Update from Baghdad...

I know, I know, I'm terrible about posting updates here...  I'll give you a couple of excuses (they may not be good excuses, but it's all I've got!)  First, it's kinda like the movie 'Groundhog Day' around here, so it feels like there may not be anything worth writing about.  And second, I have been pretty busy - but busy with things that either I can't really talk about, or more likely busy with things that would just be boring to talk about!

I do try to take pictures whenever I see something new, or something interesting, or just something strange (lots of that here!)  And instead of trying to paste pics in here (not so simple in Blogger), I'm just posting them all on my Picasa site (that's really easy): http://picasaweb.google.com/bultar/PicsFromVictoryBaseComplex#

Last night I tried to take some pics of the army of spiders crossing the sidewalk from the lake to the palace, but it was too dark (no flash on my iPhone), but that was pretty weird!  No, they weren't those big camel spiders (I would have pulled my weapon on even one of those things!), they were just little things, but lots of them, partially illuminated by distant headlights.

I think that last pics I posted were from the X-Dog Race I ran a few weeks ago, the "Slayer Scramble", and there are more pics of that on their website:  http://www.xdogevents.com/slayerscramble.php.  There are a few other 5k or 10k events coming up that I will try to run.  And this weekend, I'm going to my first hash out here!

The Lost Lake Hash House Harriers (L2H3) has been hashing here for years, but hasn't been active since last fall... so we're bringing it back to life!  (We would be me, an old SD hashing friend, and a couple of hashers I met here through the Las Vegas email list.)  Hopefully we'll get some interest and get a regular hash going. 
Oh, and can I talk about the weather some more?!   It's sure not what I expected!  Since I've been here, we've had clear sunny days in the 80's, comfortable nights in the 50's, then days with highs in the 40's and lows below freezing, beautiful clear deep blue skies, then dust in the air so it looks like orange moonlight, rain both when it's hot and cold, and rain when it's dusty which means the rain is really drops of mud!  But it hasn't been uncomfortably hot - yet, I know that's coming, and we haven't had a 'real' dust storm yet where we need to where goggles and dust masks... can't wait for that...  :-/ 

There are interesting things going on around here these days... but you'd be better off watching the news, or digging around with Google to find out about things like the elections going on this weekend.   

Several folks have asked what kind of things I might like sent to me in a care package, and I really appreciate the offers, but honestly, just an email, letter, text msg, etc., is about all I need.  I can get just about anything out here that one can get back home (well except beer, but that will have to wait til I get home - don't try to send beer, I'll get in trouble!)  Keep in touch!

Cheers, B