summertime... and the livin' is easy...

Summer... started late this year. Our first over 100F day was last week... normally it's the first week of April. Lucky us. Weather here has been strange this year. It's been abnormally cool and pleasant thru March and into April. Even stranger... it's been raining! For the first time in a year-and-a-half I saw a thunderstorm and heavy sheets of rain. Dark clouds and lightning filling the sky... it looks just plain weird in Doha. The flowers they plant every month around the city have stayed open and blooming, which is a pleasant gift from the rain gods. Not such a pleasant gift is that our sewage system backs up into our ground floor everytime a single drop falls from the sky. Four times this year our mailroom, locker rooms, and parking garage has been under several inches of watery pooh. There are no drains or sewage lines in Qatar, just open tanks. Why build them? It's only suppose to rain for a few days a year.


The spring semester is finally over, and school is about to let out for a few weeks. I finished proctoring on Thursday, and wrote part of this blog in in a classroom filled with exasperated students sweating over equilibrium concentrations and molecular orbital diagrams. Suckers... if they only knew that they will never, ever, use this information again...



A gaggle of my friends got together this past weekend and celebrated all of our May birthdays, since almost everyone would be out of the country when their big day arrived. We gathered about twenty friends and co-workers, and had one hell of a Tex-Mex birthday party! I myself made the tres leches and cinnamon churros. Johann got us water weasels, and [NAME REMOVED] got us all really sweet birthday cards. Supposedly, [NAME REMOVED] is taking me out for steak tomorrow for my birthday! Now don't read anything into that... we're just hanging out together, trying really hard to be great friends... we're not officially dating... (her words). But I think she's only hanging out with me because she wants in on my winning trivia team...



That's right... I'm on a trivia team. One of the hotels in town has a monthly trivia contest, and I was asked to join in with a team from Georgetown. Galagher is on the team, along with Phon and a few others... but the core of the team is G'town Boss. G'town Boss is one brilliant trivia Aussie... mad, crazy skills! I'm afraid one day he might just kick all of us to the curb and go solo... and he could. Anyway, we get together on the last Monday of the month to battle a few hundred other people for trivia supremacy. Unfortunately, this isn't your ordindary bar game... the sports questions are mainly soccer, cricket, and rugby. Every questions is global; almost no American themed questions. One subject was world heritage sites... and there were countries listed that I didn't know existed! Two months ago, we can in second. Last month... tied for fourth... ugh. But this week... FIRST PLACE!!! We kicked ass!! At some point we have to get together and use up our Ramada gift certificates, or we're going to lose them. I say we just sell them at a discount, and blow the cash on hookers and hashish...


With the end of finals, and the last of the grades going in today, we all have a busy social week ahead of us. Today was a end-of-semester science group lunch. Tomorrow is my birthday... so I'll be partying with a select group... hopefully well into the night. On Tuesday is the Education City convocation. I wrote of this event last May, and this one may even be bigger. This is where speakers drone on about the future generations, succeeding in a new economy, blah, blah, blah. In reality, we're here for one reason, and one reason only... Enrique Iglesias is performing. Bailamos himself... the man who sleeps with Anna Kournikova... damn him. The next night is TAMUQ's graduation ceremony, and it's especially cool that this is the first time that students that I have personally taught will be graduating... even more of an unwarranted ego boost...



later...

ben