Category: general

I guess Reid took it with him for lunch.

So instead, I had some spaghetti with a weird spicy sausage sauce. It was pretty good.

But it wasn’t chili!

I packed up the car, stopped by McDonald’s for a sausage biscuit, and made it to Mari’s by 10:30 this morning. From then until around 10:30 at night I was in full bake-mode, punctuated by two breaks: one to watch the movie Elf and one to play Harry Potter Scene It. (I won!)

I made the following cookies:

• Coconut Snowmen
• Buried Cherry Cookies
• Black-Eyed Susans
• Chocolate Crinkles
• Spritz Christmas Trees

The Buried Cherry Cookies came out better this time than they did when I made them two years ago. (Last year, instead of Buried Cherry I made some jam-filled cookies I found in Taste of Home. They weren’t as good. Plus they had to be dipped in chocolate, and between the Snowmen and the Spritz I have enough dipping to do, thank you very much.) Most of the Spritz trees were covered with white chocolate and decorated with icing as usual, but I had more trees than white chocolate so some of them ended up halfway dunked in regular chocolate and some of them ended up naked.

All the cookies came out great, though. I had to get used to Mari’s oven, but once I did everything went quite smoothly. At one point Mari and Brooke went out to pick up extra supplies and a pizza, and while they were gone I continued baking and watched Kyou Kara Maou 45, my favorite stand-alone episode. (Ah, Conrad, you asshat ;D) When they got back I took a break and we ate and watched Elf, which was a really good movie. I hadn’t been sure what to expect from it, but it was fabulous. It never lingered on unimportant things, and every idea that was introduced got follow-through–the hallmark of a well-written story. (It also helps that the story was cute and funny and awesome.)

Later in the evening I was getting pretty tired, but I persevered. After playing Harry Potter Scene It, I continued baking while the others watched the Flash Gordon movie (with awesome music by Queen). At some point Brooke made homemade Twinkies with her brand new Twinkie set from Mari and Kelly. I was cookie’d out so I took my Twinkie home. I’ll probably eat it tomorrow :)

By the end of the night I had managed to finish all my cookies, and I packed them up in tins and handed them out to Mari, Chris, and Brooke, taking most of the rest home in bags. When I got home I gave a tin to Cheryl and Reid.

Cheryl spent the day baking, too, and still isn’t quite done. Meanwhile, Reid made chili, which was fantabulous. Hopefully I will be able to eat more of it for lunch tomorrow.

Number of pictures taken by me on this most satisfying of days? Zero. But Brooke took some, and hopefully I’ll be able to share them.

And that’s about it. I feel very accomplished and very tired. Good night, world :)

Yesterday we did Christmas with Cheryl, Reid, and Grandma Flo. While I had already let people know that we weren’t buying presents for anyone this year, I was still very uncomfortable receiving gifts and not giving anything back but a card. I wrote the most heartfelt thank yous and I love yous that I could in the cards, and they were pretty and I did calligraphy on the envelopes, but that’s not the same as a real present. (The Christmas portraits I ordered from smugmug haven’t arrived yet. I’m hoping they’ll get here on Monday so I can hurry up and get all my cards out that day. The Christmas cookies I’m planning on giving as gifts will be baked today.)

Sean and I made the decision to be cheapskates together. I think we’re at the lowest point we’ve ever been right now. I hope we’ll have managed to pull ourselves back up by next Christmas. I want to go back to being completely normal.

I still think back fondly on my high school days, when I bought everyone I loved presents and baked cookies. I won’t say high school was the best time of my life, but it was neat to have so much freedom and money all at once. I like being able to give gifts and make people happy.

Hopefully everyone will enjoy the cookies.

I woke up at 7:35 and got out of bed to go to the bathroom. The house was chilly, and pale blue light flowed into the living room from the patio doors and skylights. I’d set my alarm for 9, and as such didn’t really need to get up yet, but I didn’t even try to get back to sleep. I didn’t want to. It seems like it’s been a long time since I awoke with such great anticipation for the day.

It feels like Christmas morning.

Today, I’m baking Christmas cookies.

From MSNBC:

The San Andreas Fault, which runs north-south, slips about 2 inches (5 centimeters) every year, causing Los Angeles to move towards San Francisco. Scientists forecast the cities will merge in about 15 million years.

Start packing now!

My last period was at the beginning of October. My doctor and I had just started waiting to see if anything was going to happen without the assistance of hormones, and that little tiny dribble was all I’d seen. On a random whim at the end of last month we decided to wait until January instead of going right back on the hormone, but I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to have a natural period ever again.

And now I’m having one.

I’m having a period.

Ganked from Miss Em.

• What is your name? Do you have a nickname?
  My parents named me Heather Ann Aubrey. Ann was a popular middle name at the time! Now my name is Heather Aubrey Meadows. Hai calls me He-chan…and okay, I’ll go ahead and explain it. It’s pronounced “heh-chan”, and “he” means “fart” in Japanese. He’s not really calling me a fart, though. :P This all goes back to when I was in Japan in 2001. We had just learned the meaning of “he”, and we were out at karaoke with a bunch of businessmen. They asked me if I had a nickname, and one of them suggested “He-chan”, and then they all cracked up. I told this story to my Internet friends, and it stuck. Other Japanese-ish nicknames include Hea-chan and Heaza (it should be Hezaa, but who’s counting?). People used to call me COS back in the day. Brooke calls me Hea Hea or Hea, and it actually sort of bothers me if anyone else calls me that, because that nickname feels like a special thing between me and her.
• What is your hair color? Eye color?
  My hair is blond. Its actual shade varies. If I get a lot of sun, it turns pale, especially in the front. Sometimes it is so dark my husband says I’m a brunette, but really it’s dirty blond ;P My eyes are blue, just like the eyes of all my family.
• What kind of distinguishing facial features do you have?
  Gah, I don’t know. Glasses? A huge forehead? The refusal to show my teeth when I smile? When I was younger, a teacher told me she liked it when I smiled, because I had “such pretty dimples”. At the time this offended me because Anne of Green Gables didn’t have dimples. (Diana did, and Anne wanted to look like Diana, but I wanted to look like Anne.)
• Do you have a birthmark? Where is it? What about scars? How did you get them?
  I don’t have any birthmarks. Now that I’m getting older I’ve started to enjoy skin tags, random little red dots, and stretch marks here and there. As far as scars, why yes, yes I do have some! They are all the result of my cancer treatment. The biggest is the one across my abdomen that makes it look like I’ve had a C-section. Then there’s the round one about the size of a dime nestled against the inside of my right breast; that’s where my catheter was implanted, for several months. There are a few tiny scars all around my chest and neck where they attempted to implant the catheter and failed. They’re really not all that noticeable though.
• Who are your friends and family? Who do you surround yourself with? Who are the you are closest to? Who do you wish you were closest to?
  Brooke, Hai, Mom, and my brother AJ are the closest people to me, I think. I have many other friends I care deeply about and wish I was closer to; Mari, for example. A lot of my Internet friends seem to fall into and out of my life, like Dawn and Sam.
• Where were you born? Where have you lived since then? Where do you call home?
  I was born in Lexington, Kentucky and grew up in Nicholasville. For nine months in 1996-1997 I lived in Huntsville, Alabama while attending UAH. For several months in 1997 and 1998 I lived at UK Hospital in Lexington. After that I lived in Nicholasville again until I finally moved here to Augusta in 2003. I still think of Nicholasville as my home. I also–and this is totally weird–have a kind of homesickness for Japan.
• Where do you go when angry?
  Back at the apartment, I would go to the bedroom when I was mad. Or, if Sean was in there, I’d frump on the couch. Here, I don’t really have anywhere to go when I get mad, so I go online and blog.
• What is your biggest fear? Who have you told this to? Who would you never tell this to? Why?
  I always say that my biggest fear is having my loved ones die. I’ve told this to my blog readers many times. I would probably tell anyone, if they asked. I guess I wouldn’t tell somebody who was trying to manipulate me, but they could probably guess it anyway.
• Do you have a secret?
  The only “secrets” I have are the dark opinions about other people that I refuse to air anywhere, because I’ve seen what harm that can do :> I am really an open book, otherwise.
• What makes you laugh out loud?
  Anything that makes me incredulous; clever puns; Magazine Man‘s funny stories (I was trying really hard not to plug him here, because I think his ego is starting to rival mine, but when I tried to think back to the times I’ve laughed out loud recently, the first thing I thought of was a quote from this post: “By jeezuz, you’re busier’n a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.”); Hai; jokes in anime; AJ; those times when Sean and I are teasing each other and we just sort of start staring and finally one of us disses the other and then we’re both cracking up.
• When have you been in love? Had a broken heart?
  I first experienced what love might feel like in high school, when I had that all-encompassing crush. On the one hand, I felt helpless to control my emotions. On the other, I chose to feel them, because I was afraid of how bland my life would be without them. Love is kind of like that, but better. You do have to choose to stay in love, and there are some days when that choice is really hard. But then there are the times when you know you’ve made the right decision. I never had that until I met Sean. As far as a broken heart, I pretty much had that throughout high school :>
• What is in your refrigerator right now? On your bedroom floor? On your nightstand? In your garbage can?
  Stuff that’s ours in Cheryl’s refrigerator: rice, Gatorade, lunch meat, Swiss cheese, Slim Fast, string cheese, yogurt, eggs for the big cookie baking extravaganza tomorrow
  Stuff on the floor here in the guest bedroom: Sean’s laptop backpack; Sean’s jacket; Sean’s headphones; more of Sean’s stuff; my shoes; the disassembled pieces of my laptop table (it’s kind of broken); my purse; a pile of newspapers and memos to myself; my laptop bag.
  Stuff that really shouldn’t be on the pretty table next to the bed: a box of Kleenex; an empty water bottle; Aidmheil; my cell phone; my latest Netflix offering, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran
• Look at your feet. Describe what you see there. Do you wear dress shoes, gym shoes, or none at all? Are you in socks that are ratty and full of holes? Or are you wearing a pair of blue and gold slippers knitted by your grandmother?
  I’m barefoot. Gee, that was boring.
• When you thinks of your childhood kitchen, what smell do you associate with it? Sauerkraut? Oatmeal cookies? Paint? Why is that smell so resonant for you?
  When me thinks of me childhood kitchen…hmm, I can’t really think of a smell. My biggest memories of the kitchen are: 1) washing the dishes and hating it and feeling like Cinderella; 2) toddling in (I think I was 2) and yelling, “Mama! Dada!”; 3) seeing a big dead mouse/rat on the floor and running out into the utility room. Nope, still can’t think of a smell.
• You are doing intense spring cleaning. What is easy for you to throw out? What is difficult for you to part with? Why?
  Gah, questions like this suck. I’m not going to answer it based on stuff I used to own, because I’m tired of living in the past with these questions. Let’s just say I’m getting rid of some of the very few items I have amassed so far. It’s easy for me to get rid of clothes that don’t fit or are ugly, because I like to look nice. This wasn’t always the case. I used to want to keep everything, because that gave me hope I could fit into it again. I will not, on the other hand, part with books or DVDs, because I get bored easily and like having plenty of things around to distract me. I used to keep every card that was ever given to me, and I will continue to do that because I think it paints a nice picture of the people in my life. (I still remember that birthday card Mari and the guys got me with Death in the rearview mirror.)
• It’s Saturday at noon. What are you doing? Give details. If you’re eating breakfast, what exactly do you eat? If you’re stretching out in your backyard to sun, what kind of blanket or towel do you lie on?
  Today I actually got up at noon. Some Saturdays I would still be asleep, snuggled under a sheet and four blankets, because this house is cold enough to bother me, and I’m from Kentucky. Some Saturdays I would be up and out, biking with friends or hanging out. Today I pretty much jumped straight into the shower, because we’re supposed to be doing Christmas today. (Of course, I have no idea when that’s going to occur, because nobody ever tells me anything, and I always forget to ask until everyone’s gone.)
• What is one strong memory that has stuck with you from childhood? Why is it so powerful and lasting?
  Biting my tongue off. I remember it because it was so weird. My brothers and I and our next-door neighbor Robin were sitting on the fence separating our lots at the trailer park, and taking turns jumping down to show off. When I jumped, my knees buckled and I fell into a crouch, and one of my knees smashed into my chin, snapping my jaw closed. My tongue happened to be between my teeth at the time. I think I was more stunned by the pain of my knee hitting my chin. I ran into the house. My mouth felt funny, so I tried to rinse it out in the sink…only blood just kept coming out. I can still see the bright red blood flowing out of my mouth into the white basin of the sink. The tip of my tongue had been severed on both sides, but was miraculously still attached in the middle. I ended up having to keep a cold washrag in my mouth for two weeks while my tongue grew back together.
• You is getting ready for a night out. Where are you going? What do you wear? Who will you be with?
  Oh, I is, is I? Well, I don’t do the clubbing thing like Mari or the bar thing like Brooke [edit: Brooke is not a barfly. I did not edit this post under duress. FREE TIBET!], so I am probably going out to dinner or shopping with Sean or a few friends. If we’re going to a nice restaurant I’ll probably wear slacks and a button down blouse; otherwise I’ll just wear jeans and a decent-looking shirt.
• What do you consider your greatest achievement?
  This blog. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. But I am very proud of the fact that I’ve been writing here consistently for so long, and that I’ve managed to archive so many things here. (This includes the photography I’ve put on smugmug.)
• What is your idea of perfect happiness?
  Waking up in the morning excited to do the things that have been planned for the day.
• What is your current state of mind?
  Annoyed, frustrated, nostalgic, and slightly headache-y
• What is your favorite occupation?
  If I knew that, I’d have an easier time finding a job, I imagine. (I wonder if this question means what I think it means?) Coolest job in the world: astronaut. Most appealing job in the world: travel photographer and diarist. Thing I can’t stop doing, though it will probably never be my bread and butter: writing.
• What is your most treasured possession?
  My archives. Those being this blog, and my chat logs, and my photos, and all the other records of everything I’ve ever done.
• What or who is the greatest love of your life?
  I think hope is my greatest love. I am obsessed with it, obsessed with the promise of a better life for myself and for everyone I care about.
• What is your favorite journey?
  The ones that start with a single step. Har, har. Taking this question literally: I love any journey where I get the chance to explore, and I hate trips with no direction or planning or time for doing my own thing.
• What is your most marked characteristic?
  Self-deprecation, I imagine. It’s my way of trying to be humble, but it’s gotten me in trouble. I think I’ve unintentionally caused people to think little of me, which was never my intent. (My intent was to have people think, “Oh, she’s awesome! And so modest!”) Tied with this is probably my competitive streak, though in recent years I have managed to tone it down (yes, local friends, I used to be worse. Scary, isn’t it?).
• When and where were you the happiest?
  During our honeymoon, when we were staying on Miyajima; specifically, mealtime, when we got to eat banquets of traditional Japanese food. Sean didn’t particularly care for a lot of it, but I was in absolute heaven. I’d go back there in a heartbeat.
• What is it that you most dislike?
  Being ridiculed or underestimated. (Teasing is okay, though.)
• What is your greatest fear?
  Wait, this question again? I guess the answer can change from day to day, can’t it? Well, aside from the fear I listed above, I am also terrified of the thought that I won’t be able to achieve my dreams: living in Japan, having something (writing or photographs) published.
• What is your greatest extravagance?
  Right now, I probably spend too much money on distractions like books and DVDs. This is only because I am trying to escape my life :>
• Which living person do you most despise?
  Right now I’m not feeling particularly hateful. I don’t want to give an assembly line answer to this sort of question. There are plenty of people out there worthy of hate…all the people who intentionally hurt other people, regardless of their reasoning. But if we intentionally hurt the people we hate because they intentionally hurt other people, then the cycle never ends, does it?
• What is your greatest regret?
  Sometimes–and I hate myself for this–I feel like I should have waited to get married, and gone to live in Japan for a year as an English teacher first, so that now I wouldn’t keep thinking that I gave up my freedom too easily.
• Which talent would you most like to have?
  A gift for time management and the elimination of procrastination. There are so many things I could do, if I would just do them.
• Where would you like to live?
  Japan or Nicholasville, first and foremost. I’m really interested in living in any other country in the world, just to see what it’s like. I’d also like to try living in a big city, and I think it would be awesome to live in Washington State or Alaska.
• What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
  Having minimal control of one’s life.
• What is the quality you most like in a man?
  Intelligence
• What is the quality you most like in a woman?
  Empathy (am I sexist or what? You’d think I’d like intelligent women, too. And I do…but I’m so competitive, I want to be the smart one.)
• What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
  I really think my competitiveness holds me back, both in personal achievement and in relationships.
• What is the trait you most deplore in others?
  The lack of tact. I mean, I am pretty blunt, but I can usually tell when I’ve crossed the line, and I apologize when I do. People who don’t know when to shut up are grossly irritating.
• What do you most value in your friends?
  Their willingness to spend time with me
• Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
  Shibuya Yuuri, from Kyou Kara Maou. (Hey, it didn’t say literary fiction, did it? …and technically there are Kyou Kara Maou novels…)
• Whose are your heroes in real life?
  Whose wrote these questions? :P I wrote a pretty good hero thing for my MySpace, so I’ll just paste it here: Magazine Man, Jeff Laitila, Justin Klein, and Miklos Fejer, for living their dreams and for being damn good writers; Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, for being gutsy and turning their hobby into a career; my brother AJ, who is one of the bravest, most intelligent people I know; and my mom, whose loving, generous, and strong personality epitomizes everything to which I aspire.
• Which living person do you most admire?
  I guess all those people in the heroes list. Maybe the heroes were supposed to be dead people.
• What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
  I’m not actually sure what the virtues are. A quick Google search for “is a virtue” turns up the following choices: happiness, persistence, paranoia, lust, patience, coercion, lying, gambling, skepticism, endurance, arguing, humility, cynicism, talking to patients, disclosure, competence, cruelty, scrutiny, restraint, selfishness, consistency (online), viscosity, baking, silence, virtual reality, laziness, impatience, hubris, optimism, reliability…okay, that’s ridiculous. Here’s a site that lists the following: Faith, Honesty, Gratitude, Perseverance, Forgiveness, Patience, Courage, Respect, Generosity, Discipline, Compassion, Humility. I don’t know, there can be too much of any of those, but across the board I think they are all pretty decent standards for living.
• On what occasions do you lie?
  I hate lying. I’m pretty good at it, which scares me, so I try not to do it often. Rather than lie, I will simply omit information. Typically I only do this to save someone’s feelings, or because the situation is none of my business anyway and I don’t need to be commenting on it. I will also do this to avoid owning up to a failure, so long as I know I can fix the damage. If I can’t make things right, then I strive to be straightforward about it.
• Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
  Internet abbreviations. I overuse them on purpose, to be clever. ROFL. See? I try to avoid repeated phrasings in my writing, but often find myself saying things the same way again and again. I used to say “I know how that is” way too much, but I broke myself of the habit because it felt like a lie to say that. Right now I’m trying to minimize my use of the nonquestioning question “Really“, because it sounds too gossipy.
• If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
  I would somehow fix my attitude/time management skills so that I actually accomplish the things I want to do, like lose weight, travel, work, write something publishable, etc.
• What are your favorite names?
  That’s interesting! I like slightly exotic names, or regular names spelled slightly differently (but not too overboard). I’ve always liked Abigail, for some reason. Biblical names are nice. I also like French and Japanese names.
• How would you like to die?
  Either in my sleep at a very old age…or while accomplishing something meaningful. The former is more appealing to me because it would mean I would have the chance to do lots of things in my life, but I also like the idea of a noble sacrifice. At this point in my life I can’t think of an ideal that I would ever have the occasion (or motivation) to die for. However, I do know that I would die to save the life of someone I care about.
• If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
  I don’t know. If we’re going with karma…I don’t know if I’ve done enough good in my life, or will do enough good, to merit an upgrade. But I don’t think I’ve necessarily been bad, so hopefully I wouldn’t end up coming back as a dung beetle. I really would prefer to come back as another person, or some other kind of thinking and feeling organism.
• What is your motto?
  Life is what you make it.

I never know what’s going on.

I feel like a nuisance.

Whenever I try to help out, I do something wrong.

But the worst thing is having my mistakes paraded around in front of everyone.

Tonight I drove through the Millbrook subdivision off Oakley Pirkle and took some pictures of the lovely Christmas lights.

I don’t know if it’s a problem with the C3030 Zoom camera, with all digital cameras, or with the way I take photographs in minimal light, but I have had to deal with the problem of bright, floating pixels in my nighttime photography for quite some time now. Usually I just leave the pictures alone; you can probably find examples of the evil pixels in my smugmug somewhere.

Tonight, however, I wanted to clean my Christmas light shots up to make them look as good as possible. They are all blurry due to the fact that I took them from my car, which, even while in park, likes to jump around…but I thought I could at least get rid of the floating pixels and despeckle the images a bit (thanks for that suggestion, btw, Charles!).

It took me something like two hours to go through and clean up the 24 new images I’ve uploaded to my December 2005 gallery. Here, for your amusement, are before and after versions of one of the pictures.

I opened each image in Photoshop, eyeballed it for floating pixels, and drew over the pixels with the Pencil tool. Then I Despeckled and did Auto Layers. Obviously I’m not a professional, but at least the pictures look better than they did before.

I just need to learn how to take night shots correctly. What I do now is set the ISO to 400 (I can’t adjust the shutter speed, I don’t think), turn off the flash, hold the camera as steadily as possible, and hope for the best.

I normally try not to filch other people’s photos, but I just have to have this one:

The sight of the grey-haired premier gingerly steering the two-wheeler around the building had Environment Minister Yuriko Koike in fits of giggles as she arrived for a cabinet meeting.

Nice to see that he’s enjoying his present :)

Mari linked to a pdf of the new rules for Greeneway use that were adopted on September 19, 2005 via the City of North Augusta Resolution No. 2005-19. I was going to copy all the rules and put them here, but the pdf was made like a photocopy and I can’t select text. Alas. (OCR, motherfucker! Do you speak it?)

So, just in case the official pdf goes the way of the dodo, I’m hosting a copy here. Some highlights:

Use of headphones is discouraged.

D’oh! Not that I have an mp3 player anymore…but I was kind of hoping to get another one and load it up with Japanese language practice files. (Or the audio only of Kyou Kara Maou episodes…)

Walk no more than two abreast.

I’ve been guilty of breaking this one, but then again I think it’s a good rule; there’s less congestion that way.

Cyclists must ride in single file.

D’oh!

Maintain control of bikes, skates and boards.

As I wondered over on Mari’s blog, does this mean I can’t ride hands-free anymore? I really enjoy doing that; I’ll miss it if I’m not supposed to do it. I am in control when I ride like that, and if I’m too close to people I always grab the handlebars, but maybe it makes people nervous regardless…

All in all I imagine the rules are pretty fair. (It seems that neither Brooke nor Mari has a bell on her bike…for shame!)

Check out the list of “expressly prohibited” activities at the end of the file :)

According to a study conducted by Meredith Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University,

The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex.

So, be honest, girls. Is it true?

;D

(via BoingBoing)

Really well, I think!

I should know something soon–the job may start as soon as January.

Tonight there was a hafla at the Warren Road Community Center for all the bellydance students and anyone else who wanted to come. Most of the women were resplendent in full bellydance garb; I and a few others just wore regular clothes.

When Chris asked me if I was going to dance, I said, “No,” and held up my camera. “I’m covering this event for the blogosphere.”

;>

There were bellydance videos, plenty of music, lots of delicious snacks, and much fun to be had. Brooke showed us how to wear hair falls and how to make tassels out of yarn. Jeannie showed us how to do tribal-style stage makeup. Towards the end of the evening, (almost) everyone participated in some tribal improv. Not only that, but there were plenty of bellydance items to buy, including CDs, videos, coin belts, tassels, and those cool stickers you can put on your face (like Mari, Bonnie, and Jeannie are wearing in the pictures above). I didn’t buy anything, but it was cool to look at all the stuff!

All in all, it was a neat time to hang out and enjoy everything about bellydance.

See the rest of the photos here. And check out the very end; I’ve uploaded my first two videos to smugmug!

Sunshine’s blog has been discovered by actor [redacted], and featured on MSNBC TV. When Sunshine heard that [redacted] had mentioned her blog on the radio, she wrote him an email to confirm, and got a really great reply. Check it out:

Yes, I did mention your website on the radio because I think it is great what you are doing and I want people here in the United States to see what you have to say about life in Iraq today. We get a very uneven view of things because all we have is the media and they are sometimes very one sided. The media pretty much only shows us all the terrible things, the bombings and the death toll but not the everyday life of the Iraqi people. We do not know how the average Iraqi citizen feels about things there and you write very well about your life in Mosul. Just being a kid and going to school and trying to have a good life. I know that there are many bad guys there who are making things very difficult for all of you. But I am very optimistic about the upcoming vote this week and I know that someday you will live in an Iraq your parents have never seen. A free Iraq where you have the right to chose your own leaders, go to work, become what you want, say what you want and have a good future where you will not live in fear.

Awesome, all around. I hope more people start reading Sunshine’s blog.

[Edit 6:06 pm:] The actor’s name has been removed from Sunshine’s blog. Sunshine states in her revised post, “In the same day I wrote a letter & tried to send it to that famous actorI deleted his name at his request)”. I removed his name from my post as well.