this blog is powered with diesel fuel

i wrote this first sentence in the dark. and this one. Now the generator is humming and the lights are back. Diesel fumes drift up to my office on the second floor, mixing with the smell of rain, and the firewood in the stove. Other smells of Kabul include: sewage in gutters. garbage in mud. those tasty bread patties stuffed with green stuff and grease. unheated rooms. closed doors. And dust - ok that's not a smell but it lingers long after. My sinuses feel like beach dunes.

I had four minutes on Morning Edition today. It was fun but took a while with tech problems. We were supposed to go through a super-clean satellite phone but it wasn't firing, so i spent a few hours on the skype line with NPR's tireless engineer bob duncan trying to reposition this little dirt-smudged doodad on my balcony in kabul to sync up with a satellite over the indian ocean... it wasn't catching the angle but a couple of afghanistan ag reports did the trick. by that point it was 2am when i wrote my previous blog entry totally beat. Only today i found the darn doodad died, no juice in the battery, which meant a frantic search for the plug and then finally I just talked to rene by cell.

before the call i walked over to NATO HQ to meet with them and get my facts straight. I haven't spent much time at the base. It's a multi-national force of course, & there's something like 15 or 17 different languages spoken; even the soldiers have trouble communicating sometimes. Today I dealt with an Italian, then a Virginian while the Russians and Moldovians hung around back at the post telling jokes. Finally I was escorted into the base by a pair of press reps. I find military press folks generally more likeable then their civilian counterparts. They're the interface between the patriotic class and the brainy cynic; the result in some is a sort of open-knuckled irony which i find very enjoyable. I walked out smiling and tore my wrinkle-free shirt on the barbed wire.