What better way to start the holiday season than with a few festive photos.My side of the family were in town for a few days to celebrate an early Christmas. Of course, a few photos were taken of Kaija and the family during the week. My parents also took a few shots during a semi-impromptu holiday photo shoot this morning.

None of Kaija this time. Sorry to disappoint. :)No, I’ve been catching up with the photos that I had not gotten around to posting for various reasons. But now that I’m taking a little time off from work, I’m putting the time between Kaija holdings to good use.My friend Robert Seymour and I took a hike in the Sunol Regional Wilderness on November 1st. The trail was representative of much of the Bay Area hiking that I’ve done: up and down golden hillsides, open skies, sometimes through pastures of grazing cattle. The weather was a little cool and windy but perfect for hiking.My cousin Don’s son Forrest celebrated his third birthday on November 16th of this year with much of his nearby family. He was excited to see everyone, though perhaps a little reluctant to share his toys. I think the balloons kept him just as entertained as his presents.

In an effort to remove the web server hosting windeler.net out of our newborn’s bedroom, I’m moving the web sites to a new server. The web server itself is quite a bit faster than the Pentium 133MHz machine that I’ve been using (it was cheap!) and has a much faster Internet connection than my home ADSL outbound connection. This should make loading pages and pictures much faster. I’ve also taken the opportunity to change the URL to https://brahm.windeler.net/, which is something I meant to do from the beginning but never got around to implementing. Oh, and I’ve updated some of the links on the right side of the main page, too.So far I’ve got most of my personal pages, photos and backend scripts copied over. Let me know if you find any dead links. I plan to move the main the.windeler.net family weblog over shortly.

What kind of father would I be if I didn’t post more photos of my newborn daughter. Here are a few from her first week as well as a few with her mom’s side of the family who are in town. Oh, and as it happens, there are a few from a walk that Jennifer and I took at Vasona Lake in Los Gatos the same day that Jennifer went into labor.Rounding out the photo additions are some photos from weddings in October that I am just now getting around to posting: the wedding of my friends Hu and Yan and my cousin Sarah’s wedding.Thank you to every one who has e-mailed, called, sent gifts, posted comments on this web site, etc.! It is great to hear from you all. I promise to get back to you eventually, but life has been pretty crazy this past week as you might expect. I had been warned about the insane (non)sleep schedule, but I hadn’t expected it to be this bad. We’re figuring this parenthood thing out little by little.