Just trying to show the dust. The Palace is pretty obscured there in the background.

My coolest picture of the dust and sun.


The heat source. When there is enough dust in the air, you can look directly at the sun without damaging your eyes (I hope).

Sunglasses work! (Right) Sun viewed by naked eye. (Left) Sun viewed through Oakleys. (By the way, Oakley, if you are out there, Dave's new Flak Jackets got scratched, and the dealer out here doesn't have replacement lenses; want to send some? If so, I'll give you my address.)

Well, if you have taken a peek at the little "Baghdad Weather" indicator in this blog's sidebar during the past couple of days, you surely will have noted that the temperature has dropped down to a balmy 105, and we have high winds and dust storms. WE LOVE DUST STORMS! Well, we don't always love them, and we don't love every aspect of them, but we do love their cooling properties when the temperatures are in the one teens...like 118, 115...the one-teens.

Our latest dust storm blotted out the sun and dropped temperatures significantly. (No, this has not helped the temperature inside of our office trailer; it is still hovering around 105.) The only problem is, it is no fun to breathe heavily when the air is full of dust, and running makes me breathe heavily. That has become my very handy excuse, lately, for skipping my runs. Actually, I did run in the morning yesterday, and I fully intended to run today, but I accidentally set my phone alarm to silent. Woops. I'm supposed to run tonight to make up for it...but we'll see what happens with that. I haven't skipped more than one consecutive day yet, and I don't intend to. [Incidentally, did I mention that I took first place (woman) in a 5K the week I arrived here? Cool, huh?]

So, even with the nice drop in temperature to buoy our spirits, we are still lucky enough to have the dust itself to complain about. I've never sneezed so much in my life, not even when my dear friend's kitty (real name Cafe O'laitte, but renamed "Mocha" by Yours Truly, in much the same manner that I renamed her grandmother (Mom-o) a much more fun to say, "Mee-maw") rubbed her allergen-ridden pelt across my nose. So don't worry about us. There is still complainin' aplenty to be done by us. We love it!

OH! I ALMOST FORGOT!!! We, my teammates and I, have decided to quit using the EVER-so-awful king of curse words...the "F" word. Boys and girls at home, this is a horrible, ugly, nasty, disgusting word, and I have quit using it several times in my life, the first (or perhaps second) time being when I was a midshipman aboard the USS Pubic Mound---err, I mean Puget Sound in Norfolk one summer and ran across an very disgusting Senior Chief female who used the word quite liberally. I decided I didn't want to be like her and quit cold turkey. It stuck for most of the summer, until my return to the drudgery of USNA brought the word back to my vocabulary expeditiously. But, anyway, I have decided to quit, again, and so have all but one of my teammies. For each infraction, the offender must insert one dollar into our Curse Jar (or water bottle), and the money will be used to pay for a team party in October. If things continue the way they went on Day One, it will be one mother of a blowout! How much would you say is in here?

Yeah, that's a 5 in there...