As many of you might remember from my days in Deidre’s Bookclub, I typically don’t read fast. I was lucky if I could get around to finishing the club’s book of the month!
Not so here! I’m able to read 1-2 hours per day and I am absolutely blasting through so many books I’ve wanted to read for years and years!
Enjoy this list. I’m maintaining this list on my iPhone’s notepad function and I can email it into my blog as it grows. Today I start a new book, Predator by Patricia Cornwell.
Books Read on this Deployment
(includes date completed)
1.) The Marching Season, Daniel Silva: 16 Jan 09
2.) Angels and Demons, Dan Brown: 20 Jan 09
3.) Deception Point, Dan Brown: 25 Jan 09
4.) The Other Boleyn Girl, Phillipa Gregory: 3 Feb 09
5.) Marley & Me, John Grogan: 5 Feb 09
6.) Cruel and Unusual, Patricia Cornwell: 11 Feb 09
The dust storm continues. It isn’t as windy as yesterday, only gusting up to about 25 instead of 35 knots. But the chalky goodness is still flooding down from Syria and Iraq.
I’m usually the first to admit that I haven’t truly forecast the weather in a really long time and on this trip I tend to leave the serious science to our talented and capable NCOs. I’m a communicator and manager of the weather and weather-resources here.
That being said, today I actually felt pretty strongly that the dust here was going to continue several hours longer than originally forecast and I’m very glad that those of us who felt that way were able to convince those who thought we’d be back to sunny skies by now.
We were right! We’ll experience this dustiness through sunset, most likely. There were some who thought the dust would clear up right after sunrise.
And enjoy that one-and-only time I talk about my work here.
This base has been transformed by the dust. What little color there was on the base, such as vehicles, decorative emblems, etc. are now covered in a sandy film. Every exterior surface, and even many interior surfaces, have a fine dust settled on top.
There’s no point doing anything about it right now, we have about 9 more hours of this…it’ll just get all dustied up again.
It’s a ghost town. We’re advised to remain inside, although there are some hard-core types enduring the weather to take advantage of the lightning speed WiFi access right now.
I’m typing this up on my iPhone, then will come outside just long enough to transmit it.
Back to the gross!
I sorta figured this would happen while I’m here.
“What’s that?”
A shamal.
“What the heck is a shamal?”
Well, let’s define it here. It’s a strong northerly wind that picks up dust from Syria and Jordan and carries it all the way down the Arabian peninsula.
And it’s shamal-ing right now as I type this. The winds are gusting to 40 knots from the northwest, and the dust came down all the way from Syria — we watched it on the satellite! I even saw the wall of dust towards the northwest minutes before the winds started here, but I was in a no-photography area so I wasn’t able to capture it for you.
(Side note: I have to give public kudos to the forecast team in the U.S. and here at my base for the great job they did predicting its onset here. They said it would arrive by noon, and it got here at 11:55am!)
I have a couple pictures of what shamal vs. non-shamal conditions look like here, but they didn’t turn out really well. I won’t include them here, but I wish I could have captured how it looks here better.
It looks like fog. That “you can’t see your hand in front of your face” kind of fog. If you’re standing inside looking out into this stuff out the window it looks like a brownish-yellow fog. But the wind is howling…and if you inhale too deeply, you start coughing. If you breathe the air without a cover over your mouth for too long, you feel the grit on your teeth. It smells sort of like chalkboard chalk. Do you remember clapping together blackboard erasers when you were younger? And inhaling that dust for too long? That’s the sensation.
You feel the grit on your hands, in your hair, and on the surface of your skin. I stood outside for 5 minutes waiting for a bus from my duty location back to my dorms and could feel how dirty my hair was in that short time. Again, remember how chalk dust feels on your hands after you’ve dusted off the excess. A fine grit.
If your eyes aren’t covered, the dust gets into the eyes and it’s difficult to see as your eyes get watery. I have goggles for my eyes and am carrying around a small towel to cover my mouth.
I was talking to a British fighter pilot today right when the storm started and in a typical British no-holds-barred fashion, he gave gory details about where on our person we’d be finding shamal dust remnants for days after the event ends. I can’t wait.
It becomes hazardous to do things outside in these conditions. As if the winds and reduced visibilities aren’t enough of a problem, the respiratory hazards associated with prolonged inhaling of this dust can be a problem too.
Even though I’m inside right now typing this (I am usually outside where the WiFi is stronger), there’s still a layer of dust settling on my keyboard, and the table on which my laptop is sitting.
A shamal event wreaked havoc on the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. For you weather weenies, here’s a paper about the meteorology of the shamal that impacted the “march to Baghdad” in late March ’03. There are arguments to this day about the amount of advantage coalition forces were able to gain from the duststorm, but I’m not going there.
So it’ll be interesting to see how I feel when this is all done, and how long before I blow all the dust out of my nose, clean it out of my ears, and wash it out of my hair.
Rose (a friend from when I was stationed in FL) and I took a trip off base for some driving training. I drove in Seoul for 2 years, it wasn’t too bad. We went to dinner at a restaurant in a posh Doha hotel: The Sharq Village and Spa. The food was incredible! It was a Mediterranean buffet and worth every penny. I’m sorry I didn’t pictures of the dessert spread: lots of pistashio and honey…yum!
I was stuffed so full of grilled jumbo shrimp, hummus, vegetables and desserts I could barely lift my rear end from the seat when all was said and done. Thanks for talking us into trying it, Rose!
For you South Park fans out there, this image came up while I was Google Image searching something else and thought it was awesome!
“What were you searching for?”
Well, it’s funny you asked. As a stray blog topic, I was going to discuss the art/science of the military pilot call sign.
[Wagging her finger] Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve all seen Top Gun! Maverick? Goose? Here, let me refresh your memory…
I’ve met two pilots here named “Tim [something]” and apparently they’re young enough to get the call sign “Timmay!” Exclamation point and everything. In other words, an officer who came into the service after about 2000, when Timmay! was first introduced on South Park.
Between meeting a couple of “Timmay!”s and dozens of other fighter/bomber pilots with the work I’m doing here, it got me thinking about these pilots and their call signs.
Working among this is new to me. You can read a bit about the Air Force call sign tradition here. I spent most of my aviation-weather-forecasting years among Army pilots, who don’t use call signs as much. I’ve never had to do weather work for fighter pilots before. Apparently they’re the ones who go by call signs. You ask a tanker or cargo pilot his call sign and he looks all confused at you. I’m now in a unit that’s run by call-signed pilots, and that’s the jargon around here.
“Hey, Squatter wants to know whether you’re changing the number of planes Claw can use for Cheetah’s missions”.
These call-signed pilots tend to assume that everyone around them has call signs.
“So, Major Vollmer, what’s YOUR call sign?”
Ummmm…..no? At most, I was called “WEATHER!” All caps and everything, and that was usually from someone angry with a bad forecast. I know some weather officers who did get theirs by working with fighter pilots early in their careers.
How do the pilots get their call signs? Sometimes it’s obvious…a guy with a big nose will get tagged “Nose”. And it sticks for the rest of his career. Sometimes it seems random. I know so many “Fang”s, “Snake”s and “Sparky”s from throughout my career. I believe they get named at a big Officer’s Club party during pilot training. It might be formal…but to be honest, I don’t know.
We have a Marine pilot named Farquaad here, you know…from Shrek. He’s short (5′ 7″) and his face seemed to be shaped like the Shrek character, with the square protruding chin. Really. If you didn’t say anything, you wouldn’t notice, but once I heard our chief scream “FAHRQUAAD!” across the room to this guy the first time, I had to stop and laugh.
Our former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General T. Michael Moseley, went by “Buzz” his entire career. (Note: that was among his peers and other fighter pilots…*I* would never get to call him “Buzz”). Since our current CSAF has a cargo pilot background, he allegedly doesn’t have a call sign.
Last week I took pictures of some of my colleagues at our social tent last week and I wanted to e-mail copies of the pictures to the subjects themselves. So here I am at my laptop, ready to fill in the “To:” block and I realize I’m stuck.
How do I send pictures out to “Runt”, “Stork”, “Trojan”, “Snake” and “Atlas”? That’s how these fighter/bomber pilots do everything at work — I really truly did not know these guys’ first or last names for my first 3 1/2 weeks here! I had to ask this week, “What’s so-and-so’s real name so I can e-mail him this picture?”
So there you go — hopefully Farquaad doesn’t see that I was talking about him on here. At least you won’t know his real name so I’ve protected the innocent, right?
Ok, workout time!
I got a “new” pair of shorts from the laundry folks, since they lost a pair of mine.
I’m putting the word “new” in quotes because I can’t say for certain whether they’re new or not. For all I know they were misplaced from someone else’s batch of laundry. They look fine, they’re clean, they’re my size, I’ll need to cut the liner out of them still.
Bottom line, I’m back up to 6 pair of shorts and the world is once again in balance.
In other news, I’ve started my off-base driver’s training process, I’ll be taking my first training drive on Wednesday morning after work.
And oh yeah, one more thing:
GO STEELERS!
I have my Terrible Towel(s) ready to decorate the weather desk tomorrow night. The duty area (go ahead, you can picture Wargames or NASA Mission Control…but everything is covered in Qatari sand) is planning a Super Bowl party while the game airs at 2am here…I’ll be on duty, but I’m not sure the weather is going to cooperate for it. We shall see. I’m still excited that my favorite team will be playing…again!
I’m in the midst of dealing with a laundry casualty, but first I guess I should talk about how laundry is done around here.
We don’t have our own washers and dryers, we have a “laundry service”. This takes a little getting used to, and I was blessed to have a couple girlfriends over here who could explain how laundry works here. Nonetheless, I STILL didn’t come completely prepared.
You drop off your laundry at a drop off point, not dissimilar to dropping off dry-cleaning. You fill out a form and the attendant counts out the items you have and itemizes them on a ticket. 72 hours later, you can pick up said laundry.
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| From 2009 01 10 Southwest Asia |
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| From 2009 01 10 Southwest Asia |
The already-folded non-uniform clothing, plus uniform socks, fitness gear and t-shirts comes back in a somewhat-vacuum-sealed bag, while uniforms come back on a hangar.
At first I thought, “This is great!” Those who know me know my disdain with laundry. For 90 days I’ll have no worries — clean clothes presented to me! WOW! And it’s the Doha Marriott hotel doing my laundry…that’s a good thing, right?
Um….no?
This laundry service is brutal on my clothes and I’m glad I didn’t invest in much more than Target-caliber undies, sports bras and white socks for this trip. I’ll show you why right here:
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| From 2009 01 10 Southwest Asia |
See that stupid little sticker? It’s a cloth sticker with a number inked onto it. The example you see is on one of my green uniform socks. The fabric on the sticker is similar to a what’s on a cloth Band-Aid, except a little more stiffened. The number sticker is stuck to each article of clothing…somewhere.
“Where?”
Who knows…front, back, waistband, top, bottom, inside the article of clothing, outside the article…
So when I get each batch of clothing back, I go through and peel off the stickers. So I have to undo the folding that someone at the Marriott had already done — just to peel off those stickers…if it’s on the outside of a uniform item then it can’t be there, and if it’s on the inside of the article of clothing I end up annoyed by the little sticker. So I just peel them off…always taking a few sock, underwear, sports bra or t-shirt fibers with it.
In addition, the stickers leave (a) a sticky adhesive residue and (b) ink bleed-through. Since I didn’t bring my best stuff, this isn’t too horrible, unless it’s bleeding through my already-thin AF fitness shirts. And I’m starting to get annoyed by that.
The clothing is boiled during its rinse cycle. So no colorfast or high-quality lingerie. That’s fine, I don’t have anything in either category here with me anyway.
Back to the original topic: yesterday I experienced my first laundry casualty — at pick-up time, the attendant opens up the bag of folded laundry, counts out the items, then carefully puts it back. Yesterday a pair of my AF Fitness uniform shorts were missing. The attendant caught it right away (which is a good thing), marked up my receipt that we were short one pair of shorts and told me to come back in 48 hours. “Strays” go into some pile somewhere and I can check to see if the shorts come back as a stray. Otherwise, they will reimburse me.
And I sure hope it resolves soon. Like I said before, there’s a 72 hour turnaround, and I figured a minimum of 6 of everything (i.e., white socks, sports bras and AF fitness uniforms) would suffice. It does, but barely. I have exactly 6 sets of AF fitness uniforms. So when I’m short a pair of fitness shorts, I’ll run out before the next set of laundry is available unless I keep VERY clean (not likely here, I work out daily)…
Therefore, while I enjoy not having to run my clothes throught the washer and dryer, the laundry service here is so brutal on your clothing — you can’t expect better when they’re processing THOUSANDS of servicemembers’ laundry — I probably won’t be able to use much of this stuff when I get home. The elastic will be decomposed, and they’ll be peppered with adhesive spots and ink stains.
Paul, if you’re reading this: recommend 8 sets of PT gear!!
Is this a “Publishing Fail”?
This is from the Mideast Stars and Stripes…the 5th or 6th example of
bad grammar or misspelling just in today’s edition, the first I’ve
seen as a headline.
Enjoy a few pictures from my trip to Doha, the capital of Qatar. I tagged along at the last minute on a driving lesson (I wasn’t driving), but it was a trip out to lunch, and a windshield tour of the city.
I started snapping pictures as soon as I thought we were off base, but we weren’t quite off base and we got pulled over by the USAF Security Forces (police) because they could see me leaning out taking pictures. As I’ve said many times, they’re quite strict about where I can and can’t take pictures…and if I’m anywhere near the USAF aircraft, it’s illegal.
I thought to myself, “Oh no, I just got this camera for Christmas! Maybe I can talk him into just taking the SD card?”
Fortunately, the SP was kind enough to merely delete all the pictures from the camera and sent us on our way. It was all of a 3 minute setback…phew!
The trip into the city was quite the adventure — the country is in the middle of constructing an 8-lane-wide interstate-style highway and the city’s growth and building is fanning out several dozen miles from the city. Construction everywhere!
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
The driving is much more…um…aggressive? than in the U.S….but I’m not sure if aggressive is the right word. Offensive? Selfish? Cars would just pass us all over the place, whether there was a lane on one side or the other or not! It reminded me quite a bit of Korea, except there were cars of all nationalities around: Japanese (Toyota), American (GMC), British (Land Rover), French (Renault), Italian (Fiat), Indian (Tata), definitely lots of German (Mercedes). Between our base and Doha are many quarries, harvesting for concrete for all the construction I would see in the city. So trucks absolutely DOMINATED the highways, reminding me of I-95 in Virginia!
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
First we stopped at a mall outside of the city to hit an ATM. The mall reminded me of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, with a gondola ride inside and everything. This mall had many western stores, so it probably isn’t worth it to shop there, I can go to H&M, The Body Shop, and Emporio Armani at home (well, if I really wanted to!).
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
Covered parking for the expatriates’ European SUVs!
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
We then drove into downtown Doha and stopped at a “souk”, which is a traditional marketplace. It was mid-day, so it was rather quiet, and the 3 of us enjoyed a Indian lunch at a restaurant called Royal Tandoor. After a wonderful lunch of hummus, lamb curry, basmati rice and garlic naan (I was so full!), we learned that the restaurant was part of a chain…oops.
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
When we came out of the restaurant, it was after 2pm, and most of the businesses were closed for their “siesta”. One of the guys I was with wanted to buy a necklace for his daughter, so we drove around till we found a jeweler that was open…like any foreign shopping, it took a lot of bargaining till he found what he wanted at the price he wanted. I took a look at some of the pearl jewelry…I’m going to have to find something better quality before I invest several hundred dollars in anything!
After the shopping, we continued a windshield tour and I got some nice pictures. It was nice to pull over at a park that sits right up against the Persian Gulf…I just stood there and inhaled the sea air — nice! Doha is a VERY clean city…so it isn’t like inhaling at, say, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. You smell the sea, and for someone like me who grew up near it, it was very nice.
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
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| From 2009 01 26 TripToDohaQatar |
Note: Pay no attention to the flag flying on top of this building…I was stunned by the tilework: so beautiful!
I’m going to close here so I can add in the pictures and get this blog out…stay tuned for captions in the next 24 hours in the photo album!
It’s a last minute thing, but one of the folks I work with was taking someone out for off-base driving training today, just a lunch trip into the city of Doha nearby, so I will be tagging along, merely for some sightseeing and perhaps some native fare for lunch!
I leave in about an hour, I’m so excited, I promise pictures!
The people I’m going out with also work nights, so hopefully we’re back so I can get at least 5-6 hours of sleep. That’s the minimum for me to be a happy camper while on shift!
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