So I'm here at the kitchen table tonight (my father-in-law over in the living room watching T.V. with the volume up a little higher than it should be and my wife downstairs asleep, exhausted from the holidays) and I just read an article at Time.com (Where "Check Please" is Your Call) about restaurants that let the customers pay what they feel "their meal is worth."  In some cases, for those who have no money, the restaurant trades the meal for one hour's worth of work.  With two restaurants now doing this in the U.S., one in Salt Lake City, Utah (One World Café) and the other in Denver,  CO (SAME Café) patrons seem to like it and abuse of the honor system is minimal.

The thing that got me was this sentence:

Since opening, one man has regularly come in and left money on the counter without eating, stating "I was blessed today so I though I'd pass it on." He's homeless.

Wow.  The selflessness of that just floors me.  I was expecting people who could afford more to leave more and the like but I was not expecting a homeless man to give to help others in such a fashion.  Like others out there, I've always seen people with down-n-out stories on street corners or highway on-ramps and thought "If I give him money, he's just going to spend it on booze or drugs".  Now though, I'm not so sure.  Tell you one thing though, I believe that there is more honesty there than in any corporate board room or politician out there.

About time!

This story, Court rejects 'intelligent design' in class, on cnn.com says it all.

A couple choice quotes from U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III decision:

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy,"

"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

Thank you Judge Jones.  Thank you for making sure our constitutional rights are not trampled upon by those few who seem forget that there is a seperation of church and state here in America for a reason.

While reading my blogs today, I came across a very good article from the Washington Post commented on blurbomat.  The thing that caught my eye was this quote:

    "To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," -Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.)

That is a powerful statement.  I firmly believe that the Bush administration has been using patriotism as a guise to be with or against them; if you’re against our policy, you are un-American -BULLSHIT!

In the first paragraph the good senator also stated:

    "the Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them."

Bravo Mr. Hagel, Bravo!  We need more politicians like you, ones who aren't afraid to speak out against the mainstream propaganda.

This weekend was a hard weekend for me.  Without going into detail, I'll just say that I'm so glad that my wife is understanding, caring, and most of all loving.  Her weekend was no picnic either; she has her own stresses so my incident didn't help her at all.  We got thru it, and I learned that what I thought was controllable is not and I'm going to make an effort to control it -I have to, and I will.  It won't be easy but I need to put forth effort to show her that I care and that we mean the world to me.

This should make perfect sense to my wife, not so much anybody else.

Honey, I love you more than you'll ever know.