Update 11

A funny thing happened this morning. Just as I was about to fall asleep, at the moment when conscious thought had ceased but just before the tipping point into actual oblivion, a British fella burst into the tent and shouted, "IS ANYONE AWAKE?!" I made a sort of strangled, gargling, "Wha?" sound and he pulled the hanging blanket aside and said, "They've found a device by the construction, they think it's an explosive, everyone has to evacuate!"  I woke up the other three people in the tent and we went outside.

There were about twenty British wandering about and no one in charge. I asked where the bomb was and was told that it was by the new construction, I wandered to where I could see the area and saw British, non-bomb disposal sorts, just wandering all over the area. So I told everyone to just go back to bed. My reasoning being that if there was no crowd control, there was no bomb.  We all went back and after a period where I worried that I'd just made a choice that would kill us all, I fell asleep. 

Not quite two hours later, the fellows in my tent, their numbers now swelled to a daytime maximum, developed a game where one of them would pretend to sneeze and the others would shout out hearty, "BLESS YOU"s. They were also dropping a concrete basketball from the top of a tall ladder, or perhaps it was a boulder from the top of a specially built staircase. At any rate it was painfully loud against the hard plastic flooring and I eventually gave in and shouted, "I have accepted that, for my sins, I will not be allowed to sleep a straight 8 hours. That is inevitable and fair. I have accepted that your collective insistence on weight lifting means you live on an all-protein, all-flatulence diet and I will sleep inside the olfactory equivalent of a packet of freeze dried peanuts, a smelling, gaseous haze. But do you have to be so predictable? Is this all a response to the tuba lessons I take at night, while you all sleep? Is it the strings of firecrackers I light off in the wee hours of the morning? No, it isn't, because I don't do these things! If it were an option, I would encase my head in a sound-proof, asbestos box every morning and breathe through the gills that I developed on my chest, but in spite of all the testimony of my senses, the generations required for massive evolutionary changes to have taken place have not actually passed. I am still forced to listen while you all make as much noise as is humanly possible and I am starting to think that you are actually enlisting supernatural aid. Or is this cacophony some sort of rite you engage in, in order to ward off the more timid demonic entities? Because I have to tell you, at this point you would be better off purchasing tripwires and claymores, because lying here in the throes of enforced insomnia I am no longer able to think of anything besides ways of slowly and tortuously murdering each and every one of you. It is only a matter of time before lack of sleep drives me from mere murder into actual corpse mutilation. So, if you are hoping to, A: live long and fruitful lives and/or B: have remains that can be reassembled come the rapture, I suggest you find a way to return the favor of silence during the day and allow me some sleep!" I dropped back into the cocoon of pillows that swaddle my head.

Not eight seconds later one of them said to the others, "He just woke me up, two hours ago, and there wasn't even a bomb."

In other news, it is the New Year here in Afghanistan. We got it about 11 hours before you all did, so as an old hand in this 2011, I have to tell you, I think it will be a good one. I have a good feeling about this year. I get to go home, not too far into it, and I think that things that seemed difficult last year will seem merely things that happen.