In Pursuit of Mysteries

We are screwed in Iraq

This is from BoingBoing Blog:

Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Iraq, confirmed
that a widely-redistributed letter she emailed to friends about the nightmarish
situation in Iraq was indeed written by her. Too bad the WSJ doesn't allow this
reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper.
 

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual
house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to
see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover
their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those
reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a
scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the
streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't
strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any
thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't
be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't
say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what
people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't.

There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our
house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every
day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi
employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter
second.

It's hard to pinpoint when the turning point exactly began. Was it April when
the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and
Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten
percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or
was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni
triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments,
Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a potential threat, under the
Americans it has been transformed to imminent and active threat, a foreign
policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

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Rings

I picked up my and R’s wedding rings this afternoon while doing the vet
stuff.

These were custom done by Green Lake Jewelry Works.

I’ve hidden the pictures outside of the main body so not to overload anyone.

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When it rains…

Alright, that's enough…

I took my OTHER cat of many years, Pollux, my tom, to the vet today because
he's gone downright gaunt in the last six months. They weighed him and he weighs
just a little over six pounds and he was a nine or ten pound cat before. He's
not so thin he's going to die but they are doing blood and urine work to see if
he might have thyroid problems or diabetes or kidney issues.

While squeezing his organs from outside, the vet (and several of his fellows)
noticed a mass that doesn't belong. Given Pollux's alert state and lack of
visible illness (outside of weight loss) or behavior changes, the best guess is
a lymph node gone cancerous or his spleen. I had them do x-rays and, while they
confirm the mass, they don't show much else about it. Since we're leaving town
on Monday for two and a half weeks for Europe, this, like the x-rays for Freya,
will have to wait until we return. I have two options: they can open him up and
take a look or they can do an ultrasound and probably get a sample of the mass
for tests with the help of the ultrasound for aim… Needless to say, I'm going
to choose the latter.

So, I have one cat with breast cancer, which may or may not be operable, one
cat with some sort of tumor or other cancer, and then Nova, the seemingly
healthy three year old that we just took on. The outlook seems a bit grim for my
older kitties.