Pictures of the Shamal

Here are some pictures taken of the Shamal.

One:


And a second:

Soon

Wow....

I have now been on Active Duty for over a year...hard to believe...so much has happened.

For those of you that have been checking my infrequent updates at AnySoldier.com you know that my cut-off for mail was 15 Mar 06. Packages or letters mailed after this date are not guaranteed (where they ever?) to reach me. We should be rotating out in the next couple months. Not sure when or to where...*shrugs* But all I know is that time remaining is now weeks, not months...and that is a good thing.

Shamal

I know, I know...two months with hardly a post, and now, two in one day...wow!!!


The other day, I was working the gate and I happened to look out to the back side of our compound. I could see the clouds in the sky threatening rain, but the horizon behind the hills had an odd brownish tint. As I watched, that brownish tint turned into a swirling, turbulent wall of brown sweeping behind the PRT. It looked as though most of it would pass, until I looked off to the left of our compound...and there it came, sweeping over the hill that had blocked it until this point. Like a pair of pincers, the dust storm (aka shamal) swept over the PRT from front and back. The dust got so bad that we could not see 100 meters, about the length of a US football field.

Taking cover in the base of the gate tower, I watched the dust blowing along the sidewalk that runs along the outside of the wall. The wind was blowing so hard that it kept about one foot of the sidewalk closest to the wall scoured clean, but it made ever-shifting patterns on the remainder of the sidewalk. The shamal lasted about 30 min...afterwords there was dust coating every horizontal surface.

Like most things here...the shamal was starkly beautiful.

But I hope not to be out in the next one!

Camels and Cameras

This is a post that I have been meaning to write since before I left on leave in Jan. Unfortunately, I never quite got around to it....so here goes...

It has been my experience that it is nigh impossible for me to get pictures of camels. This seems to break down into 3 main reasons. 1) The camels are too far away. With the disposable cameras that I have had up to this point, this would result in a panoramic picture with indistinct, possibly camel shaped dots in it. 2) The camels are obscured. This often happens when we are travelling, and the picture is either blurred by speed or the dust thrown up by our vehicles hides the camels. 3) I don't have my camera. When this is the case, we will invariably pass, at low speed and close range, a camel caravan that is gorgeously beribboned or a nomad group travelling with their worldly possessions on camel-back.

I had hoped that my bringing a digital camera back from leave with me would help to rectify this situation, but unfortunately this has not yet happened...

Stay tuned!