Be careful of Restaurant.com. I bought a $10 gift certificate for Mongolian Grill in Mukilteo for $4. The place only does counter service, but insisted on the 18% gratuity in the fine print, basically eating up the entire savings.

The restaurant justified it as they needed to make back the loss they were taking on the gift certificate. I had to make 4 trips to get the food and drinks for my wife and kids to the table, and they couldn't even be bothered to offer a tray, but they felt they were entitled to an 18% tip because they gave me a discount that the tip eliminated.

And Restaurant.com basically said "well, we state that they can charge the tip" and if I didn't like it, I could scan through their listings to find the 6% of restaurants in my area that do have offers with them, but don't have the fine print about a gratuity. I say "scan through" because, of course, they don't actually let you sort or search by that criteria. If I want a restaurant that doesn't have a mandatory tip, the selection of deals in my area goes from 76 to 4.

I don't mind the 18% at a sit-down restaurant where I'd tip around that much anyway. Maybe I'd be out an extra $2 if I felt the service didn't rate a full 18%. But letting a self-serve place, where there's NO service to speak of, tack on the 18% and telling the customer it's "buyer beware" is bull. I'm never going back to that restaurant and Restaurant.com is never getting another penny from me.

Times are tough in casa Bulmash. I'm not going to go into detail. This isn't an "oh, poor me" post. But I've got plenty to gripe and worry about (as do a lot of people), some of it fairly serious.

That said, this afternoon while the wife and the baby were taking a nap, the boy and I were in my home office. He sat on my lap while we enjoyed a "Sesame Street" podcast (their "Word on the Street" video podcasts on iTunes are great... and free), part of a free episode of "Word World", and some music (Kermit the Frog singing "The Rainbow Connection").

With my four-year-old son on my lap, the two of us just hanging out, I realized how hard it was to feel anxious and upset at that moment. With everything I'm facing, it's easy to get buried in the worry, the anxiety, the feelings of desperation and anger, and there are times when I feel almost overwhelmed by them. But in that moment, the phrase "count your blessings" took on an amazing significance to me that it hasn't before. Because, in that moment, I felt blessed. It felt odd, because I've been feeling a bit forsaken lately. I'd been feeling like God gave me some chances, I blew them, and He moved on.

But I sat there, in that little bubble of contentment, that little moment of just a peaceful and easy happiness, and the whistling winds of worry stopped blowing for a few minutes. I knew they were on the horizon, but for a few minutes, I didn't care. For a few minutes, I was just able to enjoy being a dad to an incredible little guy who I've probably had less patience with than I should lately, but who still loves me and looks up to me despite my flaws and failures. And that was a blessing.

I guess, at a time when I've been feeling like blessings are few and far between, that moment of happiness and contentment really hit home the fact that there are still blessings to be found in my life. Whenever I'm feeling frustrated, whenever hoplessness is trying to sit on my shoulders like a fat man eating a candy apple (don't know why, but that's the image that enters my mind when I think of a great weight on my shoulders), I'm going to pull out this memory.

I guess my point is that most of us have blessings in our lives that we take for granted. It might be a friend who you can always rely on for a joke. It might be a child who is always happy to see you and greets you with a smile and a hug. It might be a pet who you can always depend on to cuddle with you when you need it. It might even just be having a hang-out spot where they'll greet you by name and make you feel welcome. There are these people and places in our lives that make us feel good, but when we're feeling overwhelmed, it's easy to gloss over them and forget they exist. And that was my insight on "count your blessings" this afternoon, a reminder that I had this little blessing sitting in my lap, and that he was just one of the many blessings I could still find in my life if I just opened my eyes and noticed them.

I wrote this as a guest piece for a site about relationships with black women, but the site owner seemed to have lost it, so I thought I'd run it here...

If you want to love a black woman, you've got to love her hair, because it's almost a third member in your relationship.

I'm a "nice Jewish boy," married to a black woman for six years now. In the early days of my relationship with my now-wife, she took me to see a production of Black to My Roots. She told me that if I wanted to understand black women, I had to understand their unique relationship with their hair.

With a mother who took great pride in her hair, I grew up knowing that women had a different relationship with their hair than men did. Still that didn't begin to prepare me for what I would learn when I fell in love with a black woman. For black women, it wasn't just about the fashion or style of the moment. There was this much deeper undercurrent of conflict between what God gave them and what society told them was beautiful. For my mom, it was just a matter of some dye, a good cut, and a few styling techniques so she could maintain it at home. For black women, hair can be a second religion.

I learned about "naps," "the kitchen," and most importantly "good hair" (check out a a musical number about good and bad hair). "Good hair" is about black women holding themselves to the standard of beauty of the dominant white culture and why many black women, including my wife, will apply dangerous chemicals to their hair to straighten it out and spend hours on maintenance of that style. The importance of hair is also passed down from mother to daughter, reinforced by countless hours of mothers styling their little girls' hair... painful combing, intimate braiding, talking, togetherness. Hair is, for black girls and their mothers, what sports and tools are for boys and their fathers.

I would ask why she didn't just get a short "natural" (a.k.a. a short afro) and wear a wig when she felt the need for something longer and straighter. She's a beautiful woman and has the bone structure that could pull off a short natural with elegance. But she had tied up so much value in her hair, both the look and the ritual of it, giving that up was something hard for her to even imagine.

The funny thing is that I learned I loved naps. When her hair was freshly washed, moisturized, and dried, before she assaulted it with a curling iron -- especially when she was due for another visit to the salon and she'd grown out some naps that were untouched by those chemicals -- I loved to put my fingers in it. It was springy and soft, and felt good against my fingers. Once it was straightened, it would become drier and harsher. I didn't really enjoy running my fingers through her hair when it was straight and processed. I loved it when it was freshly washed, nappy, and soft.

Despite her need to have "good hair," something about the fact that I loved her naps endeared me to her. I think it was that I could love her as God made her, and accept her as she remade herself. The things that attracted me to my wife initially were her smile, her way with words, and the fact that under all that black woman fabulousness, she was as much of a sci-fi and mythology geek as I am (if not more). But as I've grown to love her, I've learned to love many different things about her, including and especially her hair.

So, the last couple of days, when I've gone out to my car, the windshield has been so thick with dust and pollen, I've had to run the wipers with a few squirts of cleaner. Although we've had a number of high and very high pollen count days already this month, birch pollen has entered the mix in a big way just the last few days. And the onset of my symptoms has pretty much tracked the rise of birch pollen in the air.

I don't know I'm allergic to birch pollen. Never been tested for it. I get unpleasant sinuses at certain high pollen/dust times of the year, but they were never bad enough to go to an allergist.

So if it's swine flu... farewell. If it's not, I'm hitting Costco tomorrow and picking up an industrial strength bottle of Claritin. I already have the megabottle of Benadryl (Kirkland brand "Allergy Medicine") and use it as an occasional sleep aid (most non-prescription sleep aids like Tylenol Simply Sleep are just Benadryl with a different name). I'll get the megabottle of Claritin tomorrow.

And if the Benadryl knocks me out so much tonight that I don't hear the baby crying (I'm on baby call until 3 a.m.), apologies in advance to my wife.