My father has been a hard working man all his life.  He has given everything for his family.  One small virus thirteen years ago attacked his heart.  Because of that his heart has slowly been degrading over these past thirteen years.  We are counting on the Health Care Act to lift the cap on his insurance in June so that he will be able to get a heart transplant.  He's not asking for a free ride.  We just want the cap lifted on the insurance that he has paid into his entire adult, hard working life.

I can't believe you voted for this garbage.  I'm stunned. I could see if your party wanted to try and fine tune things but an all out repeal!  I thought my representative in congress had more sense than that.  Look I'm sorry to be so blunt but this is the most politically motivated, reprehensible, partisan mess I have ever seen.  It was called the "Repeal of the Job Killing Health Care Law", even the name is partisan and ridiculous.  Your party claims to fight for the small town, hard working salt of the earth.  How can you say that when the very thing you voted on hurts those people the most.  It's obvious your party only cares about big business and greed.  Ridiculous!  I hope your proud of all the hard work you are doing for the insurance companies.  You should be ashamed.  Needless to say you have lost my vote.

     I watched Buddha's Lost Children the other night.  In short, this movie is stunning both visually and for the story it tells.  This documentary tells the story of Buddhist Monk, Phara Khru Bah Neua Chai Kositto who runs the Golden Horse Temple in the borderlands of Thailand's Golden Triangle.  A former Thai boxer, Phara Khru Bah devotes his time to the children and horses of this rugged region known for it's drug smuggling and impoverished villages.
     This is a great introduction to anyone who wants to know what Buddhism is all about.  You won't learn the story of the Buddha nor of his teachings.  You will, however, see the result of those teachings through the example of this monk and how he cares for the people and animals of this region.  We also follow Nehn Suk and Pan Saen as they are brought in and cared for by Phara Khru Bah and Nun, Khun Mae Ead.  Beautifully filmed, we ride along with these novices and their master as they move through the region fixing temples, caring for villages and teaching Buddhist philosophy not only through words but through actions.

I stumbled on this yesterday and did some testing last night and found this to be amazing.  Basically it is a metatag editor for iPod videos.  It's very easy to use.  Basically you just load it up, open your file and it automatically searches for the information for your movie or TV show.  It fills in as much information as it can find including artwork, rating, actors etc.  It allows you to select information from multiple sources even.  If TAG has your chapter titles but Amazon has your artwork, actors etc then you can select what you want to keep and it will discard the rest.  Once you have all the information selected you just hit a button and it will write your file.  Now, the information it finds is only as good as the DB's it pulls from but for the most part this does a really good job of automatically filling in your information.  Much better than the more manual VideoTag method.  I highly recommend it.

So, I am trying out this recipe for Cajun 15 Bean Soup. So far it smells absolutely fantastic. I made some modifications for the time since I did not have my reading glasses with me at the grocery so I did not realize the beans needed to soak for 8hrs. I think it will be fine. Specially since we won't be eating it until tomorrow. This recipe might just be a keeper! I hope I can find some cornbread.

UPDATE:  This turned out AMAZING.  We had it on Saturday night after the boys played the senior bowl.  This is spicy but it is my perfect idea of spicy . . . you don't taste it and you think  . . . eh, this ain't spicy . . then it hits the back of your throat!   HAHA . . . . also, it was not so spicy that it bulldoged the flavor.  In other words the 8 YR old loved it but she was sweating!  Great find!  I will be trying Andouille Sausage next time.

So, I guess you would consider this a statement of intent.  This blog will basically be for me to post about what strikes me as interesting.  While this blog has a decidedly Buddhist theme it certainly will not be limited to Buddhist topics. I think a better blog name\web address would be MonkeyMind which is a Buddhist term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".  Unfortunately there are already a couple of blogs parked at that address or variations of it.  Shame that the people that own it aren't doing anything with it but "them is the breaks".  So onward and upward as they say.