So, a few days until my nephew’s first Christmas. You gotta love kids and the new discoveries of one thing after another. So here’s Branson at his first Thanksgiving, discovering that a napkin ring not only tastes great, but fits on your nose…

Yes, Santa does visit the beach. (Of course, he’s traditionally seen in the cold, but the sleigh works the same in sand as it does in snow … it was no problem for Rudolf to land on the beach at all.)

On the photography site are posted pictures from A California Christmas, a few days spent down in Crystal Cove … some samplings of which are shown here.

After seeing this Santa, I’ve changed my long-held opinion: He DOES exist, and I’ve seen him.

So … Merry Christmas! (Now, shall we takes bets to see how long after the new year it takes me to revamp the site again?)

This surreal view out my window today sums up how I feel about the new place — Santa Ana’s Santiago Street Lofts. Living here so far has been great. Yes, there’s a bit of “urban blight” surrounding it; it’s not perfect. But nevertheless it’s wonderful, and I’m loving it here. (By the way, do you know how you know you’re getting old? When you get excited about the new high-tech dimmer that you installed!)

Here are a few more shots of the incredibly bright double-rainbow that spanned the sky today. It was so wide, my wide-angle (17mm) lens wouldn’t capture it all. (And maybe one day I’ll get around to stitching together the panorama shots I took. These of course could be much better with a bit of retouching, but I haven’t been posting lately, and I thought better to get them up then to wait some more time…)

127 mph in a 550 horsepower black BMW M5, with seats that quite literally reach out and push you in the opposite direction of your turn. That was the “Mr Toad’s Wild Ride” home to a wild night, capping a very filled couple of weeks.

Tonight — much thanks to great friend Mark O — was “performer’s passes” to KROQ’s Acoustic Xmas. (If you’re not from SoCal, then you probably don’t know that it’s one of the year’s hottest concerts, put on by a local radio station.) Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: It’s not acoustic, and there was pretty much no “christmas” involved. Other than that, it was amazing. With the passes we had no lines at the bar, and a pretty nice salmon and steak dinner (and we got to watch the fight — oddly — in the middle of the concert.) Out on stage: First up (that we saw) was basically System of a Down (by a different name now) … who were amazing. Next up: Rage Against the Machine … also, another amazing performance. We missed the next band, and ended with Linkin Park. Seems like I always feel this way during a great concert, but it really seemed like of the best shows I’ve seen. The singer spent a lot of time right up in the crowd, and the audience went crazy the whole time. At one point they played the “slow” song (never all that mellow with Linkin Park), and a few lighters came out … but a SEA of cell phones came out. It was a little eerie and beautiful to see thousands upon thousands of lit cell phones waving back & forth across the stadium. Anyway, it was an incredible show. Top notch, huge thanks again to Mark, and congrats to all the fans who get to see tomorrow’s (Dec 9, 2007) show.