Our Year in Review

Even though we had waited a thousand years for the change from 1999 to 2000 and despite an invitation to spend New Years Eve with our friend Maurizia Palmieri,  we veged, as the millennium changed. We had just completed a drive from Palm Springs to Fairfax after visiting our son Joey and his partner Mark. We had a great visit and our grandson, Sean, enjoyed swimming both before dark and after dark in an outside pool in December. He also enjoyed seeing some of the desert and a trip to Disneyland with his mom and uncles to see the Magic Kingdom during the Holiday Season. 
With the Holiday Season over, Joe embarked on an enjoyable consultancy with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), http://www.omrf.ouhsc.edu/. It involved several trips to Oklahoma City, a lovely community. Joe worked with a great group of scientists, administrators and designers who were enthusiastic about designing and building a state of the art laboratory animal facility for the OMRF. 
Ella was born near Oklahoma City in Stroud. Her parents moved to California when Ella was three years old. So, she decided to travel with Joe on one trip and visit the city of her birth. For all of her life in California, Ella has felt the prejudice of some bigoted native Californians -- anyone who's lived in the state at least five years -- towards "Okies," who are regarded as uncultured, uneducated, unclean, illiterate, lazy rift raft. Most recently at a Home Owner's Association meeting, one of our neighbors complained that some front yards in our neighborhood were so unkempt, it looked like the houses were occupied by Okies. We turned and looked at each other and agreed that, if those allegations were true, all the sloppy Okies must have moved to California, as the front yards we saw in Oklahoma City and surrounding areas we well kept.
We did travel to Stroud and saw the town and the outlaying area where Ella's family had tried to farm on thick red clay that has since been turned to pasture land. We found Stroud to be quaint and nothing at all like Ella had imagined from hearing stories from her mother of the hard times the family had there. It is a much nicer city than bigoted Californians could dream of.
Joe also made a couple trips to Kansas City MO. to continue his consultancy with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research

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A view of modern Stroud Oklahoma, looking down Main Street, Route 66. (Another quality black & white photo by the Chicken Shift.)

to perform the eulogy for a woman he had know for almost 50 years and for whom he had great admiration. Also in a year he performed  a wedding, it seemed he should be involved in a ceremony commemorating the other end of life.
We were also saddened by the death of Diane Ralston, a member of the UCSF faculty who had been very supportive of Joe's efforts there.
Our Kids
Our son Joey and Mark continue to live in Palm Springs. Joey is managing a beauty salon there. Mark continues to work for the Lotus Corporation. They are getting somewhat tired of the summer heat and lack of business for much of the year when no sane person would visit the area.
Our daughter, Cathy continues to raise Sean as a single mom. She lives in San Anselmo, a town very close to us.  Sean is in the fifth grade and is working well in school.
A Final Word
Sometimes we hope to use this newsletter as parody for some of the insanity we observe. This year we skipped the parodies because we can't think up stuff as weird as some events of the past year. For example, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Czar Nicholas II. A dead man was elected to the US Senate. The news media declared that Florida belonged to Gore, then undecided, then Bush, and finally undecided, where it stayed for a painfully long time. (Somewhere Truman and Dewey must be smiling.)  Someone said these candidates were so terrible that the folks in Chicago only voted once. While some in Florida voted twice, they didn't realize they were suppose to use separate ballots.