Azza

Azza at about 11 weeks of age.

Meet Azza. I've had her for a month, and she's about 12 and a half weeks old now, give or take a week.

Back before the Saudis got religion, the Arabs used to name their girl children after plants and animals. Azza means "young gazelle."

 Azza is a "desert dog." What a desert dog actually is depends on who you are talking to but they are often mixed with saluki or canaan, the former a hunting sight hound with folded ears and the latter a desert herding breed with prick ears. Desert dogs can come in any color combo depending on what was mixed in (doberman, lab, golden, GSD, pit bull, etc.) but a common color pattern for the generic "desert dog" with probable saluki origins is orange or gold on top and white below with white accents, like Azza. I've never seen a "desert dog" with a lot of coat.

Azza the day I brought her home. She's about 8 weeks old here.

 Most desert dogs are pretty leggy and lean, although if they have a lot of lab or pit bull in them they can be chunky. Azza's saluki roots give her that leggy, streamlined look and almond-shaped eye holes (her eyes themselves are round like any other dog).

Azza exhausted at last.

So far I'm pretty sure she doesn't have any solid bones but is instead made of cooked noodles. I've never seen such a flexible, floppy dog. Her tail is even more amazing. Whip thin, she appears to have a lot of control over it, holding it high and curved over her back when happy. But it flies around like a wet string when she gets the zoomies.

Harry doesn't actually hate her. As long as she behaves herself, he tolerates her well. They are sharing a quiet moment in the morning sun.

I've been curious about these dogs ever since I saw them. Most of them are aggressive and often bite people. They maintain huge bubbles of space around themselves and rarely tolerate touching by strangers. And unfortunately, most of the people on camp that have one of these dogs don't have a clue about how to manage them. They can't be walked. They have to be locked up when people come over. I wondered if a consistent program of positive training and socialization begun at a very early age would make a difference. So I've been keeping an eye out for a very young desert dog.

About a month ago, Azza landed in my lap. She came from a litter whelped by a feral desert dog who lives at one of the private Aramco beaches.

Azza and Kinky playing. He starts it as often as she does!

The switch in her brain may flip in a few months and she could turn into psychotic desert dog, but for now she's proving to be a challenging but very rewarding training experiment.

Upul's comment upon seeing her was classic: "Ma'am, she's going to be big!" I hope so. How can I say I am a dog trainer if I don't spend some time, truly dedicated and focused time, training something besides a smooth fox terrier (as much as I love them)? Yes, I'm even thinking about agility!

What?

Nothing like a nap in the sun! When I see tableaux like this, I really do hope she doesn't turn into Cujo in a few months. Oh yes, Azza's touching Mimi, who's in turn touching Harry.

Azza gets along well with Mimi and Kinky. Tsingy ignores her. Harry hates her but he has so far applied extremely appropriate discipline when she annoys him. Pesty puppy won't get the message so I let him manage it his way (he's chomped her four times but so far no damage--and he gave her plenty of advanced warning each time!).

Azza and Mimi like to play very rough but I allow it...for now. Mimi seems to enjoy having another dog to play with although she is far from her puppy days.

Azza is all feet and legs right now. I know she looks half-starved but that's how these saluki-desert dogs develop. Really, I'm stuffing her with food!

Looks ferocious and it is pretty rough but they seem to both have excellent bite inhibition.

Azza's training program so far includes sitting to have the leash removed and not running wild until released, loose lead walking, sitting on verbal or hand command, sitting when people pass us while walking, stay, recall, name game, waiting for other dogs to get treats, not jumping on things or me ("off"), pooping and peeing on a schedule (my schedule, that is) and not in the house, bite inhibition during play, and tugging games. She hasn't shown much love for the hand touch game but I'm working on that. She loves all kinds of toys and it's easy to get a three-way game going with Harry on one tug, Azza on another, and Mimi playing fetch with a third toy. I can growl in her face and she'll growl back and tug harder! I love feisty dogs!

For now, I think Azza has a nice home with us.

Flora and Fauna

I found these tracks a couple of weekends ago in the jebels. I have no idea what made them--mammal? reptile? Judging by the tracks, it's a fairly good sized animal with a much wider body than the dogs have. Hedgehogs make delicate little round tracks. Foxes make tracks that looks kind of like cat prints. Lizards usually have a tail track down the center of their path. So what could this be?

These aren't strictly speaking local fauna but I realized that I have accumulated a rather large population of the "roadkill" dog toys. The T3i rating of these toys has inched up to the coveted 10 points. Both dogs love these toys!

Harry's collection of bear babies is looking a bit sad: one is just a brown rag and the other is missing an arm. He loves his froggy too but you can see that Mimi tried to get to his brains through his throat, removing the squeaker pouch for bonus points.

Who's There?

I've said it before, I'm sure I'll say it again: it is a tragedy that Mohammad, peace be upon him, wasn't a natural historian. If he had been, there's no doubt that the Saudis would be more interested in the world around them. Since they aren't, it's up to westerners to write the natural history books. And from what I can tell, most of us westerners are working our asses off to keep this country running, thus limiting our leisure time to write books on plants and animals of the Arabian peninsula. But that's a soapbox for another time.

Information on the flora and fauna of the Eastern Province is spotty at best. Even so, I've become very interested in the subject since the dogs and I have been frequenting the jebels.

The wind "renews" the loose sand surfaces every day so even though the jebels get a lot of traffic--human, dog, car, bike--if you get out there very early in the morning, there are tracks, trails, and pawprints in every square meter of sand.

Who is making these tracks? Without a good reference book, I can only point my finger at the usual suspects: arthropods, reptiles, and small mammals. Oh, and a few birds for good measure. The vast majority of these creatures are nocturnal. I'd have to set up an overnight stakeout to see them.

The sandy areas are peppered with small plants and I believe there is a direct relationship between the winter rains we had, the number of plants green and growing now, and the number of tracks that I've been seeing.

Here are some photos.

I think these tracks are made by a creature that burrows just under the sand surface. It may be looking for minute bits of organic material to eat. Fossilized tracks that look just like this can be found in marine deposits. In that setting they are made by worms. There are no worms in the dry sand but something is behaving like those marine worms. The track is only 3-4 millimeters wide.


Having seen the small red foxes that live on camp a couple of times now, I am pretty sure these are fox tracks. Each pawprint is about 2.0-2.5cm wide; the prints spread a bit in the soft sand (I've compared these to the prints the terriers make). This was a veritable interstate highway of fox activity the night before. We also find quite a bit of what I think is fox poop.


I think these are made by one of the three varieties of dove that live in the Eastern Province. White-cheeked bulbuls are common in the jebel area but their feet are too small to make these tracks.

Each of these tracks is smaller than a US dime. I think they are jerboa tracks. Sometimes they walk on all fours and sometimes they hop.

These are definitely lizard tracks. I've seen lizards making them. What's interesting is that the lizards will run along a vehicle rut in the sand for many yards before veering up and off. There are two different sizes of tracks here. The larger one is about 2cm across.

More Desert Adventures

Fox terriers in tan-colored desert landscape.

DSL thinks that I'm just putting the same photo up over and over--"fox terriers in tan-colored desert landscape"! She says she can't tell the difference. I thought this was funny because this had occurred to me too.

But I assure you, every photo is new. And in this post, you will be entertained by even more pictures of dogs in the desert!

Harry leading the way up to the jebels.

I have found a new place to take the dogs for weekend and evening walks. It's an area of perhaps a dozen jebels separated by deep wadis located to the northwest of my house. It is accessed by a parking lot next to a soccer field. I can even get in an hour's walk/run with the dogs after work. The topography provides a considerable cardio challenge for all three of us. I guesstimate there may be a couple of hundred feet of elevation difference between the top of the highest jebel and the deepest wadi. Doesn't sound like much but when you scramble up and down that half a dozen times in an hour, well, it can be fairly challenging.

GoogleEarth image. Pins mark my house and the jebels to the NNW. Click on the image to expand it.

The rocks exposed in Dhahran are part of the Dammam Dome, an anticlinal fold with four-way closure. Every rock you can see is some sort of sabkha carbonate deposited in a restricted marine setting. Sabkha carbonates later exposed in desert environments erode into interesting but quite jagged surfaces that are related to their original depositional environment...but this isn't supposed to be a geology lecture. After our first trip into the jebels, I learned that I needed to wear my boots (trail shoes were simply not up to the task). The dogs' feet are quickly toughening up on the exposed rock.

Investigating interesting cracks.

The jebels are now our preferred exercise location. I can exhaust the dogs with a good hour of scrambling several times a week and stay out there for a couple of hours on weekend mornings. The vistas across camp are interesting, there are plenty of holes and crevices for the dogs to sniff about, we've only seen one other person out there so far (quite a change from the crowds walking around the golf course in the evenings), and it has never been a primary trash dump for camp so it is just nicer to walk around there than in the trash tip and the spray fields.

Looking SSE towards Khobar and the Arabian Gulf.

Yesterday, we had another desert adventure when we went out with the hash again. This particular run wasn't all that great (it was far too long) but the scenery was nice and the company around the fire afterwards was entertaining.

My little social butterfly Harry at the start of the hash.

This hash was an open desert run with a lot of soft sand/dune scrambling. Most people dropped to a walk after the first few dunes.

I took a quick break to take this photo. Mimi had been pulling me along and she was wondering why we were stopping.

The red circle marks the halfway point of the route. If you enlarge the pic, you might be able to see some people on the top of that hill. Very few of us made it out that far. This is a great photo of the open desert though.

A Walk in the Desert

Mimi and Harry, south end of Dhahran camp, January 2010.

I decided not to go on the hash today so I took the dogs for a long walk in the desert/trash tip south of camp. I try to do this at least once every weekend; this weekend we made it out there both mornings. Today we wandered around for almost two hours--the weather was fine, the sky was blue, and we had nowhere else we needed to be. I collected a geode, not a particularly amazing feat as there are millions of them out there. But you usually find them already broken so I thought it worth keeping when I found an intact one. Of course I broke a corner of it off to make sure it was nice and sparkly inside!

There is a large jebel in the southwest corner of camp that we climb regularly. This photo was taken from the top looking back north into the Hills housing area.

Harry, King of the Jebel. January 2010.

Here is a funny picture of Harry's poop (his is the fresh brown specimen on the left). He has started pooping on top of things: rocks, bridge rails, bushes. The higher he can get his poop, the happier he seems to be. He isn't the only dog that does this--there are certain bushes in the trash tip which are festooned with turds of all sizes.


The ADSL is a great improvement over the phone-as-wireless-modem setup. A post like this with several photos would have taken me over an hour to prepare--each photo would have to be cut way down in resolution and then it would take as long as five minutes each to load each photo one at a time. Now with the ADSL connction, I loaded all of the photos at one time and it took about 30 seconds for the lot. Plus I will be able to save a lot of money--the unlimited internet plan for the phone was costing me SR 300 per month. The ADSL is only SR 40 per month--about USD 10.

I close with a picture of the chocolate sheet cake incident. It needs no further explanation!

Housekeeping

Most Aramco housing was built in the 1970's and 1980's. The general architectural style is kissing cousins with Communist Europe grey concrete, but the sand turns the concrete here brownish red. The salt water forms large cancerous rotting patches on the older buildings.

Salt water? Yes. Water injection is a method used to extract additional reserves as well as increase or maintain pressures in reservoirs. In the bad old days, Aramco, then still an American company, injected clean groundwater into their oil and gas wells. Until they started running out of that clean water.

Our sinks, showers, washing machines, and outside taps run with "raw water," lightly treated ground water. It is potable, but just barely. It is so salty that it will burn chapped lips.

The sweet water spigot is the tall swan-neck affair on the right.

We all have a second spigot in our kitchens that runs with "sweet water" that has been desalinated. That water is used for drinking, cooking, ice trays, washing vegetables.

There are severe fines for cross-tapping the sweet water line into the raw water line, even the threat of losing your job (which means automatic deportation here).

Yeah, it's a pain. Soap, shampoo, laundry detergent don't quite work the way you expect in such super hard water. But everyone on camp has to deal with this so there is little point in complaining.

Back to Aramco housing. The size of house that you are eligible for (total square feet and number of bedrooms) is determined by your marital status, pay grade, and the length of time you've been here, in that order. There are some houses that are detached but most are duplexes or townhouse style. In two years, I will be able to "bid" on available houses that meet the criteria for my status and pay grade. Until then, I live in a place that I was assigned to. Because I am classified as "executive single female" the list of potential competitors for the available housing list is small (not that many single women at my pay grade; most single women work at the hospital and I've found when meeting new people that if they find out I am over here by myself before they find out anything else, they always assume I'm working at the hospital; I do not let them labor under that incorrect assumption for long). From what I've been told, I can easily get into a standalone with a backyard (with grass), patio, garage, on the order of 1000-1100 square feet, after my two year wait period is up. It can't come soon enough.

As a result, I don't plan to do too much to the current place I'm in. Still, I've felt like I've been living in a cheap hotel for the past month. I'm sure I'll feel more settled when my household goods arrive (now projected for late December).

This 1970's-era Motel 6 aura is enhanced by the thoroughly hideous furniture that Aramco supplies. After four months, I start paying rent on all of these lovely items, including stove, fridge, and washer/dryer, which is really a token amount, as is the rent on the apartment. They deduct these items directly from my paycheck.

I did cave quickly on the issue of a couch, though. The one in the apartment was grotty, stained, stinky, and hard as a rock. I got a new leather couch at Ikea my first weekend here.

Before. Eewww.

After. Aaahh.

I am in a townhouse with neighbors on both sides and one directly behind me. They mix up floorplans in the buildings so there are small places next to larger ones. In the "cluster" style of housing, there are 12 units per building. My behind neighbor has a floorplan identical to mine. My next door neighbor has a 700 square foot unit. You get the idea.

Here is my 810-square foot floorplan. It doesn't show my patio, which is perhaps another 100 square feet and L-shaped.

My building is on the left. See the bit sticking out to the right? That's my study with my patio surrounding it.

Looking out my bedroom window across the top of my living room and study.

The other direction out my bedroom window. The building on the other side of the sidewalk is identical to mine with 12 units of the same size and floorplan. I am not entirely sure but it seems that only single women live in my building and only single men live in the building across the way.

I'll have more to say on the housing later but I thought I'd close this post with a couple of photos from our short desert stroll this morning.

Something smells interesting!

Enjoying the view.

I really had to work to keep the dogs from trampling this before I could get the camera set up. These are raindrop spatters in the sand. It does rain here but not in a collected or regional fashion. It was really windy last night so this bit of rain fell sometime very early this morning (I was out there at 6:30 am).

A Small Desert Adventure

On Thursday morning I took the dogs out to the edge of camp to see the desert.

In the desert, looking north back to the Dhahran Hills housing area in camp.

The southernmost road at the edge of camp. Looking to the southeast. Housing on the left, desert on the right.

Roads into camp are heavily guarded but as you can see, the camp is accessible from the desert by off-road vehicles. This isn’t quite the security risk it might seem because almost every transaction in and off camp requires that you produce your Aramco ID if not your iqama as well.

There isn't much trouble someone could get into on foot in camp. Most old camp hands leave their cars and houses unlocked all the time (I can't quite bring myself to do that and so lock my house when I leave for the day). Punishment for most crimes is death so the risk of theft or other mayhem of that sort is very low.

The guards at the security gates wear bulletproof vests and are heavily armed. There is a main set of gates at all of the roads leading into camp and a second set of gates and a fence entirely surrounding the “core complex”, the set of administrative, exploration, development, and engineering buildings where I work, and yet another set of gates at the entrance to the larger housing areas within camp. ID has to be produced at all of these and before you can get into the "core complex" admin area, you have to send your bags through a scanner.

There is a Saudi military base not far out from camp to the south as several large Aramco production and refining facilities. I can see the lights of these installations glowing at night.
But the housing area isn’t entirely fenced off and as I mentioned, the back end of it is open to the desert.

Looking north back into Dhahran Hills housing. Mimi on her tether.

[I discovered after downloading these photos that I’ve dropped my camera one too many times so you’ll have to excuse the quality. I’ll try to get into Al Khobar one night next week and get a new camera.]

Camp is heavily landscaped but wherever you see a living plant there is a drip or irrigation line running directly to it. There is even an 18-hole golf course glowing green as can be!

I took these next pictures on Friday morning. There is a paved walkway around most of the golf course that is just behind my building. I take the dogs out on it twice a day, half an hour in the morning and an hour every evening. About 10 minutes' walk from my building, there is a small jebel at the edge of the golf course. We climbed up it this morning to get the big view.

Looking north over the golf course. Main camp is on the other side of the golf course, Dhahran Hills housing is behind me.

Looking west along the boundary of Dhahran Hills housing which is to my left. You can see the path around the golf course with some housing to the left. My building is just around the curve in the path.

Looking south back into the center of Dhahran Hills housing. This housing area is separated from main camp by the golf course. You can see the circum-golf course path edged by rows of landscaping below then a main road, Rolling Hills Blvd, then the housing area. Beyond that is the desert area where we were on Thursday morning.

All of this lush greenery is watered with reclaimed water. They used to spray untreated water out into the desert in the “spray fields.” Now they clean the water up a bit, hopefully removing the nasty bits such as E. coli and other pathogens, and return that to camp for landscaping.

The former spray fields represent a wonderful place to take dogs, or so I was told. So I decided to check it out on Thursday morning.

We got there at 6am just as the sun was coming up. It is always hazy in the mornings because there is a lot of moisture in the air at night (no rain, so if native plants can't survive on dew they don't do too well).

Harry and Mimi investigating a pile of trash in the desert at sunrise. The Saudi military base is visible in the background. Taking pictures of things like that is strictly forbidden so I'm skirting the rules a bit with this picture.

Harry got to run free but I put Mimi on a 30-foot steel tether line (I would be embarrassed as a dog trainer to admit that she doesn't have a recall except that she's a 4 yr old fox terrier; that pretty much says it all). That cable tether still gave her plenty of running room. Here are some more photos.

Harry baptizing a little tiny jebel.

Running along a road in the former spray fields. Looking west.

I had been told there are wild dogs living in the desert and, to my surprise, I saw two of them on Thursday morning. They have the body plan of a saluki but have relatively short coats. Both of them were identical, light beige/tan on top, erect ears, longish snout, narrow faces, longish tail with some feathers, white bellies and white feet. They were pretty tall, maybe twice as tall as Harry, but not massive or heavy boned. Both of the ones I saw took off when they spotted us. I had also been told that they can be aggressive but I don’t want to test that theory at all. Sorry, no pictures, but I can probably get some at another time.

Blooming frangipani and agave.