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Sat, 23 Sep 2006 22:26:32 -0700

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Sun, 03 Sep 2006 22:35:36 -0700

Snail Power -- The Determination

This snail proves that nothing is impossible in this world by crossing over a gap almost as wide as its body. 7 wonderful pics...Sometimes things r definitely difficult , but possible :)

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Fri, 25 Aug 2006 22:10:15 -0700

Separated and abandoned in China, twin girls find each other in America

� Adoptive parents meet by chance on internet site
� Children will still have to grow up 1,400 miles apart

At their first meeting they held hands nervously, played with their dolls to break the ice and then wouldn't let each other go. The three-year-old girls, Mia Funk from Chicago and Mia Ramirez from Miami, looked and acted just like sisters.

Now, in a remarkable tale of coincidence and discovery beginning in a Chinese orphanage and ending in an emotional reunion sparked by some internet sleuthing, two sets of parents are working out how to bring up the twin girls living 1,400 miles apart. "It has to be a miracle of God," said Douglas Funk, the adoptive father of the girl he and wife Holly named Mia Diamond before bringing her to a new life in the US two years ago.

"What are the odds that of all the people in China these two are sisters? What are the chances of the two of them getting together to find each other? It's amazing."

The girls were taken in, separately and unidentified, by the children's welfare institute in Yangzhou, a city in the heart of Jiangsu province, after they were abandoned a week apart. In a country where parents are normally allowed only one child, there is nothing unusual in finding newborn girls discarded at the roadside.

It was only when Diana Ramirez of Pembroke Pines, a Miami suburb, wrote about her daughter Mia Hanying's forthcoming birthday on an internet site for parents who had adopted from the orphanage that Mrs Funk saw the message and began to wonder. Emails were exchanged, followed quickly by DNA tests that showed an 85% likelihood the girls were sisters. With unidentified parents this is the highest possible reading.

"We found out that they had the same name and they were both three years old," Mrs Funk said. "We swapped pictures and they looked so much alike. Then we found out they were found at the same spot. It's an awesome thing, a miracle. In the sea of humanity, these kids found each other."

After chatting several times on the phone, the twins wore matching Chinese outfits for their first face-to-face meeting at Chicago's O'Hare international airport. They stared at each other in fascination before tentatively holding hands and gradually becoming friends as they played with dolls and a musical lamb that Mia Diamond brought as a present for her sister.

"They're inseparable," Mrs Funk said after a weekend visit from Mrs Ramirez and Mia Hanying, who came to Florida to join her new parents last year after being held back from adoption for 12 months by medical treatment of a heart defect that is now cured.

While the reunion brought joy, both families realise it will also create hardship as the fraternal twins grow up so far apart from each other. "It's a little bit of a distance, but whenever we can we'll get together," said Mrs Ramirez, who has two sons aged 13 and 10 with her husband Carlos, a building contractor. "I want to have them speak on the phone frequently, as they live in different states."

The Funks, who have five biological children aged six to 21, and have adopted a four-year-old Taiwanese boy since Mia's arrival in July 2004, plan to visit Miami in October. "It's like an in-law situation with the Ramirezes and us, we're going to be family," Mrs Funk said. "We plan on letting them get to know each other."

Psychologists say twins who grow up apart can end up embittered, and that studies have shown fraternal or identical twins who grow up together have happier relationships. "Adult twins who only met in their 40s or 50s often have resentment at having lost time together, but the parents of these girls will do a wonderful job in not letting that happen," said Dr Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Centre at California State University, Fullerton.

"They can only get together as often as time and money allows, but I don't see them suffering. There are photographs, the internet, telephone calls, so much that can be done now to stay close that couldn't several years ago."

Mrs Ramirez said: "You keep thinking how is this thing possible." The answer lies in the internet and DNA technology, which have broken down the barriers to what were once closed histories. Many websites have been set up to link families who adopted from the same towns or orphanages overseas, and testing has proved several blood relationships that would otherwise have gone undetected.

http://The-Real-McCOY.stumbleupon.com/review/5282383/

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 06:00:43 -0700

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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Wed, 16 Aug 2006 05:52:06 -0700

If - An Inspirational Poem
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head
when all about you men are losing theirs
and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
but make allowances for their doubting, too.
If you can wait but not be tired of waiting,
or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise,

If you can dream but not make dreams your master,
if you can think and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with triumph and disaster,
and treat those two imposters just the same,
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools,
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,
and lose and start again at your beginnings
and never breathe a word about your loss,

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
to serve your turn long after they are gone,
and to hold on when there is nothing in you
but the will that says to them "hold on,"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
or walk with kings nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
if all men count with you but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
with 60 seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
and which is more, you'll be a man, my son.

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Sun, 23 Jul 2006 05:39:08 -0700

Awesome Photograph..... The moment we conquer our fears can be so breathtaking and magical :)

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Sat, 22 Jul 2006 23:15:13 -0700

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Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:00:25 -0700

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Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:23:03 -0700

The shocking pictures of mumbai blasts

Bomb blast in the train at Matunga in Mumbai.

Bomb blast at Matunga railway station & injured at sion hospital in mumbai on Tuesday.

Bomb blast in Mumbai local trains .

Stranded railway passengers on Kalupur railway station in Ahmedabad on Tuesday owing to the cancellation of trains from Mumbai.

People gather at the site of a train blast in Mumbai.

Victims of train blast are treated at hospital in Mumbai.

An injured being taken to the hospital.

Mumbai suburban commuters wait outside the Churchgate station, after a series of blasts ripped through Mumbai's local trains.

Bomb blast at Matunga on Tuesday.

A first class bogie of a suburban train ripped apart after a bomb blast at Mahim in Mumbai

Police and onlookers stand around a mangled commuter train's wagon following a series of blasts in Mumbai.

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Sat, 08 Jul 2006 23:14:55 -0700