A dog’s life

There is this phrase, usually listed as an acronym, in military terminology which denotes that nothing of interest has occured. The phrase is Nothing Significant to Report, or NSTR for short. This update is gonna be kinda like that. Another week went by. We went over and talked to our IA counterparts. We went out and checked on checkpoints. We are still waiting on the satellite system to come in the mail. We are slowly getting more settled and into a rhythm, finally.

The reason I called it “A dog’s life” is that the photos are almost all of dogs we’ve seen out on the checkpoints. We had a little dog that showed up here right before the team we replaced left, but when she started getting on some nerves we had to take the interpreters take her over to the IA side and put her out. No worries, dog lovers, she is doing well, and made the transition from the old HQ area to the new buildings. I saw her the other day, and she’s still much fatter than when she first showed up by our CHUs, so apparently she’s eating well. The old team named her Morgan, since they said she spoke better English than the ‘terp of the same name who they fired last year. I for some reason don’t have any pictures of her that I’ve taken, but I’ll ask around to see if anybody else does. So, without further ado, here are some pictures of dogs out on the checkpoints:

Watching the backside of the berm:

Checking the c-wire:

Awwww, a puppy!

More puppies:

And for our last picture, a mirage. I did not take this photo, it was taken by CPT Gibson, apparently with his 4x digital zoom turned on, as the image has not been resized or retouched (other than saving for the web w/ Photoshop). It has been over 100 degrees here. The picture was taken in March…

Finally, some admin notes. I’m currently trying to get a collection of photos together with each of the team members featured, in order to send home to their families. Don’t bug them about the pics yet, as I’m still looking through to make sure I’ve got one (each) of everybody. Don’t be surprised if you get a big photo attached to an email in the relatively near future. Also, if any of you had issues checking this blog in the last couple of days, GoDaddy (my hosting service) upgraded the machine where the site is physically stored, which is great. However, in the process the Frontpage extensions (which I use to publish the non-blog part of the site) got corrupted, causing the thing to ask for a username and password. Anywho, it confused me, and I’m pretty computer savvy, but it’s fixed now.

Oh, by the way, it’s getting kinda annoying when Blogger eats my carriage returns to keep the pictures all aligned correctly with the text. I did however remember they have an ‘edit html’ tab in the blog post editor, so hopefully inserting line breaks in the appropriate places will work…