briefs
Hello hello, the headache has finally gone away, thank goodness, and it did so with enough time left in the day for me to take a nice walk. It was warm today? Tomorrow it will be cold again? I don't understand this winter.
I talked with Kathy in Kurdistan today, and one of the things we discussed was this article, which I shared here a few days ago. Even the peshmerga, the Kurdish armed forces keeping Daesh/IS out of Iraqi Kurdistan, haven't been paid in like 5 months. Kathy summed it up by saying that when the Kurdish Regional Government made deals to sell oil to Turkey in 2014, Baghdad threw a fit and stopped allocating money to the KRG. This wasn't an enormous problem then, because the price of oil was still high. But now it's fallen, and Baghdad still hasn't budged. The higher-ups in the government, the Kurdish Prime Minister et al., are doing okay, but Kathy estimated over 70% of the people in civil service-type jobs (which are most jobs, in Kurdistan; there aren't a lot of private enterprises), are going either with half-pay or no-pay.
So that's very gloomy to think about.
I also talked with Mum today, and it was good to hear from her, and then like I said I went on a walk. There's a loop I can do that's about, I don't know, two miles or so, along the lakeshore and then back up along the streets through my neighborhood and it's a nice walk. On my return I stopped at an Indian food place and ordered samosas and biryani for dinner, take-away because it's too much food for one meal, and that was also nice. No-one was around tonight, and I couldn't face doing the grocery shopping necessary for me to make myself a decent meal. I'll go shopping tomorrow morning; we still have milk, coffee, and oatmeal, it'll be fine.
And now, since it's approaching tomorrow already, I think I ought to get to bed.
I talked with Kathy in Kurdistan today, and one of the things we discussed was this article, which I shared here a few days ago. Even the peshmerga, the Kurdish armed forces keeping Daesh/IS out of Iraqi Kurdistan, haven't been paid in like 5 months. Kathy summed it up by saying that when the Kurdish Regional Government made deals to sell oil to Turkey in 2014, Baghdad threw a fit and stopped allocating money to the KRG. This wasn't an enormous problem then, because the price of oil was still high. But now it's fallen, and Baghdad still hasn't budged. The higher-ups in the government, the Kurdish Prime Minister et al., are doing okay, but Kathy estimated over 70% of the people in civil service-type jobs (which are most jobs, in Kurdistan; there aren't a lot of private enterprises), are going either with half-pay or no-pay.
So that's very gloomy to think about.
I also talked with Mum today, and it was good to hear from her, and then like I said I went on a walk. There's a loop I can do that's about, I don't know, two miles or so, along the lakeshore and then back up along the streets through my neighborhood and it's a nice walk. On my return I stopped at an Indian food place and ordered samosas and biryani for dinner, take-away because it's too much food for one meal, and that was also nice. No-one was around tonight, and I couldn't face doing the grocery shopping necessary for me to make myself a decent meal. I'll go shopping tomorrow morning; we still have milk, coffee, and oatmeal, it'll be fine.
And now, since it's approaching tomorrow already, I think I ought to get to bed.