Amber is the color of your energy.

What I'm learning about Iraq is that it is really dusty. Occasionally the dust picks up and clouds the air some. These dust storms are hazardous to our missions as helicopters are not allowed to fly when visibility reaches a certain distance making the air "red". This is in contrast to "green" air which means no flight restrictions and "amber" which is the color of your energy...
...darn it 311, always getting your songs stuck in my head...I mean the air is okay but not good and maybe for emergency situations will they allow a flight.

When a dust storm sits in, it causes a sort of haze in the sky. It's somewhat harder to breath and people feel their sinuses build up with pressure. Up until last night I've only experienced light dust storms. Where there is a haze, but it still kind of looks like a blue sky. Yesterday was a whole new experience. I won't say it was heavy because of stories of previously deployed soldiers describing barely being able to see their hands in front of their faces. It was more of a medium dust storm. Enough haze that you can't see the color of the sky at all, but it didn't block out the sun too much. At night it was really cool. The lights become hazy and you wonder what is lurking just beyond what is visible. We were all quite impressed what a dust storm can look like. I'll be interested to see what a heavy looks like.

But what was more surprising was how much dust made it inside! Below is a picture of a half-swept floor just to show how much dust built up in one day.

Floor sweepers will never go hungry in this town.

I also took a physical fitness test with a few other soldiers in our platoon the other day. First off, I've never tried to get the highest score so I never know what I have to get to get a high score. But I sure now exactly what the minimum is! Especially for push ups. Since I was the only female taking the test, I wasn't too embarrassed by how little I can do. The guys were pushing 70 and up for their numbers. I pushed 23! Which I didn't think I could even do so was feeling pretty proud of that...until the sadist from my earlier blog decided to see how many she could do. And she did 50!!!! This is war!