I think if I catch up to the years, months, weeks, days I have not written in this blog, I can finally write about what's on my mind. So many things to write about. The month of May found me sleeping on the ground for nine days in three different locations:

Yosemite, CA
Panjshir Province, Afghanistan
New River Gorge, West Virginia

Today I remembered how to cook something ... barely ... the turkey breast is a little tough. I signed up for a yoga class. I wanted to remember one of the many topics that have been swimming through my head that I should blog out. But now that I'm writing, they all escape me. Today I wrote a ten page trip report on Afghan Ascend's expedition to Panjshir Valley. Much of it I won't publish, and maybe a sentence or two in it is for my eyes only. But here's a raw excerpt, unedited, unfiltered:

Prepared for the gate to Kabul (DXB)

Going to Kabul in May, a city still battling with a foe reluctant to acquiesce power, the Taliban - was not something unusual for me. What was unusual was I was going to a city at war, without the accouterments I had when I flew into Baghdad in 2007. There was no military airplane, I was not surrounded by armed soldiers, I had no Kevlar body armor nor did I have a side-arm for personal protection. My security relied solely on my anonymity. I’m not sure how a 5 foot 9 tall woman with two large duffels and an expedition pack arriving into Hamid Karzai International Airport with a U.S. passport could escape attention. The threat to foreigners was first from kidnappers seeking ransom and next the Taliban. Before arriving in Kabul, I was cognizant of not setting any expectations of Afghanistan, I was trying to be aware of what emotional and psychological baggage I might bring. I did not want to affect the Afghan Ascend program by suddenly freezing in place or running for shelter if I heard a car exhaust backfire. Maybe that seems unlikely, but it didn’t take long for anyone who spent enough time with me after I returned from Baghdad that I might have had a slight touch of PTSD. I thought the first thing Kabul would remind me of was being in back in Baghdad. National-level conflict is in my DNA.