As being recently called to serve as the Branch President of the Gold Beach Branch of our church, Wayne's opportunities to serve increased in the month of November, but yard work slowed for Wayne and Ann due to the coming of the rainy season. With less outside needs, it has given Wayne more time to research Family History and teach other family members how to continue in this Elijah driven work. Plus, Wayne continued his quest of getting Volume 3 of his autobiography closer to publication. Ann has stayed busy with her exercise classes, volunteer work at the local cat shelter, service in the church as a counselor to the Relief Society President, walks on the beach and selling our excesses on line and at local bazaars. We have reached a stage of "Less is Better" and are trying to simplify our possessions. Call us "Anti Hoarders" I guess.
With our monthly jaunts to Medford for various needs, like two trips in November for Wayne to get a crown on one of his teeth, we needed new tires on the Camry this month. Wayne also spent a day helping our neighbor rewire and relight his garage. He is a woodworker that makes furniture and decorative pieces from driftwood off the beach. In the winter time, his garage is in need of more light, so Wayne was happy to have a project to be involved in. It was fun!
We have been here long enough now to notice the seasonal changes that take place. Winter, because of the ever changing cloud arrangements over the Pacific Ocean, is the better time for sunsets and massive waves due to the storms out at sea. Spring, summer and fall are whale watching times. We love watching all the goings on out our sun room windows. Ann takes tons of pictures of her view.
Bobby has found that as the weather gets colder, he likes being on Ann's lap a lot. She can't sit down without Bobby begging to be up on her lap.
Ann's volunteer work at the local cat shelter is very fulfilling to her. She gets to pet lots of cats, give them shots and such. What she loves most is when she is able to place a kitty in a loving home. Below is her most recent placement of a kitty with its new owner.
We love learning new things, especially when it involves harvesting from the bounty of nature. In November we teamed up with some friends of ours, Arnie and Amy Boe, to go mushroom hunting in the nearby woods.
After breakfast out at a local restaurant we had been wanting to try, under Amy's and Arnie's tutelage, we learned how to identify and gather three different types of edible fungi.
Expert foragers the Boes are! It was a beautiful day spent together in the woods!
Ann became quite adept at spotting the little buggers as they cautiously popped their heads above the forest duff.
Then they taught us how to clean, prepare and preserve our harvest. Amy is an expert at cooking and preserving! Not only was it a fun time together, the mushrooms were delicious!!
This Thanksgiving we were without our sons and their families. We were going to cook a feast and invite over some of our local friends that were family-less for the holiday. But then we learned that this nice little community we live in puts on a massive Thanksgiving feast at the fairgrounds for all the community. We inquired more and found it was always good food and very well done, so we invited our friends to join us there. We were pleasantly surprised with the activity! Very well done! We were told there were over 400 community members there that day! Here is one table of our group. We also found many friends we were not aware were attending scattered throughout the building.
After a long eating extravaganza and lots of visiting, we realized we had not documented ourselves being there, so had a friend take this post dining picture.
The month of November was was a little more laid back than previous months, but gratifying none the less. It is strange to us to realize that we have been in this community of Gold Beach over a year now and this coming December 20 will be a year that we have been in our house. It is a good season of our life. However, Gold Beach is not our final destination. This too shall pass someday and we will be off on another adventure as we travel through our lives and Over The Next Mountain!
