Can someone explain the US presidential election procedure

I am a US citizen and I will try to answer the best I can, because it is somewhat confusing. Please if anyone else wants to chime in, I would appreciate it. Right now there are about 7 or 8 candidates for both the Republican Party (George W. Bush's party) and the same number for the Democractic Party (Hilary's party). So right now the US is in the primary election mode. Primary elections or caucases (that is what Iowa is called) is important because they will help eliminate candidates in both parties. Our primaries results are by the actual popular vote (if Hilary gets 20 votes and Obama gets 25 he would win that primary). Now each state has different primary election days, I can't explain why to you. I know Maryland (where I live use to be in March but our state government passed a law that pushed our primary voting day up to February. Iowa is important because it is the first one. A lot of candidates will start dropping out once they see that they are not getting the popular vote to make the field of candidates less and less. Then in the summer depending who gets the most votes for Republican and Democrats there are two big conventions. One for Republicans and one for Democrats where they nominate/endorse their top achiever as the candidate for the General Election. Then in November 2008, the entire United States will go to the polls and vote. Oh I forgot to mention that for the primary election if you are a registered Democrat you need to vote Democrat and the same with Republican. But in the General election in November you can vote for either party. Now this is the the tricky part. The General Election is not won by a popular vote and this is where I truly don't get it. But according to history when constitituion was written our country's leaders did not think that the public could chose the right person for the job, so when we vote we are voting for electoral votes(you might want to look this up on Wikipedia to get a better understanding on it) and the President is determined on how many electoral votes he wins. There are so many electoral votes per state. The electoral voting is what caused all the uproar when Bush and Gore were running. Look at this article www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_vs_Gore to get a better understanding. So our next president will take office in January 2009.

I'm also a little confused by the procedure and would be interested to know also.