As with Cheryl's birthday a few months back, Mark enjoyed multiple celebrations of his birthday with friends, including a couple of surprises arranged by Cheryl!
The Thursday before Mark's birthday, 31 May 2001, Cheryl brought a cake to choir rehearsal. It was a mocha haupia cake from King's Hawaiian, just like we had for her birthday. Mark usually doesn't partake of the refreshments that we have at the half-time break in our choir rehearsals--he finds it harder to sing afterwards--but for mocha haupia, he'll make an exception!
Mark's birthday fell on a Saturday; as it happened, local news-radio station KFWB was hosting an Energy Summit in Studio City that morning, so Mark drove there to listen and to ask a few pointed questions about the electricity shortage and solar power. He talked to the Speaker of the state Assembly and to actor and electric-vehicle enthusiast Ed Begley, Jr., but he didn't win the door prize of a Honda Insight hybrid-electric car! That would have been a nice birthday present...
We had been rehearsing "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" with The Aerospace Players, and Mark had also been helping build sets on Saturday afternoons (Cheryl joined in later as well). Because the Energy Summit ran overtime, though, he got to the theater shop late, and most people had already left; they had been tipped off by Cheryl and had brought a cake, so they had celebrated his birthday in absentia!
That evening, when Mark went over to Cheryl's condo to go out to dinner, she had arranged for another surprise: his college and grad school friends Karl and Debbie, and their daughter Anna, had driven down from La Crescenta and were waiting there too! The gift bag they brought Mark contained some excellent books reflecting their common interest in space (Mark met Karl and Debbie through SEDS, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, at Princeton--and note Karl's Star Trek jacket!), and Cheryl gave Mark a hard-sided carry-on suitcase to replace the battered soft-sided one he's had for twenty years.
You'll note the plastic covering the furniture in the photo; this was there because, after thinking about it for three or four years, Cheryl's condo association decided that this summer would be a good time to punch holes in everyone's walls and replace all the plumbing! (Plaster dust was everywhere...) This was very bad timing, because she had to take her condo off the real estate listings (you don't want to show buyers a residence with holes in the walls) for a month while we were already in escrow on the house we were buying. Worse than that, though, was the disruption to her home life and the fact that we had to put her cat, Melody, in a "kitty condo" for four weeks to prevent her from climbing into a hole and getting stuck. We love our new house, but the process of buying it and moving was especially hard for Cheryl.
For Mark's birthday dinner, we went to another of our favorite restaurants, a Peruvian place called El Pollo Inka. We always seem to go there when Karl, Debbie, and Anna come to visit, and we're happy to have the excuse!
Then the following Wednesday, 6 June 2001, Mark's co-workers took him out to lunch (actually, he took them in his van!) at yet another of our favorite local restaurants, Ragin' Cajun just down the street from El Pollo Inka in Hermosa Beach. Cheryl had told Mark that in Hawaii, people celebrate just about any occasion by eating; he can certainly get into that!
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