Written by 
Merry Christmas, everyone. We hope that wherever you are, you’re having a good one.
Holiday Version
Written by Tomorrow afternoon, Rob’s brother Chris arrives from Oregon. We’ll be driving up to pick him up at the airport and then heading over to my sister’s for Christmas Eve. We are really looking forward to having Chris here and letting him enjoy the holidays with my family.
This week has been crazy busy, again, still, forever busy! As soon as we launched Salvation Army’s website, we took on yet another project for our friend and photographer, Aaron Draper. We have been nothing but busy for the last 6 weeks or so and right now, it’s looking like our first quarter of 2010 will be slammed with client work. We are excited about returning clients and new clients who have just recently found their way to us.
In addition to work, we made our way to San Francisco yesterday to shop a bit and see the decorations. It was a nice day away, the weather was gorgeous and we didn’t even need jackets! It was nice and necessary to just walk away from the office and just be together.  It’s interesting now that we work together how we sometimes forget to spend time together as a married couple. Yesterday was a chance for us to reconnect.
So tomorrow, we begin a few days of being with family to celebrate the birth of our Savior. We are blessed beyond compare.
Daybreak
I’ve told the story of the 2004 Florida hurricanes here before. But it’s relevant to what I want to talk about here today, so bear with me please.
A major hurricane landfall in Florida is a once-a-decade event. They usually either skirt up the east coast and hit the Carolinas, or they duck down around Cuba and spin off somewhere in the Gulf, but a direct landfall in Florida is pretty rare. By 2004, we’d been pretty lucky; the last real serious landfall was Andrew in 1992.
Hurricanes are evil things. They obliterate entire towns. They kill indiscriminately. They destroy property and ruin economies. And in the fall of 2004, Florida had five landfalls (counting one strong tropical storm) in a single month. One would hit, destroy the power grid, cause utter chaos, and after a week of Mad Max life, the lights would come in just in time for the next storm to come along and ruin everything again. After a month of this, many of us had become convinced that God just wanted to destroy us. That we’d never see electric light again.
Even when the lights came back on the last time, we didn’t trust them. Storm was the normal. Aftermath was the reality. We’d grown so accustomed to living in darkness and chaos, it took a while to readjust to things like light switches and televisions and air conditioning and pumping gas and buying ice. We didn’t really know what to do with daybreak, other than to distrust it.
Launch, Salvation Army Edition
Took some doing this afternoon – rarely does any website launch go absolutely smoothly – but we’re happy to announce that the Modesto Citadel of the Salvation Army now has its own website!
It isn’t much at the moment, just a somewhat temporary presence (adorned with the dynamite photography of Aaron Draper) that needed to go up for the holiday season. We’ll build it out to the full website after the start of 2010. But we’re pretty happy with how it’s coming along – take a look at www.salvationarmymodesto.org and tell us what you think.