Rockzmom, I've listened to your recording out of curiosity. Pronunciation of individual sounds or words aside, your speech has struck me as an excellent illustration of the stress-timed nature of English. If there are two stressed syllables side by side, many English-speakers tend to pronounce them slower. If there are several unstressed syllables between two stressed ones, most native English-speakers tend to pronounce them considerably faster. This makes the cadence of spoken English so different from many other languages. Some of us Russian speakers tend to do a similar thing in our own language too, but it is not nearly as pronounced as in English.