California

Edi, Edison, Erin and I flew out out to California on the 13th, over two weeks ago now. We flew into Los Angeles and drove to Fresno and back, spending about a week in Fresno.

The trip came about in a kind of unlikely way. In the fall every year, we bid for vacation for the following year at work. Because of the timing of my upgrade bid and the vacation bids, I wound up bidding for 2008 vacation as a DC-10 Captain in anticipation of going through the training. Because of my much lower seniority, I didn’t get exactly what I wanted. I did get my first choice of a 2-week block in September for the Monterey Jazz Festival, but my second choice bid was for a week in June (I get 3 weeks a year now) and they assigned me a week in May.

Fast forward to my trip earlier this year to visit Jerry while he was still alive. It was on that trip that Marshall’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer was confirmed. I was able to visit Marshall on that trip. It occurred to me, though, that it would be best if Edi and the kids would be able to visit him while he was still in (relatively) good health. Not long after that, Marshall announced plans for three events to celebrate his life while he’s still alive to join in. One of those was in Fresno during the week of vacation that I was assigned. Coincidence?

It gets better, though. I started making plans to go out to California. It’s a huge production to get our whole family to go someplace all together these days. Edi was able to work her schedule out for a week that had slightly different days than my vacation, and I managed to get work to agree to change my vacation by a few days. Sometime after that, Marshall rescheduled his Fresno event. Fortunately, he was still planning to be in town during that time, so we created a fourth event just for the Sugar Group and related friends on the originally-scheduled date. With that perfect plan in place, we were off to California.

We got in Tuesday evening the 13th, had dinner and called it an evening.

On Wednesday, Edi, Edison, Erin and I spent a chunk of the day with Gloria (Edi’s step mom), and Paul (step brother). We had a nice time playing cards, eating out, and visiting. Then, we had our regular Sugar Group meeting, sort of. Angel wound up being in California for a cancer treatment and came down to join us. The meeting was ‘adjusted’ a bit due to my dad’s 70th birthday being a few days prior and us being in town. We just had a fun socializing night and it was, indeed, fun.

On Thursday, we watched the first Chronicles of Narnia movie, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, on DVD at my folks house. None of us (Edi, Edison, Erin, or I) had seen it before. Thursday night, Edi went to a unit meeting for her Fresno Mary Kay unit. Of course, Edi moved 3 1/2 years ago, so she was kind of a special guest. In addition, Heather, her sales director, is moving away soon, so the timing of us being back was quite good.

On Friday evening, we had the whole Guest clan over for dinner and hanging out. That was Edi’s first chance to meet our new godson, Gideon. I got a chance to hold him on my previous trip out. He’s 5 months old now and pretty darn cute. Seems he likes me, too 😉 That was the first time in quite a while that I’ve had a chance to see ‘mom and dad’ Guest, too. Oh, and we watched the Chipmunk movie that night, too.

That weekend we were there was the opening weekend for the second Chronicles of Narnia movie, Prince Caspian. About 15 of us (Sugar Group types) went to see it in the theater. We all liked it. After the movie, many of us went out for a fabulous teppanyaki dinner.

Sunday morning was church, of course. Then the afternoon was spent enjoying the time we had set aside to spend with Marshall. I think about 30 people showed up. We ate an international lunch (partly / mostly potluck) which was excellent and then sat around the living room taking turns telling Marshall stories. He seemed to enjoy it and I know the rest of us did, too. I’ve already written a fair bit about Marshall’s significance to me, so I’ll just leave it at that…

Oh, and while we were at Church on Sunday morning, I ran into Roy, who probably deserves an introduction of his own one of these days. He’s (again) the bass player at Northwest. He told me that there was a jazz gig that evening downtown and invited me to come. So after our time with Marshall, Paul, Angel, Edi and I went down there and enjoyed the last set of that. I wound up playing a few tunes which was fun.

And with that, our whirlwind week came to an end. On Monday, we packed up and drove back down to Los Angeles for our red-eye back to New Hampshire.

I suppose given this abbreviated journal of the weeks events that it might make more sense now as to why it didn’t get all written out as it happened. It was great to live it, though. Most of all, it was divine that all of the events surrounding the trip worked out as perfectly as they did.

V-