Sorry for the delay in blog entries, but I have been busy. Here, let me give you a typical weekend for me. Wednesday night(that is like Friday night for you people in the real world)right after work I dropped my stuff at the hotel room and walked over to attend Sunday "counseling" services (go figure that one out). After that it was a call to Nicole at K-Force for an update, with that done I was over to the mess hall for dinner and a place to work on some drawings for a hour or so, before going back to my room to complete creating my snares for the Spiny-tailed (Dabb) lizards. To sleep around midnight and up at 4:00 am to get my things together, and have a cup of tea before biking out to the desert to my favorite place on the compound: the spray fields, Lake Lanard (sewage lake), and the desert. Got there about 5:30 am to set my snares at three lizasrd holes and bike over to a line of trees around the lake to spot the lizards with my binoculars. While waiting, I was able to do some bird watching, spotting a nightjar and the usual array of warblers, flycatchers, etc. With no lizards showing I wandered down the dirt road to a dumping area and walked right into a colony of Arabian Red Foxes. Must be 10 den holes and tracks all around. By 8:30 I headed back to the hotel - up the incline and against the wind in temperatures near 100 F. It was brutal (I did bring water this time). Back at the room it was time to shower and take a short power nap and grab a late breakfast while doing some more drawings in the mess hall (my studio). 1:00 and headed over to the theater to help with some thearical backdrops for an upcoming showcase. Spent the rest of the afternoon painting backdrops, at 4:00 headed back to the hotel to change and catch the bus into Khobar with Omer to get some supplies for my nature journaling workshop, grab a shwarma for dinner, help Omer decide on a Leatherman tool, then catch a cab to the Mall of Dhahran for some other supplies (which they did not have), so another cab back to the hotel where several of us sat around shooting the bull over several pots of tea. To bed finally at midnight. Up again at 4:00 am and back out into the desert, only this time a shamal (dust storm) rolled in about 6:30 am so I had to hurry back to the hotel, followed by the mess hall, where I again worked on some more drawings until time to go to the theater to repeat yesterday's events. Later that evening my good friend, Nicole, gave me a call to tell me about her trip out in the desert 3 hours west of here with a bunch of spelunkers. She was rappelling down into a cave when she turns upside down. It was so funny seeing photos of her in that condition with all these guys just laughing up a storm. Would have been worth it being there to really experience the display. She has to be such a sport to even go on a campout in these temperature, and the shamal that hit them about 3:00 am collapsing her tent forcing her to crawl into a car with some of the guys and a dog to get out of the dust - hot, no sleep, miserable, she said. She's cool. After that I was exhausted and finally hit the sack around 11:00 pm to get some sleep before work in the morning. That is a typical weekend for me, and the workdays are not much different.
Photos of fox den, fox, and a lizard hole.
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