and complicated that even the smartest human

up close

couldn’t make even one ant but it is easy to kill a thousand of them.  The handiwork of God is so magnificent!  People think they are so smart, but we can’t even begin to understand something that is so easy and small like an ant. 

 When you look at God’s creations, think of Him and that this world was created for our good because we are children of our Heavenly Father and he made this world because he loves us and wants us to experience joy and the excitement of learning and never being able to learn all about everything that is around us.  He wants us to learn about flowers and bugs, trees and mountains, rivers and fish.  But most of all He wants us to learn about the most important thing we can learn, about Jesus Christ (Jesu Kristo) and our Father in Heaven(Amahan sa Langit).

there are SOOO many fat frogs in our yard and everywhere, especially at night

Learning is fun because we are learning about what Heavenly Father has given us. 

We have always loved how you love to try new things and explore God's creations.  YOU are one of God's special creations, and we are SOOOO glad we get to see and know the miracle that is you. 

Each coconuts weighs about 8-10 pounds!! Quite a load

The only 2-headed coconut tree we've seen--way cool!

The captain and his first mate haul us to shore

a lot of guys fish by walking around pushing boats that carry nets

a lovely chapel near the area where the cool waterfall your dad saw is

This little guy wishes you happy birthday

Happy Birthday Simon.

Happy Birthday Shane!

Dear Shane, 

Take a close look. Is it any wonder that the power goes out!

Happy birthday!!  I can’t believe we pulled this off with all our outages of late.  We have had not one but two typhoons go through here in the last two weeks—nowhere near as calamitous as the big one last December, but nonetheless they brought high winds and strong rain and much shannanigans to cable, internet, phones and electricity. In the main island of Luzon there has been lots of flooding.  Even our water supply was in and out.

But all is restored!! Just in time to wish you a proper Cropper Happy Birthday.  

As you know, Sara’s Grandpa Cropper was a safety engineer at Geneva Steel and retired after 37 years of service. He was close friends to the safety people at Kennecott. If you two had been contemporaries, you would have known each other. Your career in industrial hygiene and your job at Kennecott with Rio Tinto seems to us to be along the same lines, although I’m sure there are tons of differences.  With all that in mind, we decided to start your blog post by introducing you to Blaine a little.  He was always concerned about safety.  He had seen too many accidents that all could have

Three on the bike with laundry and dinner. You can't even see the driver.

been avoided had there been a little care taken.  He had a poster made for him by his co-workers that said, “Blaine Cropper, Mr. Safety”.  This concern manifested itself in constant reminders to his family.  For example, put your seatbelt on or when he would walk into the kitchen, find a cupboard door left open, then close it carefully and call out, “Safety Hazard!”  Whoever left it open would get the point. He was a kind, caring, highly competent and careful man, and his integrity was unwavering.  You remind us of him in all those ways.

So, in his honor and of course yours, we would like to show you some safety hazards that might make you cringe or just laugh.

Torpedos? Gas tanks? Scary going past this guy!

Of course it’s very easy to draw parallels between safety in our home or work environments and our spiritual safety. We run into so many people here (no different from anywhere really) who have forgotten their life preserver, failed to wear their helmet, or over indulged in appetites that have wreaked havoc on their lives and the lives of their families.  With a little restraint, forethought, and care, so many of their problems—our problems—could have been avoided.

Just heading off to work 

We are working right now to untangle a mess that started years ago.  A baby was born 25 years ago in Bayawan, and her parents failed to register her birth, so she had no birth certificate—couldn’t afford it and didn’t foresee the need.

They then moved and had her baptized in the new town using her accurate place of birth on that document.  They kept moving and each time they would register her for school, they would write in that she was born in the new town.  This was a short cut, to avoid problems with her lack of birth certificate.

Fast forward to 5 years ago, to age 21, she wants to get married but has a wad of documents that are all conflicting as to her place of birth, and her baptism record, the only accurate one, and the one that carries the most weight to reconstruct a birth certificate is lost. So her sister has a great idea.  She should go to

Motorcycle with a trailer and no tail lights? Usually there is a kid in there.

that priest in her new town, and ask to be baptized—don’t worry that she has to say that she has never received the sacrament of baptism, and the crazy thing is on the baptism certificate, she used the town she is now living in as her birth place instead of the real one she was born in (to give her the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume she was ill-advised by someone who talked her into it being somehow okay) in the same way her parents have done in the past, and put Amlan as her place of birth, attesting to the truth of that falsehood by affidavit.

In the meantime, she and her LDS boyfriend are now living together, she wants to be baptized into the church, but she can’t until she gets married, but she can’t get married till she has a "delayed application birth certificate" which she can only get if she is properly baptized with the real place of birth.

Humpty Dumty.

Does the mother know that little kid driving?

We won’t even tell you all the work and cost and falderal that will have to go on to get this resolved, if it even can be. She is sincere and they really want the baptism to take place. We have some ideas to try and we are hopeful something

Road Safety, whether your in a truck or pedicab, the rule is... "just hang on!"

will come of it.  But suffice it to say, like any good safety engineer or industrial hygiene professional knows, there are no short cuts—especially when they mess with things like honesty, chastity, and virtue. The other truth this illustrates is that making one mess, failing to clean it up, and just covering it up or building over it will ALWAYS cause bigger problems than the original.  It’s true in industry, in business, and in our personal lives.  Better to just face the music, pay the price, clean up the mess, repent, and move forward, clean and unencumbered.

Safe Family Travel

 Shane we are so grateful that your family is now linked to ours.  We are grateful that you are the kind of man who we can trust to always take good care, not just of the physical well-being, but the spiritual health and strength of your family.  We find the parallels between you and Grandpa Cropper very endearing and interesting—he is a man to look up to, and we see a lot of him in you.

May god bless you as you continue to avoid the Safety Hazards. 

Remote once again

We are sending out a group email and blog post regarding our internet situation.  Hopefully everyone who normally communicates with us will get the message.

Our internet provider had something happen to our tower (again) but this time the consequences are severe.  Every customer connected to that tower has to have a technician come to their home to re-calibrate (or something) their I P number.  We have called them, called again, and gone to their office in the next city over, received various stories and promises, and have the following info:  looks like we are scheduled for Sept 2 for the technician to come.  Believe me I had to have a cry about that. We’ve been without access for less than a week and I feel so anxious about it, and now they say over a month more!!

We use the internet for so much more than keeping contact with home—much of our training materials come from the church web site and we download from there often, but have nowhere near all we need down-loaded for our ongoing trainings.

So, what we have to do now:  Since every customer on the tower is affected, we can’t go to a nearby café to get access, or to the resort next door like we used to months ago, before our internet was connected.  Our only option is to use our Tatoo, a stick that allows us to access a phone-line internet connection.  But it is slow, so no downloading or Skyping, and worse, it has limited reception, and none near our home, so to use it we have to travel to Tanjay or Dumeguete.

Bottom line is we will check our email as possible—sometimes a couple of days, sometimes several days between.  We will probably not respond individually unless something is urgent, ‘cause there just won’t be time.  For example, right now I’m sitting in the car in the rain parked next to the market in Tanjay, composing on Word, then hoping to send and post by Tatoo.

After all, we really DO live on a remote jungle island, And my name IS Mary Anne (a Gilligan’s island allusion for those of you who are too young to know) so our communication thus far has been a big miracle that is really not sustainable here.

We love you all, and with this fiasco, we realize how much we miss hearing from you, our life lines.

We owe many people a return email, but don't hold your breath. Sorry.  Please pray for a pre-Sept 2nd miracle.