16 May 2007: It's raining dirt

You read that correct. The sky opened up today for several hours and it rained into the evening. Spectacular lightning arced across the sky. The problem is that it's so dusty here that even the drops of rain were full of dirt. It wouldn't be a good idea to stick your tongue out to catch a few drops. I've never seen gritty, dirty drops of rain such as this. Even after several hours of intermittent showers the rain continued to coat everything with slimy dirt. My Admiral became coated with a varying thickness of grime - thanks to rain! It's also so dry here that even though it rained for hours the ground dried almost as soon as it ended. What a place! Soldiers in the field can't even take a "whore bath" (the art of stripping naked in the rain to wash) in this because they'll just become dirtier than when they started. This may actually be the most "Joe unfriendly" climate I've ever experienced. By that I mean the weather (no political or ideological opinion implied).

My team has pistol qualification coming up the next two days. We spent half of today in weapons training to get ready. I like the fact that around here we qualify every other month. It keeps us fresh and familiar with our sidearms. I also find it a good release to pop off a few rounds at the range. 9mm isn't much but it's fun to shoot.

Since we were experiencing a day of dirty rain I tried to stay indoors. That's not too hard to do. Besides, there's AC indoors. That's a necessity around here. At the end of the day I tried to watch AFN but there wasn't anything entertaining on (unless you wanted to watch "The Batchelor - Officer and a Gentleman", CNN Crossfire, "Attack of the Show", or yet another terrible Tom Cruise film - "The Last Samurai"). Some other time I tell you about the AFN commercials - my favorite being Sqeakers the Hamster and his OPSEC lessons.

Range fire tomorrow! I'm looking forward to that.