"A toast! A toast! A toast to Mama Dollar and to Papa Dollar, and if you want to keep this old Building and Loan in business, you better have a family real quick."
- George Bailey, It's a Wonderful Life

Every Christmas my wife and I watch a number of old Christmas movies. It's a tradition: on Christmas day we get up, put on a pot of coffee and put in movie after movie after movie: The Bishop's Wife for one, Miracle on 34th Street for another, and, of course, It's a Wonderful Life. At the very end of It's a Wonderful Life, the whole town of Bedford Falls descends on George Bailey's house and donates enough money to keep him from going to jail.

I was never in danger of going to jail (that I know of) and I wasn't as desperate as George was in that movie, but you, my readers, remind me of that town.

On Monday when I posted that I might have to take this website off the net for financial reasons, I expected to get a lot of sympathy. While I did mention I was accepting PayPal donations, I didn't expect much to come of it.

I was wrong.

I posted that article early Monday morning. I spent the rest of the day away from my email. That evening my email was full of messages from PayPal informing me that a lot of you had donated money to the cause. By Wednesday you had donated enough through PayPal to allow me to pay for my server costs for another month and pay three bills on top of that. A number of you also volunteered hosting space, and now that I have a little breathing room I may be emailing some of you about that as well.

But that will come later. Right now I want to take the time to say thank you. You bought me some time and eased pressure off the next few weeks considerably. The site will continue operating until at least Mid-December. At that point I'll have to reassess the situation, and the site still might go dark for a while, but it's not inevitable. A lot can happen in a month, and you gave me that month.

I'll try to make that month worth your while.