Testing, Testing, One, Two, Three...

Hi Everyone!

Well, here it is...my very first blog. I've finally given in due to a severe lack of ablility to connect to my VPN email and send out mass emails that way. Hopefully this will allow people to keep up with my activities on an easier (and more frequent) basis. I will do my best to at least be as regular with my posting as I was with my emails prior to the great email outage of early March. My guess is that I'll be _really_ good about it for a few weeks, then will slack off a bit.

Some rules of this blog. For the purposes of web posting (and my security), my name is Leia. Those of you who know my real name already know it and those of you who don't either don't need to or can find it out in another forum, so there's no reason to mention it here. I currently live in Baghdad, Iraq and work for a humanitarian organization. If you've been watching the news at all these past few months, you'll understand why I don't exactly want the world to know exactly who I am, who I work for, and what I'm doing here. The organization for which I work will be referred to as my "company" or "the company," but I assure you that it's not the CIA. :) Similarly, the neighborhood in which I live will be called my "neighborhood" or "the neighborhood." It's really nothing nefarious, just a bit of code so that those who might want to know for nefarious purposes will have a little more difficulty in finding me and those with whom (or for whom) I work.

I'm not going to allow comments, but if you'd like to email me, you're welcome to: leiacellaa23@hotmail.com. I know I'm not the best at replying to emails, but I really do love to get them.

I'm also going to make this blog as inaccessible as possible so that only those who know about it can find out about it. If you're a friend of mine who blogs frequently, please _don't_ link to my site from your page. This is just my way to communicate with the people back home (and elsewhere).

I'll get a real post up here soon, but right now I think I'm going to spend most of the day sending out emails to a few of you on my list at a time to let you know about this site. I love you guys and miss you and have a whole lot to tell you about that's happened to me recently or that I hope will happen soon.

BTW...the date down below will be the local time for here.