Argh! My valve!

I have just come across what might be the most stunning discovery of the century! I'm pretty sure of it, even though the century is quite young still. There is some bad blood between me and coconuts. Yep. I ate a few Samoa Girl Scout cookies a few days ago, and noticed that for a couple of days I had heartburn. It went away. I ate a few more of the cookies yesterday, and today I have heartburn! War is hell.

Speaking of hell, there's an occurrence here in Iraq that I lovingly refer to as "hairdryer wind" which is pretty self explanatory I think. Usually it's just annoyingly hot wind. The kind that makes you sweat more than it dries you off... thus rendering the whole point of sweating pretty moot. Maybe it's good for the skin or something. Anyhow... Last night we had a nice continuation of the winds that brought us the delightfully colored and textured air that you can see in the previous post, but the gusts got stronger. We had a few reports of trees falling over here on FOB marez, downing all kinds of precipitous networking and power cables that FOBs are notorious for having. These are some pretty decent sized eucalyptus trees, too! Which is sad. I remember one of the first things I noticed about the pad I live on was "Wow. These looks like REAL trees!" But by the mighty breath of Allah, those nice big trees are turned into holy warriors disrupting... some slow internet... oh well. As you can see, Iraq continues to be a madhouse!