Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone that reads this. I hope the new year brings you all of your wishes. I had an uneventful New Years Eve which was fine with me. I went to Des Plaines' New Years Eve Celebration at the library and listened to some bad pop music before the ball dropped. As nothing was open today, I spent it at home reading and putting CD's on my new iRiver. I thought that I was going to fit my entire CD collection on it, but a quick calculation indicates that I will need to leave about 60 CD's off. It will take a while to fill the drive so it isn't anything I will have to worry about for a while.

The United States government has decided to up Tsunami relief aid by a factor of ten to $350 million. This will help a lot but I am sure more help will be needed. There are many places on the web that have links to organizations that can help now. Both Yahoo and Google have links to organizations providing relief such as Oxfam, CARE,the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, UNICEF, and others. If you can help you should. Millions of people need help immediately and governments can't do it alone.

The present total on casualties in Iraq for December is 71 Americans, 2 Brits, and 3 Poles. The number of Americans may change yet so I will not report names until next weekend. For 2004, 848 Americans were killed in Iraq and in total it has been 1333. That includes the one person killed in 2005 so far. While these numbers are nowhere near the 123,000 that were killed as a result of the tsunami, it is still far too many. Hopefully things will improve soon.