When I got to Iraq and was fishing for newspapers who would publish my dispatches, a tech editor of some sort from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times--I can't recall his name--asked me if I wanted to keep a blog. That was August of 2004, and I didn't know what the hell a blog was, but I said yes and never got back to him.

I could never have kept a blog in Iraq. We lived at the dirt, spending an average of 20 days away from the Forward Operating Base (FOB), and when I had access to a computer it was only for 30 minutes at a time, often with a two-hour wait. That was enough time to e-mail my wife, father, and Mike Murphy, and that was it. I thank The Brownsville Herald for publishing the dispatches, though they were indeed very few and far between.

Hell, the first six months I counted nine showers, and probably only three times as many brief forays on the internet. Hard to believe I'm back to teaching high school English in a clean, well-lighted classroom. Hemingway has never been so relevant.