Dates, Sweet Dates

I've always wondered where dates came from. I remember as a kid eating date bars at Christmas. And Abbie and I started using dates to sweeten our smoothies. Dates are a great sweet snack and I remember going to the little Middle Eastern restaurant/store in South Raleigh. I now know where dates come from. Big tall palm trees. Iraq used to be one of the world's largest producers of dates, but after the first Gulf War, and many UN sanctions, Iraq stopped exporting dates to major Western markets. It wasn't until last week that I realized that all these palm trees around in our area are dates, despite the fact that they're all called date palm groves. You'll see in the below pictures that the dates under the trees are like raisins...they start out hard and smooth, and as they mature, they shrivel up in the heat. These dates are about a month from being ready for picking. Most likely, they'll just fall off and decompose. But, now, you know where dates come from.

Glad I could help in your education today.

Big Blasts In Baghdad

If you've been watching or reading the news, you already know there were a bunch of blasts in Baghdad that have killed and wounded scores of people. To set your minds at ease, no one from this unit or our parent unit were hurt or even targeted. I don't know why it happened, but I surmise its to undermine the GoI as well as the Iraqi Army. Pray for the people of this country to get through this time, and especially for those families that lost people. It was those types of bad events that turned the majority of the populace away from terrorists in the first place.

My team and I were out on mission in the northern part of our sector, and we heard two of the blasts. Big blasts. And we were many kilometers away. They were heard for miles, from what I have heard. Just awful, if you ask me. But I wanted to give everyone an update in case y'all were wondering.