518 Channing Ave. Palo Alto, CA 94301 December 18, 2007 Dear Friends and Family, Once again I'm writing my Christmas letter from Milwaukee, as I didn't manage to get it done before leaving home. I had a smooth flight on Tuesday, and will be staying here with my sister Mary and her grandson Sasha until the 31st. Sasha is a freshman at UWM this year and is staying with Mary. Here are a few highlights of my year. In March, I took a brief trip to Wichita Falls, Texas, to visit my niece Beth and her family. Beth's husband Tom is stationed at the Air Force base there now. The children have all grown a lot since I saw them last. Nathan and Meagan are teenagers now, Ethan was almost 10 when I visited, and Abby was about to turn 4. Texas is just as vast and flat as everyone says, but we took a drive north to a park in Oklahoma and hiked along the river bluffs there. Some photos are on my web site at http://tim-mann.org. Bible Camp was in June this year -- we decided to try moving it earlier, and the camp we rent had an opening in June. It was a lot cooler in the Sierra foothills than our usual week at the end of July. As usual, I served as treasurer, and at camp as song leader and assistant director. This year the kids sat on a set of curved bleachers that brought everyone closer together, and the singing went really well. Check out the camp photos at http://TreeOfLifeBibleCamp.org. This year I also got several chances to play and sing with Elastic Sky, our "house band" at VMware, where I work. We're a group of employees from a variety of parts of the company who get together and play for corporate events now and then. It's a lot of fun, and a good learning experience for me, since I hadn't played with a band before this, while the other members are quite experienced (and very good musicians!). It's a privilege to get to play with them. The band's name has a bit of a funny story behind it. Back around 2001, VMware hired a naming firm to come up with names for two of its new products. The firm came up with the names "Elastic Sky" and "Ground Storm", and a blue-and-brown logo to match. This was a little before I joined, so I don't know the whole story, but the company decided not to use the names, calling the products "ESX" and "GSX" instead, but still using the logo. Perhaps the founders thought the names sounded too much like typical Internet bubble-era vaporware. Whatever the reason, the unused names became a company inside joke, and eventually we started calling the band by one of them -- possibly making us the band with the world's most expensive name! At the end of July I traveled to Minnesota for a week for the biennial convention of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the national body that the church I belong to is a part of. It was our congregation's year to send a delegate, and I agreed to fill in since our originally chosen delegate couldn't make it. Besides learning more about what our church body has been doing and helping to decide on our plans for the next two years, I also got to see some old friends (and even a relative) who also happened to be delegates this year. I also got a chance to visit my niece Amy and her family in Minneapolis before the convention and get my feet wet in the Mississippi River. After the convention, partly sparked by meeting a relative there, I got bitten pretty hard by the genealogy bug. I've spent quite a few evenings and weekends over the last few months tracing out my family tree -- working up to my first ancestors who came to the US (all from Germany), then downward to as many cousins as I could find. I'm also interested in finding out about ancestors back in Germany, but haven't done much on that yet. There are a lot of US records available on-line today, and so one can make very rapid progress though what they cover. I've found that I have a lot more relatives than I realized! I've gotten in touch with a few of my relatives who are interested in genealogy, several of whom I didn't know about before. While in Milwaukee this year, I plan to visit some relatives and do some library research in records that aren't available on-line. In closing, best wishes to all of you for a blessed Christmas and New Year! While I'm in Wisconsin, you can still reach me at my cell phone number 650-283-3895, or at my email address tim@tim-mann.org. Love in Christ, Tim Mann