Two strange things happened to me tonight.... 1) As I was walking back to my trailer after a (cold) shower, I heard something strange. Waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of a cloudy, moonless night, I saw something move. It was like a small, long shadow. Eventually I saw it was a fox -- bushy tail, long nose, and staring at me. I froze, and it froze. I moved, and it moved. Having the fox standing there in front of me was a little surreal. I had only seen them in zoos and along highways, scampering into the woods. I walked towards it, but it walked away.
2) I was riding my bike to the MWR to use this computer, holding my little light on the handlebars to keep it from going all over the place... riding in the dark is serious business. Anyway, I suddenly noticed, a little too late, that they were doing construction in the road and had strung one of those plastic "police lines" across -- just as it smacked me in the chest and wrapped around me. I am still amazed I didn't fall off my bike.

Ok -- on Tuesday, I got my first Blackhawk ride (my first helo ride). We went to Tikrit. It was AWESOME! I was sitting in the middle facing backwards, but I was still able to take lots of pictures and see the Iraqi people waving at us excitedly as we flew over them at about 100ft in the air. It looks a lot like Illinois -- flat farmland, with lots of corn. I had no idea Iraq was full of corn... Anyway, the people live in houses that look oddly similar to those found on Christmas cards -- I guess the architecture hasn't changed in thousands of years. We flew over manshions too...there really wasn't anything in between. In Tikrit, I spent the day with the 1st Infantry Division and talked to my cohorts there. The topography there was interesting -- hilly, and the Tigris runs through it, carving a canyon. I saw people washing their cars in the Tigris. Isn't that something? Blown away by it all, and extremely exhausted, I still managed to soak as much of it in... it was the first (and probably only) time I was able to get off this base and DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. I'm sorry I'm squashing this all into just one paragraph, but I have to get going now. :)