Prologue - Kuwait

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As some of you know (and others have found out by now), I'll be in Kuwait until October 1. I'll be returning to the United States on October 2. So enjoy travelling with me!

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24 Hours in the Life of Khalaf - 3 April 2011

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It's been a good few weeks. Two weeks' rest at home was followed by a quick 3-day trip to Tampa, Florida, a 5-day trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana and a 5-day trip last week to Tulsa, Oklahoma. This week I'm in Minneapolis, MN for the first time in 6 weeks. It's good to be back, especially considering what it took to get here: 4/2/2011 10:00pm - Finished cleaning up from Juju's birthday party. Tucked everyone in for the night. Fired up my laptop and printed my boarding passes. The best price for this trip was a Southwest flight to Chicago and a Delta flight onward to Minneapolis. Checked CNN for any late-breaking news. Found out about Southwest 812 losing part of the fuselage in-flight. Hmmm.... 4/3/2011 7:00am - Woke up after sleeping in. Had a leisurely breakfast with the family. Got ready to go to visit a church - classmate is being installed as a Senior Pastor. 9:30am - Receive an email from Southwest Airlines informing me that my flight to Chicago has been cancelled...
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Smoot Marks

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In the fall of 1991, my involvement with the New Student Orientation program at my alma mater found our group attending a national conference in Boston. We arrived from Los Angeles two days early to take in some of the sights of autumn in New England. We strolled past a certain university campus in Cambridge just to be able to say, “Yeah, I went to Harvard.” And as we crossed the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, I noticed that there were lines painted at regular intervals. Further investigation revealed these to be Smoot marks. What is a Smoot mark? In the spirit of a last-minute term paper, let me borrow liberally from Wikipedia: The smoot is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge (between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure ...
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Light a Candle

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