Crazy Days in Baghdad

I don't know what's up with this place. It has rained more here in the past 2 months than it did my whole first deployment! It rained more TODAY than it did the whole last deployment! I got up a little late today because we didn't have any missions today. I got up and was hanging out on my bunk reading my wife's email when I started hearing these big booms through the walls of our barracks. You can only imagine what I was thinking! I ran to the upper floor to look out the window to see where the rockets were dropping when it realized that it wasn't rockets at all...it was thunder! The sky was all ominous and dark. Thunder storms are so much different here than back at home. Thunder back home rumbles; thunder here are just loud bangs without the rumble. I'm not sure why that is - maybe because of the different soil or because there is nothing for the sound to echo off of here. Whatever the case may be it sounds very different. There wasn't any rain yet when I looked outside, but about an hour later it started to downpour!! I'm talking Louisiana monsoon rain! It continued to rain for about 2 hours in this heavy sheet of rain. Before you know it the streets on our compound were flooded and the sidewalks were starting to become flooded. The sand is so hard here that it doesn't have a chance to absorb the heavy rain. Plus, the streets here aren't crowned like they are back home because they don't expect rain here that often. There are certain places on the roads of my compound that the water comes up to mid-shin. This is just after two hours of rain! What's crazy is that this water on the compound is moderate compared to what we're going to see when we leave the gate tomorrow to go on a mission. There will be water all over the place out there because not only will standing rain water be everywhere, but the sewage system here sucks and will be overflowed. The last rain we got here about four weeks ago caused a major sewage back up and most of Baghdad was flooded for about two weeks! The bad thing about the flooding is that you know most of it is raw sewage. You know this because you can see "things" floating in the water that shouldn't be there. Also, the smell will be horendous tomorrow when we leave the gate. This country normally smells but it isn't that bad because everything is dry and the "true" smell can't escape because it's not wet. Well, tomorrow everything is going to be wet - trash, sewage, dead animals and rotten vegetables. I can't wait to smell the stench!! Yeah, right. I would have taken pictures of the weather today and posted them, but it was raining so hard that I didn't want to mess up my expensive camera.
It's also gotten colder here but there's nothing to write about that. We're all happy it's colder now. It sure beats the shitty heat that normally consumes this place 9 months out of the year!