Mt. Everest Marathon

4 July 2009

Well I think this is my 6th 4th of July away from normal American 4th of July activities. I've either been in the field or another country for the 4th. Not next year though! Next year there will be fire works, BBQs, and sparklers!

One fun thing was I did the Mt. Everest Marathon this morning. Amazing right! Apparently we ran around the base or something, I'm not sure. Actually we had a 5k fun run this morning on the FOB and our t-shirts said Mt. Everest Marathon, Baqubah Iraq. Somewhere along the lines someone either failed geography or just didn't have a creative idea for a shirt. The run wasn't too bad, it's pretty dusty today, kind of like a Mars movie. Everything kind of glows orange because of all the dust. It's almost like a blizzard in the winter, only it's the summer and it's not snow it's dust. I don't like it.

We were supposed to get pizza today from some company in Chicago, they donated something like 10,000 pizzas to Iraq (maybe Afghanistan too I don't know). Without going through all the details, we aren't getting it, partly because of the dust trucks can't go on the road, partly because I don't know. But the funny thing was one person in our unit told our commander that we had the pizza's already and we had the 'apparatus' needed to cook the pizzas...aka a stove from what I understand about cooking pizzas. Unfortunately though we didn't get the pizza and we don't have the appropriate 'apparatus' to cook these special pizzas. Hopefully they have ice cream!

We're supposedly going to get some NFL football coaches on the FOB today for a little meet and greet. But with the air so dusty I'm pretty sure that will get cancelled as well. Helicopters don't fly so well with this much dust. Heck people don't walk this well in so much dust. To give you an idea I'd say we're at about 200 yards visibility. That's to say that when I'm walking outside I can see pretty clearly about 200 yards in front of me. It's pretty amazing. The one good thing is it keeps the temperatures down, still no 120 yet!

Happy 4th of July!