Madame Butterfly
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Posts posted by Madame Butterfly
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I went on a double date with my best friend, who didn't want to go alone on a date with this fellow
We went to see a horror movie. I grabbed "my dates" sleeve at one point, and pulled on it so hard, I ripped it out of the arm hole.
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I have an artificial tree, mostly because the kittens destroyed the real tree I got the first year they were born.
I put it in my living room, usually off to the side of the fireplace.
There is a birthday in the house the first week of December, so I always wait until AFTER the birthday to put up the tree.
Typically I put it up while alone, and string up the lights and then my roomies and I find a time when we can all put up the ornaments together.
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We need more of these types of articles to show people what is really going on.
BTW.......nice to see you back, MB. I thought that you had abandoned us....
I've been so busy with work Kor, that I don't often have much time to play online like I used too.
I lurk though, see what's been going on and hoping that everyone is well and happy. :P
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Updated: 09:11 PM EST
The Iraq Story: How Troops See It
By Mark Sappenfield, The Christian Science Monitor
BROOK PARK, OHIO (Nov. 27) – Cpl. Stan Mayer has seen the worst of war. In the leaves of his photo album, there are casual memorials to the cost of the Iraq conflict - candid portraits of friends who never came home and graphic pictures of how insurgent bombs have shredded steel and bone.
Yet the Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss. It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies. Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity - if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops' individual experiences.
Yet as perceptions about Iraq have neared a tipping point in Congress, some soldiers and marines worry that their own stories are being lost in the cacophony of terror and fear. They acknowledge that their experience is just that - one person's experience in one corner of a war-torn country. Yet amid the terrible scenes of reckless hate and lives lost, many members of one of the hardest-hit units insist that they saw at least the spark of progress.
"We know we made a positive difference," says Cpl. Jeff Schuller of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, who spent all but one week of his eight-month tour with Mayer. "I can't say at what level, but I know that where we were, we made it better than it was when we got there."
It is the simplest measure of success, but for the marine, soldier, or sailor, it may be the only measure of success. In a business where life and death rest on instinctive adherence to thoroughly ingrained lessons, accomplishment is ticked off in a list of orders followed and tasks completed. And by virtually any measure, America's servicemen and women are accomplishing the day-to-day tasks set before them.
Yet for the most part, America is less interested in the success of Operation Iron Fist, for instance, than the course of the entire Iraq enterprise. "What the national news media try to do is figure out: What's the overall verdict?" says Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the Army Command and General Staff College. "Soldiers don't do overall verdicts."
Yet soldiers clearly feel that important elements are being left out of the media's overall verdict. On this day, a group of Navy medics gather around a table in the Cleveland-area headquarters of the 3/25 - a Marine reserve unit that has converted a low-slung school of pale brick and linoleum tile into its spectacularly red-and-gold offices.
Their conversation could be a road map of the kind of stories that military folks say the mainstream media are missing. One colleague made prosthetics for an Iraqi whose hand and foot had been cut off by insurgents. When other members of the unit were sweeping areas for bombs, the medics made a practice of holding impromptu infant clinics on the side of the road.
They remember one Iraqi man who could not hide his joy at the marvel of an electric razor. And at the end of the 3/25's tour, a member of the Iraqi Army said: "Marines are not friends; marines are brothers," says Lt. Richard Malmstrom, the battalion's chaplain.
"It comes down to the familiar debate about whether reporters are ignoring the good news," says Peter Hart, an analyst at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a usually left-leaning media watchdog in New York.
In Hit, where marines stayed in force to keep the peace, the progress was obvious, say members of the 3/25. The residents started burning trash and fixing roads - a sign that the city was returning to a sense of normalcy. Several times, "people came up to us [and said]: 'There's a bomb on the side of the road. Don't go there,' " says Pfc. Andrew Howland.
Part of the reason that such stories usually aren't told is simply the nature of the war. Kidnappings and unclear battle lines have made war correspondents' jobs almost impossible. Travel around the country is dangerous, and some reporters never venture far from their hotels. "It has to have some effect on what we see: You end up with reporting that waits for the biggest explosion of the day," says Mr. Hart.
To the marines of the 3/25, the explosions clearly do not tell the whole story. Across America, many readers know the 3/25 only as the unit that lost 15 marines in less than a week - nine of them in the deadliest roadside bombing against US forces during the war. When the count of Americans killed in Iraq reached 2,000, this unit again found itself in the stage lights of national notice as one of the hardest hit.
But that is not the story they tell. It is more than just the dire tone of coverage - though that is part of it. It is that Iraq has touched some of these men in ways that even they have trouble explaining. This, after all, has not been a normal war. Corporals Mayer and Schuller went over not to conquer a country, but to help win its hearts and minds. In some cases, though, it won theirs.
Schuller, a heavyweight college wrestler with a thatch of blond hair and engine blocks for arms, cannot help smiling when he speaks of giving an old man a lighter: "He thought it was the coolest thing." Yet both he and the blue-eyed, square-jawed Mayer pause for a moment before they talk about the two 9-year-old Iraqis whom members of their battalion dubbed their "girlfriends."
The first time he saw them, Mayer admits that he was making the calculations of a man in the midst of a war. He was tired, he was battered, and he was back at a Hit street corner that he had patrolled many times before. In Iraq, repetition of any sort could be an invitation of the wrong sort - an event for which insurgents could plan. So Mayer and Schuller took out some of the candy they carried, thinking that if children were around, perhaps the terrorists wouldn't attack.
It was a while before the children realized that these two marines, laden with arms to the limit of physical endurance, were not going to hurt them. But among the children who eventually came, climbing on the pair's truck and somersaulting in the street, there were always the same two girls. When they went back to base, they began to hoard Oreos and other candy in a box.
"They became our one little recess from the war," says Mayer. "You're seeing some pretty ridiculous tragedies way too frequently, and you start to get jaded. The kids on that street - I got to realize I was still a human being to them."
It happened one day when he was on patrol. Out of nowhere, a car turned the corner and headed down the alley at full speed. "A car coming at you real fast and not stopping in Iraq is not what you want to see," says Mayer. Yet instead of jumping in his truck, he stood in the middle of the street and pushed the kids behind him.
The car turned. Now, Mayer and Schuller can finish each other's sentences when they think about the experience. "You really start to believe that you protect the innocent," says Schuller. "It sounds like a stupid cliché...."
"But it's not," adds Mayer. "You are in the service of others."
For Mayer, who joined the reserves because he wanted to do something bigger than himself, and for Schuller, a third-generation marine, Iraq has given them a sense of achievement. Now when they look at the black-and-white pictures of marines past in the battalion headquarters, "We're adding to that legacy," says Schuller.
This is what they wish to share with the American people - and is also the source of their frustration. Their eight months in Iraq changed their lives, and they believe it has changed the lives of the Iraqis they met as well. On the day he left, Mayer gave his "girlfriend" a bunch of pens - her favorite gift - wrapped in a paper that had a picture of the American flag, the Iraqi flag, and a smiley face. The man with the lighter asked Schuller if he was coming back. He will if called upon, he says.
Whether or not these notes of grace and kindness are as influential as the dirge of war is open to question. But many in the military feel that they should at least be a part of the conversation.
Says Warner of reaching an overall verdict: "I'm not sure that reporting on terrorist bombings with disproportionate ink is adequately answering that question."
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Goodbye my good friend.
I hope things get better for you soon.
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Perfect example of one-upmanship. In my day, we used to use toothpaste. Oh, this one time, our friend brushed it in carefully to make it look natural. The poor girl didn't know what was in store for her.
We always put saran wrap underneath.
Still do with certain relatives on summer vacation actually.
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Pierce was always meant to be Bond.
Hair dye can fix the gray and of course he'd shave the beard.
This dude was in Road to Perdition and I hate his character. Scum bag coward he played.
Totally wrong for the part. I give him 3 movies tops before he's gone.
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Well I love Diet Cherry Coke, so I"m glad my drink isn't on the list.
That said, can anyone remember how in the 70's, they introduced drinks with lemon in them?
Took 30 years for them to come back.
I think the blackcherry vanilla flavor is really a red cream soda, IMO, and won't last long either.
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MB - That's why you get Cable internet and a little program called BitTorrent... and a fairly big hard drive. Watching downloaded DVD rips has advantages over every other format, so far as I can tell. Against TV, it's obvious: I don't have to put up with commercials, I can pause on demand, I can skip the intro/credits, much better quality, and no station watermarking. Versus DVD, well, all the episodes are on a hard drive... no disc switching. No disc scratching either. Also the official DVDs pack a whopping three or four episodes per disc to keep costs high. Newsflash, a 4.7GB DVD+R disc will hold 11 episodes, I think... it's somewhere in the 10-13 range. Anyway, even with the extras, you only need 15 DVD+R discs, not the 40+ that come with the official pack, to back-up an entire Trek series.
Cable or DSL internet + BitTorrent + a big hard drive + a 50-pack of DVD+R discs = Trek Bliss
Not that big of a Trek fan to go to all that trouble really.
I watch it when I can, I have so much going on in my life, that I can't really do things like that. I have people I share a house and a tv with and I have to be respectful of their viewing time also.
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I don't buy collectables, because my impression is what they BELIEVE to be collectable, is just a money making machine.
The more obscure things are more collectable.
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I'd really suggest watching from Episode 1 on, starting with season 7 will really confuse you.
"Image In The Sand" was a good episode but there's so much that happened from season 1 through season 6 that led up to that point. it's like starting a book by reading the last chapter first.
Well as I'm not going to go out and buy them, I'm stuck with Spike's schedule of the show when I am home and not working.
I'll tune in today to see where it's going, but I'm working the rest of the week during the times it is broadcast.
Once I invest in TIVO or something, then I'll start copying them daily, so that I can watch it in order.
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Night air
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If you have anyone that can go to bath and body works near you, get a eucolyptis oil that you can put in your bath, the fumes are very healing.
Add honey to your tea, as it's a natural "coat" for you.
Coughing is good to get out the phlegm.
When you sleep, sleep on an angle. Use a humidifier in the room to make it nice and moist.
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Because I"m working from home today, and I like the television on in the background, and so, I started at whatever SPIKE was showing today!! B)
So what's happened to the son Whorf had on TNG? B)
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The garlic bread to go with my spaghetti for lunch
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Ok, I'm giving DS9 a try. B) B)
Today I'm watching "Image In The Sand"
This Romulan who's come to live on the station, she's setting them up, isn't she?
This hospital she wants on the unhabited moon is going to be something much worse. B)
Am I right?
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I love snow.
Though it does seem abit early for snow.
It's always magical.
I can remember 7 years ago, we had a winter where it was nicely warm for Illinois, meaning it was 25 - 32 degrees daily in the midst of winter, and we got about 1.5 to 2 inches of snow daily.
Constantly beautiful, and magical.
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I use them on games like Riven or Myst. Sometimes it's just fricking frustrating and I give in.
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Dreamgirl
Dave Matthews Band
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No, I didn't even know it was Mother -in - law Day.
Too much hype here over the White Sox to notice that.
I started it just as I said.
For about 2 weeks I have had discussions regarding this, with one person it got very heated because they really want to make sure their Mom is safe, because their father isn't a factor anymore.
So I wanted to hear what everyone else had to say.
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SEE!!!
That's a point one of the fellows made that I'm friends with that I totally agree with.
Just because you are friends it doesn't mean you can live together.
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I want to know who voted yes!!! :) Mostly because I want to know if it's a man.
When I was younger, my Mother made me promise never to take her in. But thats not really an issue, because both of my parents are so active, that they'd rather die out doing something than letting life pass them by.
Now my neighbors had an arrangement where his mother lived with them.
She was a most unhappy woman, because her mother-in-law ruled the roost. I always felt sorry for her, because I don't think her spouse realized how she couldn't blossom as a woman in her own home.
In my opinion, there must be a break from the parents.
And unfortunately, even though there may be that break, one spouse may wish to spend an extraordinary amount of time with his parents, one that may make it difficult for the couple to establish their own traditions, or explore different traditions.
Now if it were after years of marriage, and the spouse had shown that they were very loyal and respectful to their spouse, that they had seperated in their parents through thick and thin, THEN if a parent really needed the help or perhaps even an apartment over the garage arrangement, than that would be ok.
I agree Kor, newlyweds of any age need that time to get their marriage rolling. Getting used to being married is quite the adjustment.
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Yes, I can sew, but it's all self taught.
I too had a "home economics" requirement in 8th grade, and I just sucked at sewing. :)
I taught my self stamped cross stitch, then progressed to counted cross stitch and can now do embroidery and crewel.
As for sewing clothes, I taught myself by making a costume for myself and making curtains for my first apartment.
Let me tell you, it was awful at first.
But as I practiced, I improved.
I now make part of my income from sewing.
ODO
in Off Topic Discussions
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I'm glad to hear things are getting better.