Thanking God and George Soros

...for small miracles.

I get $131 dollars a month in food stamps (it was about $120 until Obama increased it... that was the first miracle) and usually they're gone in one sitting. So I hate going to the local supermarket out on the Rock cuz the prices are a little higher than they are off-Rock and I get more for my money that way.

I was sitting around trying to figure out the order of the day, when the Sun called. He was in the car with his Dah on their way to Target. I said I really needed to go, and SD agreed to come pick me up.

Wow, first of all.

Secondly, I was running slightly over-budget for the $50 I had at Target, but SD picked up the whole tab. Wow. It was actually a pleasant trip... and then he said he didn't mind taking me to Key Food to go food shopping. It helps when I get a ride cuz then I can buy all the heavy stuff like juice and seltzer water and not carry it home in the heat on the bus. Which I do when I have to....

Food bill was about $140, plus the few non-food items I needed which right away wiped out the Foodstamp balance. And then the cashier said to her friend "OH, she got it!" and pointed out that my card had a cash balance of $200. It was a special grant she said, for people with kids. She also said I had to go get it today, and it was sort of a random thing. Key food doesn't give cash back if you use an EBT card, so I had to go to the check cashing place. Of course, the machine was down.

So SD drove me to the other check cashing place further down the street where I joined the line of about 20 women who had all heard about the grant the same way... word of mouth or on their supermarket receipt. While on line I googled "$200 grant for Food Stamps" and found out that it wasn't the government that did it... it was George Soros. Billionaire financier and philanthropist, he usually makes grants outside of the U.S., but given the economy he did something for the people of NY. He donated money so that the state would give a $200 grant for each kid aged 3-17 in a family for back-to-school supplies. And at the time I googled it, about 3 or 4P, there was very little news out there. As I write this, at 7:30P, it's all over the Internet.

There were all kinds of rumors floating; you had to pick it up today or lose it, you had to get it by 5P... I'm not sure if those rumors are true, but quite honestly I got damn teary-eyed learning that this was inspired by one man. Whatever his reasons... the result is that a random act of kindness by one person positively affected several thousand people. The woman on line in front of me had triplets, resulting in a grant of $600. She went to the very next window at the check-cashing place and bought a $500 money order for her kids tuition. My grant will cover the automatic debit out of my empty bank account for the Sun's NY Saves college fund, and my life insurance. The rest? I'll buy him some clothes for school, because otherwise I would have had to rely solely on SD. So in case you read this and then read nasty comments about people using the money for other things, the BearMaiden can personally vouch for the fact that most of the women on that line were going to use it for it's intended purpose. And all of us were grateful. I made sure to tell those on line who George Soros was, and what he did. And when I got home, yes I did write a "thank you" email...

Can you just imagine??? I'm speechless.

...and now I'm off to a date with NewDate...

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