Even More of The Winner

After being saved by the man contracted to build her fence, Matt Riggs, LuAnn goes to his house to talk to him and tells him to forget the whole thing. He has a hard time with this being an ex-cop, and still wants to help her and go to the police; and she tries to talk him out of it and he agrees to do so for the time being. Charlie goes into the town and tries to find out some information on the man that had followed LuAnn, but finds that he used fake names and adresses to rent the car. Also, Jackson finally finds out that LuAnn has returned to the US after 15 years against his orders and that someone has been trying to illegally find information on her. So he decides that he must go down to Virginia to investigate the mess that she has created. Alot of things happend in this set of chapters and i want to read more to find out what effect these things will have on LuAnn's future.

More of The Winner

The reporter that has been looking to uncover LuAnn Tyler waited out front of LuAnn's house and confronted her by telling LuAnn her real name, which she hadn't heard in over 10 years of hiding from anyone else except Charlie, or Robert as LuAnn learns his real name. When she hears this while she is in her car, she immediateley speeds away and is followed by the reporter and eventually rammed when the man, and ex-cop, she contracted to build a security fence around her property comes and saves her from him. The man returned to the estate, he finds LuAnn has not yet arrived. When she does, she denies that she was being chased even though she clearly was, and that intrigues Riggs, the fence man. After the chase, you also learn more about the reporter who was chasing LuAnn. He moved out of his house into a more secretive place and the car he crashed while chasing LuAnn was a rental. You also learn that he is very good at his job, he's been doing it for 30 years and won a pulitzer. Im excited to read on and see how LuAnn reacts to being discovered.

Part 2 of The Winner

After winning the lottery drawing of $100 million, LuAnn must quckly escape the country to get away from the 2 bodies found in her home. Jackson has a plan to get LuAnn out, but she may never be able to return to the US again. That is where part 2 of the book begins, after she escapes, and it is set 10 years later. LuAnn has just bought a house in virgina and is trying to move back to the US but it is very hard for her due to what happend 10 years ago. At this same time, an investigative journalist is writing an article on lottery winners, and he is looking at past winners and whether or not they declared bankruptcy. He notices something strange about the lottery winners from 10 years ago, none of them have declared bankruptcy, but instead they seem to be doing very well. He looks at the names, and notices one that is very interesting, LuAnn Tyler. After reading all this, the reporter thinks he has an idea of how to uncover where she is. I am looking forward to seeing how the reporter plans on doing this.

The Winner

I have gotten further in the book The Winner by David Baldacci since my last post. LuAnn finally made up her mind to accept the deal that Jakcson presented to her. Before she calls Jackson to tell him that she has accepted, she goes back to her trailer where she is attacked by a man that has already killed Duane over drugs and is trying to kill her. Then she calls Jackson and tells him she accepts and he tells her to buy a lottery ticket. She then decides to travel to New York for the drawing, but she does not notice that a man has been following her ever since she left the trailer. When she arrives in New York, she stays with a man that is worrking for Jackson in a hotel and waits for the drawing for a prize of $100 million, which she ends up winning with the help of Jackson. But she is not publicly known as the winner yet when the story of 2 dead men appears in the paper and the report that police are looking for her. I am excited to see where this leads as i continue reading.

Started The Winner

I started the book The Winner by David Baldacci (as you can see, im reading a lot of his books because my dad keeps buyin them) this week. The book starts with a man named Jackson, whom you find out likes to change his appearance as his business changes, offering a poor 20 year old georgian women named LuAnn Tyler a guranteed shot at winning a $50 million lottery. When he gives her the offer in his office, she doesn't believe him and to prove that he can come through on the offer, he turns on the TV on right before the winning lottery numbers for a $1 million jackpot are announced and tell LuAnn the winning numbers before they are announced. This makes LuAnn believe him that he can get her to win, but she thinks that if she accepts ths offer, she will be doing something illegal. While she is thinking about whether or not to accept the offer, she thinks about her 8 month old daughter and about how the money could get her out of the run down trailer she is living in and away from her alcoholic, unemployed boyfriend. I haven't read much of this book but i am looking forward to see if LuAnn will accept the offer or not and what Jackson really has up his sleave.

Finished Last Man Standing

I finished the book Last Man Standing by David Baldacci this week. After this, Web is reassigned to protect a family, named the Canfields, whose son was in a hostage situation at a school that Web took part in stopping, but in the process their son had died. Web has to protect them because someone is killing people that were involved with the presecution of the organization that took the school hostage. After this, Randall Cove, an undercover agent, is killed by the head of the Canfields farm who is using the horse trailers to smuggle drugs into cities. You also find out that it was Gwen Canfield that was killing the people involved with the death of her son and she is also the one that killed Web's team. She ends up dying in the end and so does the farm hand/drug lord. In the end Web is considering leaving the FBI, and meet up with his old father that he has never met and start a new life.

Last Man Standing

I'm about half way done with the book Last Man Standing by David baldacci, and it is a very interesting book. The media has taken an interest in Web London because at a funeral for one of his team members, the wife had come and screamed at him in front of the cameras. When he arrives back at his house and his house is surrounded by reporters and he pulls his gun on them and that makes him one of the top stories in the nation. Later, he decides to visit the home of the undercover agent that gave them the information on the building where his team got ambushed. The house is already being watched by the FBI and when he arrives, he finds out that the agent had lost his family due to a blunder made by the FBI and that he may be trying to get back at them and he may have set London's team up. When they are leaving the house, the agent watching over the house is killed right in front of London by a sniper in the forest.

Started Last Man Standing

I started a book today called Last Man Standing by David Baldacci. It starts out with a group of FBI agents going into a hotel to get a drug lord and his financing people. the team is led by a man named Web London who has sort of panic attack upon enterint the hotel that ended up saving his life because a trap was set to ambush he and his team when they entered the courtyard of his hotel. He was the only one to survive the ambush out of a seven man team and the FBI has no idea who is behind the attack or how they the ambushers knew they would be coming. This makes them want to questiont the undercover agent that they were getting their information from, a man named Randall Cove, but there is one problem, he was attacked and left for dead after the ambush and is nowhere to be found. The book is very interesting so far and i have only just started it but look forward to finishing it.

Withdrawl from Iraq

I read an article today in the Star Tribune that was about how on sunday, Iraq's cabinet accepted a plan that would allow the U.S. forces in Iraq to stay there longer. Under the U.N.'s current mandate, U.S. troops will have to withdraw from iraqi cities by the end of June, and fully withdraw from iraq by december 31, 2011. Although the bill was passed by a large margin in the iraqi Cabinet, it is expected to face more opposistion from lawmakers in Praliment. Some of both Shiite and sunni lawmakers oppose the law and some would like it to go on a public referendum for the people to vote on. The lawmakers are being pressured to make the descision before they leave to attend a hajj in Saudi Arabia. It is still unclear whether or not the bill will be passed, and if it is not, the U.S. troops still have 3 years to withdraw before the country is one hundred percent under iraqi control.

Transplants

I read an article in the Star Tribune today by HJ Cummins that was about how the first bone marrow transplant was performed 40 years ago at the university of minnesota and it was celebrating that fact. The article talked about a man named Dr. John Wagner who performed the first marrow transplant that was used to cure a disease other than a bone or blood disorder, which was a deadly skin disease. The University of minnesota medical facility is one of the best in the country, a fact i learned last august when my mom had a new kind of liver transplant where the took a piece of my mom's sister's, my aunt's, liver and put it in my mom, and not having her wait for a whole one from a cadaver. Medicine has come a long way in the last 40 years, and this article was written to show how much people appreciate the life saving work doctors all around the country do.

Bad ways to die

I was looking for something to read for my post for today and i came across a pretty amusing website, www.darwinawards.com. This site is a collection of articles and urban legends about the stupidest ways people have died. My favorite article was about a polish man who claimed he was the macho man in the world. When he and his friends were drinking one night, his friend sawed off the end of his foot, and the man just couldn't be outdone by his friend, so he took the saw and sawed off his own head. another good one i read was about a terrorist who didn't put enough postage on a letter bomb he was sending and it came back to him marked "return to sender", and he opened it and was killed. My other favorite was about a group of protesters who were protesting how pigs are sent to slaughterhouses so they freed a herd of pigs and then were trampled to death by 2,000 pigs.

Stone cold

i read an entire book this week, mostly because i was grounded, called Stone Cold by David baldacci. It involves the story of 2 friends, one a con artist that conned a casino owner out of 40 million dollars because he killed her mother and the other an ex CIA assassain that had tried to get out of the business and now the CIA was trying to kill him; and the other main character is a man killing retired certain CIA assassains because a special team of them had killed his father who was an innocent man. During the book you find out that, John Carr, the ex CIA assassain who was being hunted down by the CIA, was part of the team sent to kill Harry Finn's father. Harry Finn is the man who was hunting down ex CIA assassains but was not working for the CIA. Anabelle Conroy ran into trouble when the casino owner she conned 40 million from, Jerry Bagger, began to pick up her trial and was trying to kill her; so she asked her friend, John Carr, to help her get the man of her tail. When people begin showing up and trying to kill both of them, Carr begins to think it is because of his secret past in the CIA and in Vietnam that he had told no one about. I liked this book a lot and it was a real page turner, and i would reccommend it to anyone who likes mystery or action books.

Heroes in a Box

Superheroes are another kind of hero, they are the ones who fight evil with good no matter what the cost. Often, unlike with other heroes, the duties of a superhero controls his or her life; fighting crime is all they do. I think these heroes are the kind that don't really occur in reality just because you need superpowers to be one. They are still important though, because they often give kids someone to look up to or are a role model.



"I don't want to force them to call me Dad. Whatever they want to call me, they can call me—as long as it's nothing bad. In the beginning, Chris would say, 'You are not my father.' This weekend, he kept saying, 'Dad, Dad, Dad.' It just rolled off his tongue, which was kind of cool. Then George said, 'No, it's Joey.'"
This is just one quote from Joey Democko had to when telling the story of how he adopted all 3 of his drug addicted sister at age of 23. This really shows how a hero has to make sacrafices because Joey had to delay his dream of going to college and even had to get a night time janitorial job so he could make more time to be with the boys. Joey received People's Heroes Among Us award for his actions to win his sisters kids back from Social Services. It has not been easy for him and he still struggles to make ends meet, but he says it was something that he had to do.
read the whole article here at http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,20153759_20152177_1,00.html

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"A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength the perservere and indure in spite of overwhelming obstacles" - Christopher Reeve

I think this quote means that you don't have to be something special to be a hero, you just have to have the strength to overcome the obstacles you are faced with. An everyday person can be a hero, they just have to find the it inside of themselves to fight for something or protect something, it could be anything as long as they are presented with a problem, obstacle, or challenge that needs to be overcome. I think this shows that heroes aren't that different from regular people, they have just the courage needed to take that next step.






I think this video shows how different types of heroes help people, whether its showing them you care, or defending the country, there are many different things you can do to become a hero. This video showed me that to be a hero you might have to make some sacrafices, like soldiers who have to spend months at a time over seas, and i think that is what sets them apart from regular people, they were willing to give somethinng up to do something heroic for other people.





"A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer." - Novalis

I think this shows the drive of a hero, how they keep going when someone else may have just given up, but the hero will see something through to the end.





A hero thinks of others before they think of themselves
A hero will die to protect
A hero can be of any age, any colour
A hero can be man, woman or child
A hero is courageous, loving and brave
A hero will never complain
A hero can be made in one act of compassion
Or years of tender loving care
Some hero's are remembered, whilst many are left forgotten
Hero's are angels in disguise, saving precious innocent lives

-Nicola Burkett

I think that this peom shows how anyone can become a hero, no matter of the race, age, or gender of that person; and even if you are or aren't remembered for it, it is still worth it.


Conclusion
I think that there are 3 types of heroes: Superheroes like the ones in comic books who fight evil, real heroes that save live like firemen or soldiers, and everyday heroes that care for people or do small things that make a big difference. I think that anyone can be a hero, but it doesn't come easy and you have to make some sacrafices to do it and you cannot give up. You don't have to do things like the police or firefighters do, it can be something smaller. Heroes start out as regular people and then do something for someone else, whether its being there for someone, caring for someone, protecting someone, or just helping someone out, it doesn't matter what. People that are heroes dont do it to be remembered because there isn't always a gurantee that they will be, but because they feel its what they need to do. you can be a hero as well, all you have to do is dig deep and see if you have the perserverence and courage to do something heroic. even if it is something small, someone out there will appreciate it. I hope everyone will do what they can so that they to can become a hero.

finished bourne betrayl

I have finally finished the bourne betrayl and i thought that it was a very good book. it ended with bourne taking fadi's plane back to america and finally killing fadi's brother, Karim, who had disguised himself and had been getting high level intel for fadi. However bourne couldn't kill him before he detonated a bomb meant for CI headquarters that Soraya was following and it exploded in the street only killing those inside the limo. Bourne's friend martin lindros, who was to be the leader of CI, had died on the plane ride back after bourne had saved him and there was no one to lead CI now. Bourne had also cleared all suspicion from himself by saving the day and saving CI. Soraya moore also cleared her name by helping jason save CI. It was a good book and i would reccomend it to anyone who likes spy books or anything like that and i really liked the book myself

bourne betrayl

ive gotten much further since my last post and im near the end of the book now. im not sure the page number and i dont wanna go look but its near the end. What is happening now is that jason discovered that he had killed Fadi's, the leader of the terrorist group, sister, making him and his brother karim extremely angry and now know that this is part of the reason they want to kill him so badly. While jason is in odessa, after being stabbed and narrowly escapin Fadi, he learns that he must go to istanbul to find a man he believes he is Fadi's right hand man. while there talking to the man in disguise, he is unaware that the man knows his true identity and that he wants him to overhear a conversation he has with his friend about how he is going to return to Fadi. He wants him to hear the conversation because Fadi wants bourne to follow the man and to lead bourne right back to him so that he can kill him. This plan backfires because bourne meets up with the saudi secret police who he knows and they have been secretly watching Fadi's hideout. Fadi's plan backfired because bourne made contact with some prisoners and got them to make a diversion so that he could enter the complex and that is where i stopped reading but i look forward to readin more soon.

character compare

The two characters i chose to compare are codi and hallie. Even thought they are sisters and are very close, they are still quite different. codi is often depressed and never feels at home where as hallie can feel at home anywhere. i think what really made them so different is the fact that she lost her mother first and then later when she was a teenager, she lost her baby; while hallie has never lost anything like that before. codi feels that she needs to keep moving because the place where she does not feel like her home and she thinks the next place she moves to may feel like home to her. hallie is an extremely giving and sympathetic person; examples of this are her trip to nicaragua that she isnt gettin paid for and her letting refugees stay in their home because they were homeless at the time. hallie is also more independent than codi. codi has insomnia and thinks she needs someone next to her to be able to get to sleep, and says it feels weird being on her own and that she does not like it. loyd also gives us a good idea of what is wrong with codi when he talks to her about how she is going around looking for life when she should not be looking for it but just living it. Codi also thinks she knows what her problem is when she says the difference between her and hallie is a matter of ground orientation. Loyd seems to want to help codi feel at home but im not sure he can cause i havent finished the book

bourne betrayl

a book that im reading currently is the bourne betrayl, and i have to say, its pretty dope. its about a plot to nuke washington dc and a leader of a terrorist group called doujja and their leader who seems to be uncathchable, even when they had him unknowingly trapped in a CIA prison cell. it involves black ops agent jason bourne, and a plot by the CI leader to kill him after he had done his bidding; which was to go rescue his good friend and leader of a secret CIA program called typhon, martin lindros. Little did he know at the time that they had switched out the real martin lindors with a fake that is a spy for the terrorists. And on top of all this jason is having trouble remembering certain memories of his life, especially a mission he was on in odessa to kill a man related to some terrorists. the part he cant remember is killing an innocent girl and carrying her body through the city. this book wasnt written by the original writer of the the bourne books, but it is still good regardless.The main point of this novel would be to not give up and not everyone is immune to deception. The author proves this when, even though he is badly injured, bourne still must fight against an assassain who has cornered him in a bathroom. this is also proved when bourne finds out that his best friend really isnt his best friend at all, but a spy from a terrorist cell that has a plot to nuke DC.

Adjective

I am athletic. I literally have a sport or some kin of training going on year round and am always trying to get better at all the sports that i play. every summer i always do some hockey camps along with playing on my baseball team. for me, sports aren't only fun to play, but being part of the team is also part of the fun and is a great way to meet new people and make new friends. you can also learn some lessons from playing sports, like perserverence, hard work and many others; so i think that people should be involved with as many athletic events as possible because it is a great way to be involved, meet new people, and have lots of fun doing it.