Acknowledgement

It was a wonderful evening with more than 100 people gathered at the Huaxia China Center and had a good time celebrating the New Year of Dog. Obviously this is the best one compared to the previous ones we had, thanks to all of your contribution and help with enthusiasm and friendship. The food was wonderful and plenty, the karaOK and dance went very well and we were glad to see so many singing stars. The pictures were well-taken and more will be posted on our website.  Here I’d like to pay my special thanks to some folks who helped a lot (sure I missed many - please remind me):

- Xiaohui Gu ordered several trays of food from the Baren Restaurant and brought the food to the site.  Wei Gao and Daisy Yang spent lots of time shopping and cooking many trays and pots of food, cookies and dissert at home and brought them to the site. Anle Yang/Mingzhu Zhang helped buying the drinks.

- Jianfeng Xu brought TV and DVD player to entertain our kids. Weiyi Song and many helped sitting the kids.

- Tao Li, Lijun (Gary) Liu and other folks helped Wei Gao cleaning up the many rooms while most of us were enjoying singing and dancing. They had to run a long way to dump the many bags of trash to behind the building.

- Jiabo Li and Gary Liu took many nice pictures for us. Everyone looked nice on the assembly one (see pictures).

- Lily Li and Xiaohui’s father helped receiving and registering the guests when our appointed receptionists Sha Zhang and Michelle Gan were not able to arrive on time. We still appreciate that Sha eventually made it although her car broke on the way, and that Michelle turned down several of her eye patients in order to get to the party before 8pm – Anyway next time we have a good excuse if we get to her optometry office late!

- If you enjoyed the music, it is Yue Ma (my neighbor from Beijing, cellist and stage audio expert) who brought his heavy speakers at the risk of burning them out and sitting there all night playing DJ – For the speakers, he and I had discussed for hours and even went to a music store to see other options, and eventually decided to use his for this time only. All things considered, we’ll buy our own party speakers (louder and dependable) in the future. Tielin Wang contributed his favorite and most treasured toy - KaraOK player to the party. The mixer from my home is a professional one.

- We enjoyed the songs of many, including our guests of honor, Liwei Cai (from Shandong) and the Yinong Xie couple (from Sichuan). We decided to grant them Hunanese green cards so that they will join us every time in the future :)

- Thanks to Abgent’s support of $500 (Obviously our money guy Yingwei He did a good job :).  Also thank you all for the support - $330 was collected from the party.  Our financial balance sheet will be updated on the Yahoo group site.

Let’s meet at the next monthly lunch party (2/22) and I’ll reimburse those who paid for the party.

Chen