723 Marsh Road #3 Menlo Park, CA 94025 December 1988 Dear Friends and Family, Well, last year's Christmas letter was a hit, so here goes again. I wish I had time to write you all individually, but this will have to do. It's been a quiet year here, especially compared to the last few. I'm still living in Menlo Park, working for DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, and going to church at Gloria Dei Lutheran in Belmont. No foreign travel or other big adventures. But I've certainly kept busy. My job has been fun. (Please ignore anything in this paragraph that you don't understand.) Right now my main activity is working with a group to design and build a distributed, replicated file system with coherent caching of both files and directories on client machines. In my spare time I've also done some work on implementing a distributed clock synchronization algorithm invented by another researcher at SRC, measuring how well it works, writing a paper about my experience, and revising his paper about the algorithm itself and its theoretical performance guarantees. (I'm frightfully behind on that last point.) I had a wild day today---hosting a promising job applicant and trying to keep him moving smoothly from one interview to the next, at the same time as I was working with two other people on some exciting new ideas we've just had about how to implement our file system. I feel like I've had an unusually productive two days today! Things are going well at church. Our school's enrollment is up, we've just celebrated our 25th anniversary, and we've completed a challenge fund drive that eliminated our deficit (which was over 7500.00 at the start of this fiscal year in July). So we feel very richly blessed. We have had a second pastor (Mark Mammel) on our staff for the last year and a half---one of the Seminary grads who didn't get a call---largely to do evangelism work. This was made possible in part (as they say on public television) by a large grant from an anonymous WELS donor outside our congregation, plus Pastor Mark's willingness to do some part-time work to help support himself. The program is beginning to show some good results, and we're hoping to get support to continue it indefinitely, with the congregation gradually taking over the full burden as we grow. More news next year! I'm still serving as church treasurer, and am back to teaching Sunday school for grades 5-7 after taking the summer off. My class size has fluctuated between two students and ten, but however many are there, they keep me on my toes. The "mostly-singles" Bible study group that meets at my place is still going strong, and it's even begun to be an evangelism tool. One of our members brought a friend from work, who is now in the pastor's instruction class. Right now the group is taking a break for Advent, but we'll be back to our study of Romans in January. I'm leading for this book. Another hat I've been wearing lately is song leader. For our Sunday school openings I bring in my guitar and lead the kids and parents through two or three spiritual songs. Those songs I learned back in Lutheran Collegians have been going over big. I've also been tapped to lead the congregation in singing Christmas carols at some of our Advent services, and that's gone over well, too. (If any of you are still doing singalongs, write me and I'll tell you about some great songbooks I've found.) I served as a counselor at our WELS Northern California summer Bible camp again this year, after skipping it last year. It was an exhausting but very rewarding experience, shepherding ten 7th and 8th graders for a week, trying to make sure everyone got where he belonged, no one drowned, and trying to keep and instill a loving, Christian outlook on the whole experience. I must have liked it; I'm planning to go back next year! For exercise I've been doing a lot of biking and hiking. I bought a mountain bike and have been using it to commute in to work two or three times a week. (Well, a little less since the rainy season has started.) I also biked from church over the mountains to the ocean and back with Pastor Mark one day. That was hard work; the pass we went over is about 1200 feet above sea level, and the trip is about nine miles each way. My friends and I have also been doing some day hikes on Sunday afternoons when there's time. Over Thanksgiving a group of us drove down the coast to Big Sur, where we camped out and did some hiking. On Friday we set out in a steady rain and thick fog that gave about 50 feet of visibility, and hiked up an old road. After two hours or so we had hiked 4.2 miles, gained 1500 feet in altitude, gotten thoroughly wet, and seen nothing but fog and some nearby trees. At that point we stopped in disgust and had lunch. Then, halfway through lunch, we suddenly started to see patches of blue sky. Within ten minutes the rain stopped, the clouds blew away, the sun came out, and all the fog burned off. Suddenly we could see a beautiful view of the coast and the ocean to the west, 2500 feet below us, and an equally beautiful view of the Santa Lucia mountains to the east, in the Ventana National Wilderness. Recharged with energy, we hiked on for another hour before turning back, getting beautiful views all the way and catching everything we'd missed on the way up. We hiked about 11 miles in all. Later that afternoon we went down to the beach to watch the sunset, then drove back up the coast on Saturday, stopping often to admire the coastline and take photos. My back has been giving me some trouble this year---I guess it's creeping old age; I'll hit the dreaded 30 mark early in '89---plus the fact that I suddenly became much more active after spending a year chained to my desk doing my thesis. Fortunately the doctor says it's nothing serious, and physical therapy has been helping. The therapist is also helping me correct my lifelong slump. That's a slow process, but I'm making progress. This summer I was in Milwaukee briefly for my niece Amy's wedding---less than a week. I was in the wedding party, so it was a busy time, but loads of fun. I'm sorry there was no time to call all my Milwaukee-based friends while I was in town. Hopefully I can make up for it at Christmas---I'll be home from the 23rd to January 2nd, and I'll try to at least phone you all. Amy and Jeff are living in Madison now, where Jeff is a grad student in math and Amy is trying to decide what to do next. She's been taking a few graduate courses, working on the family genealogy, and helping keep house. Amy's sister Beth is a freshman at UW-Madison, living in the dorm and coming home on weekends. Their mother Mary, my sister, still lives in Milwaukee and works as an LPN. My mom lives nearby in the family house with her cat Rascal, who is now huge, but still adorable. My brother Bill and his wife Nancy still live in Sudbury, Mass., and will be with us for Christmas. But Bill's daughter Leigh, also in college, won't make it to Milwaukee this year. Well, I'm out of space now, so just let me wish you. . . Christmas joy through Christ Jesus,