NewYearsCard

Pictured is one of numerous reservoirs in the highlands of Sri Lanka where tea plantations abound.

By the grace of God, we made it to 2010, despite occasional doubts that we’re really retired because our schedule seems to be just as full as before.

Collis completed the major revision of “Pinoy Jazz: The Story of Jazz in the Philippines”€, the DVD on the history of jazz in the Philippines. During the Philippine International Jazz and Arts Festival, he took part in several workshops talking about the history of Philippine jazz at various universities in Manila. We spent the last week of July and all of August in Ohio with our son, Eric, and with Collis’s sisters in the New York area. In Ohio, Eric treated us to the jazz scene at various venues in Columbus and to a most entertaining evening with the musical “Mamma Mia€” at the Ohio Theater. At the gracious invitation of Ard and Lorna Crum, we drove down to Vandalia, Ohio to marvel at the log “cabin” that Ard and Lorna built with their own hands, and to listen to the bird symphony outside their dining room, as we were enjoying our lunch. In New York, we sat four rows from the stage watching the riveting performances of Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter in “Mary Stuart”. Later, we flew to Orlando, Florida, hoping to watch the launch of a space shuttle, but unfortunately, the weather forced the launch to be canceled several times so we had no luck with that. We contented ourselves with a bus tour of the NASA Space Center and their superb IMAX movies. Back in Manila, Violy got caught in a whirlwind of editing jobs as foreign students (mostly Vietnamese, Indians, and Chinese) who are doing graduate work at the De La Salle University asked her to edit their dissertations. She also completed editing the autobiographies of National Artist Carlos L.Quirino and his wife novelist Liesel C. Quirino. Now, she’s back to work on the biography of the late Zamboanga (Mindanao) Mayor Cesar C. Climaco.

We spent the Christmas holidays in Sri Lanka and Singapore where we learned that Sri Lanka is more than the news about its civil war. We enjoyed learning about its history and culture, and meeting the gracious Sri Lankans. The attached photo was taken in the tea highlands of Kandy, in the central part of the country. In Singapore, at the Asian Civilisations Museum, the “Land of the Morning”€ exhibit about the Philippines thoroughly impressed us for its compact presentation of the jewels of Filipiniana. Singapore jazz stars, bassist Johnny and vocalist Beng Gaerlan, invited us to a jam session in the Jazz at South Bridge Club where we had the rare opportunity to enjoy the other leading lights of the Singapore jazz scene. It was a fitting end to one year and the beginning of another.

Have a blessed bountiful year!