Fall and Colds

This week I got a lovely note from one of my brothers who live in Michigan, including the message, "Hope everyone is enjoying the fall, my favorite time of year." It made me smile, sadly.  The colors of autumn was one of the things we gave up when we moved to Florida.  My father's last gift to me was dying in fall so that I could fly up to Michigan for his funeral and enjoy the splendid leaf display that year.

Marjorie Kinian Rawlings is a North Florida author famous for the books The Yearling and Cross Creek, both of which have been made into movies.  She wrote about the "seasonal amnesia" of Florida's year-round lush greenness.  But at least the day length changes a little bit.


Here in Medan, this close to the equator, we have very little change in weather or day length.  Currently sunrise is 6:11 and sunset 18:13.  At the summer solstice, it was sunrise 6:17, sunset 18:36.  So not much difference, and very long nights all year round.

Here is the chart for our hometown of Gainesville, FL.  Of course it is artificially manipulated by the imposition of Daylight Savings Time, but one can still see the natural variation in day length.  The curves would be even more pronounced if I showed the graph for Michigan, which is much farther north.

We had a slow week, because we were both very sick with upper respiratory infections.  On Wednesday, after a week of suffering through a nasty cold and not sleeping much due to the cough, I finally went over to the klinik at our local hospital.  The medications the doctor prescribed helped a lot.  But then Elder Porter got sick again.  We hope this upcoming week will be more productive.

Despite being sick, we managed to teach our English classes.  On Wednesday we were overwhelmed with a record-high attendance of over 15 people, with a fun topic of movies.  I showed some trailers and had them say what genre of movie and what the setting was and who the characters were--all in English, of course.

So on Friday, which is usually the larger class, we were expecting a crowd.  Except that it rained hard, and most everyone comes by motorcycle.  Someone texted the young missionaries that they would be there late, so we waited and started half an hour late, with four students.

Well, one learns to be flexible.  Being off on a different island, Medan doesn't follow the typical Indonesian pattern of dry/wet seasons they experience in Java.  But when it rains here, sometimes it really rains, and the drainage on many streets is questionable, so it does often delay meetings and affect people's lives.