It's sickening to see how the top brass in the company I work for are making millions off of their stock options while the rest of the company enjoys lower yearly raises than ever before. Our top brass has gone on a stock trading frenzy in the last month, selling old stock for current market value and excercising stock options to buy new shares at highly discounted prices. Our CEO, President, and a VP have combined to profit more than 5.8 million dollars in the last 30 days alone. I wonder why... maybe because of this upcoming news? Darwin Deason hasn't profited from stock options recently, but he has sold more than 15 million dollars in stock in the last 2 months, I'm guessing some of it will be used to cover his legal defense. I don't know why this hasn't been picked up by more media sources yet.

This week has been a long one for my family. Sunday, my uncle (father's brother) went to the hospital with heart trouble. He had open heart surgery on Wednesday morning, with complications that had him in and out of surgery for 12 hours or more. It was very trying on everyone, both at the hospital and away. He pulled through, but not without some drama. I heard the doctor say at one point that he had been through 6 units of blood. It's time like these that I'm proud that I donate blood regularly. And you should too.

Oh, and when my cousin shook the doctor's hand and thanked him for sticking with his father through the ordeal, the doctor politely said "Son, don't thank me, thank God." That's one doctor who has his head on straight.

When I was in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago, I was involved in a discussion with a Greek citizen who is going through the naturalization process to be an American citizen. We talked about how different things are in other parts of the world (most notably mandatory military service for males in many countries), and about the naturalization process. We eventually talked about the test that potential citizens must take to become a citizen, and how the average American wouldn't know all the answers. Well, later, he sent a link to me with sample questions for the naturalization test. Not surprisingly, most of the questions were easy, but a few weren't. I took the test about 10 times I guess, which makes about 35 questions I'd guess (some questions repeat quite often), and missed about 4 questions. This makes my score about 89%. I'm slightly embarassed that I didn't make an A.