Easter 2012 Like the golden sun ascending, Breaking through the gloom of night, On the earth its glory spending So that darkness takes to flight, Thus my Jesus from the grave And death's dismal, dreadful cave Rose triumphant Easter morning At the early purple dawning. Dear friends and family, Happy Easter! You may have missed my annual Christmas letter this past year. Don't worry -- it's not because you dropped off my list. I was sick for several weeks around Christmas with a nasty case of the flu and a sinus infection. I missed a couple of weeks of work and also skipped a vacation I'd planned and stayed home in bed instead. Though I had a lot of unoccupied time, I just didn't find enough energy to write. Happily, I'm long over that now, so I'm writing an Easter letter in place of the Christmas letter. At this point in my life, each year seems to go by faster than the one before. Much is the same from one cycle to the next, but some things are new and different too. At work I'm serving as the tech lead for the VMkernel hardware group. We are a small group that works on parts of the operating system kernel that are very close to the hardware and that no other groups are tackling. This requires a lot of specialized knowledge, some of which I have and some of which I'm still learning as I go along. It definitely keeps me hopping. I am still working on CPU power management as part of this group. I enjoyed having season tickets to both Stanford football and women's basketball this past season. Games turned out to be a good activity to share with family and friends who were in town. The football team had a great year in 2011 with Andrew Luck at quarterback, losing only one game during the regular season and going to the Fiesta Bowl. My niece Beth and her family came up from Pacific Grove to attend the Washington game with me, where we saw a lot of touchdowns in a 65-21 blowout win. My sister Mary and I went to Big Game (the Cal game) together during her visit at Thanksgiving. We got very wet but had a good time watching another Stanford win. She and I then headed down to Pacific Grove for Thanksgiving at Beth and Tom's. Women's basketball made it to the Final Four in both 2011 and 2012, but lost to the eventual champions Texas A&M in the 2011 semifinals and Baylor in the 2012 semifinals. I went to a game with my niece Amy, and later with my high school friend Mark Sebald. I also traveled a bit for some games: in March 2012 I took my birthday week off, made a leisurely drive down to Los Angeles, and watched games from both the men's and women's Pac-12 basketball tournament. A couple of weeks later I took the booster club bus to Fresno to see the women win the 3rd and 4th rounds of the NCAA tournament. Oh, and I went to two of the men's NIT games that were played at Stanford, then watched on TV as the men won the NIT title. On to musical activities: I was song leader for Bible Camp again this year, as well as continuing to serve as camp treasurer. This past year we had quite a musical lineup -- besides me playing guitar and singing, we had a keyboard player, a ukulele, and another singer. They were all very good and so we were able to work together with minimal practice time (none before camp!). I didn't play with the VMware band Elastic Sky this year, though I might do that again in the future. Choir has gotten going again at my church and I have been enjoying that, as well as getting to play guitar to lead singing or do a solo occasionally. Besides all that, I continue to serve as church treasurer and tech guy. We are just about to wind up a pastoral vacancy of nearly 11 months, as Rev. Timothy Shrimpton recently accepted a call to be our new pastor and will be installed in three weeks. During the vacancy we were blessed to have Rev. Silas Krueger, a retired pastor from southern California, as our interim pastor. He and his wife Marsha moved into the parsonage and he served us essentially full-time. We'll miss him as he moves on to do many more things for the Lord during his very active retirement. I still work on my family tree in odd moments. I'm fairly stuck as far as getting back farther, but I continue to find additional distant cousins here and there, and occasionally one gets in touch with me. The 1940 census records just become publicly available, so those will answer a few more questions. Today was a fun day. We had a full crowd in church, and I sang with the choir. In the afternoon I baked Danish Puff for the first time -- an old favorite recipe of my mother's -- to bring to Easter dinner at Gene and Kathy Lee's house. We all enjoyed the dinner, and the Danish Puff got good reviews. Then it was home to feed the cats and write this letter. I hope it finds you all well and that you had a happy Easter! Blessings on your year, Tim Mann