We wish you the happiest of holiday seasons, and may your new year be filled with peace, love, and joy.

One year ago, Erin was born at 7:39 AM PT on December 18th. A week before Christmas we were given a beautiful little baby that has grown to be a sweet little girl.

Although Erin doesn’t appear in our blog often, she is a very active member of our family. She enjoys crawling all over the house and finding new places to explore. One of her favorite places to crawl to is the play room where she finds unattended trucks, trains, and various other toys. She tries out every lever and button that she can find before Evan can move his toys to safety. It will be interesting when she starts walking and moving faster.

In addition to her explorations, she likes to play “flying butterfly” with her dad. He makes a butterfly with his hands and flies it around the room. It then lands in various places, and then they blow it off its perch. She giggles and smiles when it lands on her head. In the last couple of weeks, she has started playing the game with Mom, except Erin makes the butterfly with her hands and lands it on Mom’s head. Great fun!

Erin is a busy little girl and full of smiles. She brings us lots of joy and happiness and we are very grateful that she is part of our family. It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year!

Happy Birthday, Erin!

Since we bought our house in 2001, we’d wanted to replace the many old, single-pane windows in it. These were wooden double-hung windows that had, over the years and after many coats of paints, become difficult or impossible to open and close. In addition, they were miserably energy-inefficient, and we had some really large openings through which I’d guess we wasted hundreds of dollars each year in energy costs.

Since improving our home’s energy efficiency has been our focus in 2008, the windows became one of our main targets. (Soon, I’ll post an entry describing all the energy-related projects we’ve done and the rebates we’ve been able to collect.) In the end, we replaced windows in four bedrooms, two bathrooms, the living room, the office, and the dining area off the kitchen — nine openings totaling over 200 sq. ft. of glass. (Several other windows in the house were double-pane when we purchased the house, and we had previously replaced a couple others.)

One of the windows we replaced — the one in the living room — was itself about 65 sq. ft. and represented over 30% of the total glass replaced! Here’s the rough opening:

And here’s a small album showing the process of replacing that huge window:

The vinyl replacement windows were manufactured by Simonton, and we purchased them through — and had them installed by — Triple D Construction. (For what it’s worth, we thought they did a good job, and we’d definitely hire them again. And so far, we’re satisfied with the Simonton windows, too.)

One more thing to share — I wanted to be able to watch the complete replacement of the large living room window, so I set up a webcam, recorded a time-lapse movie of the process, and put together the following video (which repeats some of the still shots above):

(You can also watch a higher-quality version here.)

On Sunday morning — early, before the crowds arrived — we made our annual pilgrimage to Lone Pine Farms for pumpkins. Of course, it’s more than just pumpkins — it’s also the hay ride, the farm animals, and this year, for Evan’s first time, it was the Cow Train (see below). We spent about three and a half hours out there and watched it go from nary a soul upon our arrival to an overflowing parking lot and the complete decimation of their wheelbarrow supply.

Since most of the photos are of Evan and Erin, they can be found in a non-public gallery for which you are welcome to register. I have, however, added copies of two photos into one of our public albums:

Pumpkins at Lone Pine Farms

I mentioned the Cow Train. Last year, Evan was a little too small and a little to wary to ride it, but this year, he was all about it. The Cow Train is kind of hard to describe, so here’s a fun little video I put together featuring some Halloween music by Mannheim Steamroller:

Every fall the garden spiders start building lots of webs around our house and fattening up before the winter. The one in this video built its web just outside our living room window.

If you’d rather not watch the crappy-looking YouTube version of this video, there’s a couple things to try.

• Watch the superior-looking version in my MobileMe gallery: 2008-09-29 Garden Spider in the Fall (Eugene, OR).
• Or, click through to the video’s page on YouTube.com and then click the “watch in high quality” link immediately below the video frame.

We took the kids out on another short hike on Sunday. This time, our destination was Brice Creek in the Umpqua National Forest. I have several things to share from this trip. First, there’s the cute shot of Jen and the kids at right. (To view the larger version of that photo, you’ll need to register and log in to our gallery.)

Second, you can browse through the following set of scenic shots from the trip:

And finally, as we were hiking back toward the car, we came across a couple of adventurous guys who, despite light rain and an air temperature somewhere around 60 degrees F (I’d guess) — not to mention what had to be quite COLD water, had stripped down to their shorts and were jumping into the deep pool below the falls near the campground. It was the perfect opportunity to try out the “super slow-mo” feature on my new video camera. You can watch the result here:

I told the guys I’d post the video on YouTube and how they could look it up. At the end of the video, you’ll also see a brief message meant for them in case they watch it.

I uploaded these to our gallery a few days ago, and I almost forgot to post a link to them on our blog. Without further ado, I present to you a collection of photos from the 2008 Eugene Celebration parade!

2008 Slug Queen