Weekly gathering on December 28, 2015

Tom mentioned the outing on Jan-4 and asked the attendees to line on Jian-tan station for route s18 around 8:30 and emphasized the bus would leave at 8:50.  Interestingly, all the members argued where the bus stop should be.  At last, Rosie drew a map on the blackboard and we figured out where the bus stop was.

Jenny Cheng talked about the article “Laughter is the Best ‘Cold’ Medicine.” She said it was a very difficult article with so many vocabulary words regarding medicine and chemistry.  She also introduced 3 new words: joyologist (笑學家), lol (laugh out loud), and yolo (you only live once).  She mentioned many advantages of laughter and asked what the drawback was.  And one potential answer was wrinkles on face. She also pointed out that Henry was the most humorous classmates, Heaven owned a large laughter jar, and Solana might make laughter track.  She ended her speech by singing Edelweiss.

Sonia spoke of the article “The Christmas Story.”  Though it was her first time to stand on the front in class to explain the essay, she did it very well. First, she talked about the meaning (spirit) of Christmas.  Next, she asked the 6 meanings of the crutch (candy cane) and gave away gifts to those provided right answers.

Red stood for Jesus’ blood (sacrifice)

White: clean our sins

Shape: paths (shepherd led the way to Jesus’ birthplace)

Stripe: scars (He died for us)

Letter: J of Jesus

Candy: sweet (His love was so sweet)

She concluded her speech by telling the story of 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. The miracle was that Jesus fed many men and their families all because of one little boy’s generosity in offering his lunch consisting of 5 small loaves of bread and 2 fish.  There were different versions of this story but 2 common points were: 1) over 5000 people enjoyed this meal and 2) 12 baskets of food were remaining.

Andy talked around the article “Boxing Day”.  Its Chinese translation was 節禮日and became a legal holiday in Great Britain in 1871. Boxing Day might start in one of the 4 ways: a good deed, donation boxes, gift boxes, and lunch boxes.

He also mentioned 2 major changes on Taiwan labor laws effective Jan-1 2016: 1) legal working hours reduction to 40 hours per week from 84 hours per 2 weeks; 2) the elimination of 7 legal holidays (1/2, 3/29, 9/28, 10/25, 10/31, 11/12, and 12/25).

Michelle led the creativity program - “code” game.  First, she explained 2 sets of codes:

Code A: 1 stands for a, 2 for b, 3 for c, etc.

Code B: much more complicated and I could not describe it exactly. However it was a combination of 9 spaces and dots to identify each letter.

Then, she passed 20 sheets of these codes and each sheet included a sentence. Each team should decipher the codes and unscramble them to make 10 meaningful sentences (resolutions). These 10 sentences represented the top 10 resolutions for people to make during year end.

And here is the list of the 10 resolutions.

1.        Lose weight

2.    Quit smoking

3.    Get a better job

4.    Save money

5.   Find true love

6.    Organize your home

7.    Try something new

8.    Spend more time with your loved ones

        9.    Get more rest

        10.  Volunteer to help

To Robert, the first one seemed not right.  He wanted to gain weight.

At first, the losing team should perform the ‘hopping bunny’ (rabbit dance) as punishment. However, all classmates danced together with the merry song arranged by Michelle. In fact, it was somewhat physically-challenging dance. After that, we all felt warm and werenot afraid the outside cold weather. Michelle really made a very happy ending of the last class of this semester.