"Echoes of Eden" Dayle King Searle

  Happy day after Christmas! I hope your holiday celebration was wonderful. Things were really slow in the office this week leading up to Christmas, which meant we had time to go do fun things. Monday we took off with the Wrights and Cluffs. We caught a bus just up the hill from our hotel. There was a man standing on the bus playing an old battered guitar and singing at the top of his lungs while we rode. He wasn’t the best singer, but he’d be in the running for most enthusiastic. I was impressed with how he managed to stand there while the bus jerked and jolted along. I only saw him lose his balance once, but he stuck his foot out and caught himself without missing a beat on his song. Ron gave him a good tip, which he well deserved.

  I learned two very important lessons this week. First, if you delete pictures from your icloud account it also deletes them from your phone. Yes, this lesson was learned from experience. I backup the photos on my phone to my google photos, so normally this would not be a problem. However, on Friday, when I learned this lesson, I had not backed up my phone since Sunday. That meant that all the pictures I took this week were gone—all of them! Noooooooooo! Then I learned the second lesson—when you delete photos from your icloud, you have thirty days to change your mind and restore them. I’m so glad I learned that second lesson, or there wouldn’t be any photos to accompany this blog post, and I know the pictures are the best part.

The first thing I want to point out is that in this photo, I am standing between two average sized Mexican women. In Mexico I am not considered short, I’m average. Yes, there are taller Mexican women, like the woman on the far left, but there are a lot more who are shorter. Much shorter. I have rarely in my life experienced the sensation of “towering over” another adult woman, but here it’s fairly common.

We just got back from Guadalajara where we’ve been for a week. We were there for FIL, which is short for Feria Internacional del Libro. Most of what we’ve read about it says it’s the second largest book fair in the world, but one source said it was the largest. Either way, it’s huge. I think every major book publisher in the world, as well as many smaller ones, were there. It wasn’t held last year due to COVID, and this year they limited the number of people who could attend, so we heard that it was about half the size of normal. Even at that, it was massive. It had booths with games, movies, and crafts, but mostly books—so many books, vast numbers of books. Sadly for me, they were mostly in Spanish.