Palo Alto, CA Dec. 27, 2015 Dear Family and Friends, Last year I wrote my annual letter on December 26 and wished you all a happy Boxing Day, but this year I'm too late even for that. Still, it's the 3rd day of the 12-day Christmas season, so I'll wish you all a belated Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year! I plan to keep my tree and lights up at least until Epiphany. What with all their holiday travel, none of our organists could make it to church today, so I led the whole service on guitar. We used a traditional Lutheran liturgy (the Service of the Word, for those of you who know the WELS hymnal), four Christmas hymns and Psalm 111 from the hymnal, all much as we would have with the organ, including singing all the liturgical responses. During the offering I sang two verses from Away in a Manger as a solo. It all went very well and I got a lot of nice comments. Over the past year most of my occasions for playing guitar have been church-related. I played for outdoor worship before the church picnic both for my home congregation (Gloria Dei, Belmont) and for Good Shepherd in Livermore. I also was music leader at Tree of Life Lutheran Bible Camp during the summer, as usual. This year once again I was blessed to have a keyboard player, a drummer, and another singer up in front with me. Our drummer just graduated from high school and is headed east to college on a volleyball scholarship, so we won't have him next year, but he's passed on his electronic drum kit to an interested friend and so hopefully we can continue to have a drummer. This year has been a heavy one at work for various reasons. I was involved in a couple of "red escalations" -- basically, problems with our product that showed up only after release that had a severe effect on certain customers and were very difficult to diagnose and fix. Ultimately we were able to fix them satisfactorily, but only after a lot of extra hours. This pushed some of my other work behind and so I had to work extra hard on that to make a December 15 deadline for some new development I was doing for the 2016 product release. Right now I'm in the middle of two weeks of much needed vacation. I was desperately in need of extra rest, so I've just been taking it easy at home, going to a few basketball games, puttering around the house a little, reading, and sleeping. It has been wonderful. My cats Tessa (age 14) and Katinka (age 3) are doing well. I've had Katinka for a year and a half now, but she and Tessa are still slowly getting more comfortable with each other. Only in the last month or so has Tessa let Katinka sleep on my bed along with her occasionally instead of chasing her out of the room. And Katinka no longer chases Tessa back upstairs when Tessa comes down to the living room. Both are very affectionate to me. Katinka loves to curl up on my lap and purr loudly -- or on my chest if I stretch out on the couch to read. Tessa loves to be petted and to sleep on my bed at night. In the coming year I am hoping to take more time off and get together with family, especially those I have not seen in a while. If you have a time you'd like to get together, either here in California, at your place, or elsewhere, let me know. I'll be in touch. Christmas blessings, Tim Mann