No Sleep

I've only got 14 minutes before my electricity is cut for the daily three hours, so I must make this quick.

Didn't get any sleep last night as the "fierce clashes" (as the media is calling them, sounds more like war) went on into the night. It's not so easy to drift off into dreamland when you can hear rockets, gunfire and explosions, some so loud you think you are trapped in the middle of it. At about 2:30am the wind changed, and a massive thunderstorm occured. In may, Beirut hardly ever gets rain, let alone a dramatic electrical thunderstorm like that. I don't believe in God but it's hard not to see the symbolism- nature, if not God, was obviously telling those brainless gunmen to stop killing each other, go home and let Beirut sleep. It worked until the thunder (which was indistinguishable from the explosions to be honest) and lightning (also easy to mistake for gun fire light) subsided, and the fighting picked up again seriously at about 5.30am. It's now 8.42am and its still reverberating through the city. I gave up on sleep hours ago. Seems as though 'God' is still pissed off, because it going to storm again.

Most people are at home, hostage to this ridiculous and utterly pointless violence. I am running out of milk (there wasn't any at the supermarket yesterday, surprise surprise), so I am gonna start to get really annoyed when I can't have my cup of Earl Grey with milk: a small indulgence when you're inprisoned in your own home. Stupid gunmen, did they learn nothing from the suffering of their families in the fifteen years of civil war that tore this country apart? Do they really want to repeat that?

(Picture from AlJazeera article. It seems AlJazeera (Arabic/English), Hariri's Mustaqbal TV Hizbullah's Al Manar TV have the best footage of what's going on outside, but no truly good footage is yet being shown.)