Between one of Mark's Berkeley trips and our journey to Hawaii to spend Christmas and New Year's with Cheryl's family, we squeezed in a few more holiday events in the Los Angeles area! On Friday 15 December 2000 we went to Long Beach for the staff Christmas party for Comprehensive Child Development, a non-profit child-care service of whose board Cheryl is a member; it was lots of fun, at which Mark met several more of Cheryl's friends over a delicious Jamaican dinner, followed by a gift-exchange game at which Cheryl received a pair of glass candy jars (and at which her gift of chocolate-covered Macadamia nuts was a coveted prize!).
Cheryl and Mark had been asked to organize gift-wrapping at a local Barnes and Noble store, as a fundraiser for The Aerospace Players (B&N provided supplies, and we passed out flyers and collected donations--a very generous service the bookstore provides to community groups!). Since Mark was out of town during most of the one-week period when club members did this, the bulk of the work fell to Cheryl, who also worked one shift while Mark was gone; we both had fun together wrapping gifts there, though, on Saturday and Sunday afternoon (16-17 December). JC was with us Sunday, and here's a photo of Amy with Cheryl on Saturday.
On Saturday evening we drove up to La Crescenta, in the San Gabriels northwest of Pasadena, to visit Karl, Debbie, and Anna, Mark's old Princeton/Caltech friends and their daughter; they had met Cheryl at the beach in August. In the photo with us is their Australian shepherd dog, Max (short for Solar Maximum, since he was born during the peak of the previous solar activity cycle--they're astronomers).
While we were there Anna not only showed Mark how to play Pokemon (what a cultural illiterate--he'd never even seen a game, just the TV show!), she also gave us a piano recital! She was playing with both hands, and some pretty hard pieces too--and she had just had a few months of lessons. Both of us were very impressed! Here she is concentrating on a complex passage.
After wrapping gifts at Barnes & Noble on Sunday, we spent the rest of the day plus after-work hours on Monday (and Mark found it necessary to leave at noon) finishing preparations for our nice long vacation with Cheryl's family in Hawaii. We have enjoyed sharing the holiday season with our friends, but we're definitely looking to going on "Hawaii time" once we get there!
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