I would like to publically thank Chris Byrne of http://anarchangel.blogspot.com/ and the people at www.theguncounter.com
Recently I posted about how my writing laptop had gone down because of a bad power supply. Chris offered to send me an old beater laptop so I could keep writing. Someone else had a power supply locally, so I was taken care of, but in passing I mentioned to Chris that if he still didn’t want that old laptop, I would pass it on to my Dead Six writing partner, Nightcrawler, who was going on active duty.
Well, Chris is a man of his word, only he figured that if this was going to a soldier, then he deserved more than an old beater. So he posted to the Guncounter to see if any of the guys there would be willing to kick in for upgrades. He did this in secret, hoping to surprise both me and Mike. I found out because I have this habit of googling my name once in awhile.
The men of the theguncounter were very generous. Instead of giving Mike a beater laptop to take, he was given a new laptop that had been totally worked over by technical guru Chris, and with a bunch of extras, like a nice case, power supplies, etc.
That is a remarkable act of genorosity.
And this was before I found out about Chris and his wife’s own financial issues. This is a couple who is selling their entire gun collection to pay legal fees over a custody battle. Recently I posted about how they were selling cookbooks to try and pay those legal fees. I would strongly encourage my readers to go buy a cookbook. Good folks like this deserve our support.
Well hell Larry…
We were glad to do it. Somebody wants to volunteer to go get his ass blowed up for us, a laptop is the least we could do.
I’ve been there… a bunch of us have. We know what it’s like to be bored out of your mind off duty, and having something like a laptop to keep you sane… like I said, it’s the least we could do.
Hell, I didn’t even know he was a guardsman turned airman ’til he called me. Boy smartened up; decided that the army was for suckers and it was time to aim high.
If I’d known he was one of my own (8 years in the air force) I’da thrown in some personal stuff as well… maybe some zapsor summat.
Oh and the kind of issues we’ve got… lets jsut say the few hundred dollars to get a laptop to someone who needs it isn’t much more than a drop in the bucket; and I made a commitment to do it. I was going to meet that commitment if there was any way I could.
We’ve been fighting an international custody case vs Mels ex husband, who doesn’t want the kids, but does want to hurt my wife. He’s filed as much crap as he can, in multiple jurisdictions, multiple courts; trying to confuse the issue and getting us to burn up money.
He’s lost at every level, at every turn. Every request he’s made has been denied. Every claim he’s made has been refuted. We have beaten him every time we’ve gone in to court. But he keeps filing paperwork, and appeals, and raising issues in different courts, in two different countries.
It’s been maddening, and draining of both emotional and financial resources.
What it boils down to, is that we’ve had $150,000 plus in legal bills over the past 3 and a bit years.
It’s taken most of what we had, and what I earn, and my wife earnings on the side (she’s a stay at home mome, mostly works temporary and part time stuff); along with a fair amount of donations and selling of stuff… but we’ve managed to pay $125,000 of that $150,000.
We’re still $25,000 in the hole, and up til recently our lawyer was good about letting us pay $1000-$2000 a month as we could. Unfortunately, several of his clients have gone bust, and he needed a bunch of money all at once.
We gave him the $5,000 or so we could scrape together, but he needs at least $10k more or HE’s going to fold.
Anyway, we’ve got some ideas about how to help with that, and we’re working on it. In fact, we’ve got a big announcement Monday, relating to the cookbook, and other things.
But like I said, I made the commitment for the laptop before the lawyer gave us the bad news, and I wasn’t going to let that stop me if there was any way I could do it.
Between the donations from guncounter members, discounts I get being in the business, and stuff I had on hand, the out of pocket to me was only a few hundred. As far as I’m concerned it was more than worth doing.