Hey hon! Just wanted to answer your question since a lot of my foreign friends don't really understand what's going on since everyone is blowing up over here. So the way the popular vote works is it's like "pre-vote" in the larger cities but doesn't really count towards anything only to influence groups during voting and let the running parties know where they need to focus their campaign. The electoral college during voting is the number of votes that count based on the population of the state so the larger the state, the more points it is worth. Each county of the state will submit their votes. How a state is considered "blue" or "red" is based on the majority vote by population. For example, here is the state of Illinois. Looking at the picture, you would think Illinois is a "red" state. However, the city of Chicago is one of the blue squares and because most of the population is concentrated in Chicago it winds up being a "blue" state because a majority of the votes are coming from Chicago. Make sense? The reason why the popular vote is different from the actual elections is because the popular vote takes place in urban, heavily populated areas but American is mostly rural areas so most people don't go out of their way to the cities to vote in the popular vote. So does that mean 52 million voters are racist bigots because they voted for Trump? No. Most people hated both candidates but we had no other options. Majority of Americans are blue collar and live in rural areas. Many people did not like where Obama took this country and are sick of the lies and corruption in the government. Hillary's campaign was just another lying politician that was not listening to the voice of the people. Aside from here being supposedly for equal rights, she was found to be a liar and wanted to continue with a lot of the policies a majority of Americans did not want. Trump campaigned towards the working class and isn't a politician, unfortunately he was also seen as a big racist for all of his brash comments in the past. What it boiled down to is that a majority of Americans are sick of our politicians not listening to the people and I am sure would rise up if any of our rights were going to be taken away. Neither was the right candidate but only one gave the hope of protection and the elimination of corruption. Looking at the election results, it should be a real sign to people how desperate we are for change.

Hey hon! How is everything? I saw a couple days back you posted that your house was flooding from all the rain?? =( I hope everything is ok!

My mom used to buy me those big chocolate bunnies all the time for Easter when I was a kid. I used to love the cookies and cream one.

My coworker is currently spending 3 months in Bulach Switzerland for an assigment. I hope I get to be sent overseas at some point in the future. It would be so awesome even if it were just a week _

omg september?!?! That is just too much! Yeah I had heard how he was known as Saint Nicholas in some parts of Europe. He was the saint that went to the orphanages right? The mandarins I learned about from watching Dr. Who, lol.

Well, some states are very large so you could drive for 9 hours and still be in the same state. There are some pretty amazing states, but you have to go through a lot of boring states to get to them. There are just so many interesting countries where you are! It could just be one of those things where the grass is always greener on the other side since I don't see it all the time.

Yep, it's searching for new co-workers.

Ah I see. I used to like christmas but they've made it so commercialized now it upsets me. They will be selling christmas decorations and have christmas commercials right after halloween! Thanksgiving kinda gets overshadowed and people that aren't even christian (that are different religions) will even have a tree and give gifts which makes me very angry. Yes gifts are nice, but that's not the true meaning of christmas =/

Ah I will have to check out pictures of this archipelago then.

So jealous! I wish I could travel to London T_T