Christmas was over too quickly. But I suppose that's to be expected when it comes on a weekend. Today it was back to the normal thing – or at least as normal as things get in my job. I got up and met my mom at Curves to work out, but then instead of heading off to the office in Sacramento, my boss and I instead headed down to the office in San Francisco. That office moved a week ago, leaving behind piles and piles of old files for us to go through. A few months ago my boss had brought back several dozen boxes of files, which I've been slowly scanning to disk so we could dispose of the paper copies. Now that the San Francisco office moved, we had to either take all the remaining files, or throw them away.

So while my boss's son and his friend dragged load after load of boxes and random trash out to a dumpster in the parking garage, I rummaged through boxes with a thick stack of papers listing every project for which we still didn't have an original copy. Considering there are at least 5000 projects for this particular office, that was a lot of files to flip through, one at a time.

Driving there and back we had the radio on, mainly to listen for traffic updates. With the rain and the wind, even though there were fewer cars on the road there were enough nasty accidents that we had to take a few detours to avoid them. So as we listened for road conditions we also listened to the updates on the situation in Indonesia and India and Sri Lanka. And every time they discussed the story, the number of dead grew by the thousands.

We've had horrible earthquakes and tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis, everything that Mother Nature can throw in our direction in this country, but the devastation has never come close to what they are facing over there. So many people have died that they may never know the true number.

The story that touched me the most tonight, driving home from San Francisco, was of the little two-year-old boy who had been found. No one knows who he is, or where his parents might be, or even whether they are alive. They weren't even sure what language he speaks. And there are thousands more like him – little children, old men and women, mothers and fathers – who are suddenly alone.

This has been a Holidailies entry.