Staying in Touch--with Co-Workers

When I am back in the US I work at a museum and library of chemistry and early science that has books in its collections dating back to the invention of printing in the 1400s. In some ways, we are the most low-tech place you could imagine. The staff reads books. People visit to read books. We all talk about books. But if Chemical Heritage Foundation is low-tech at heart, it has a high-tech side. We have an extensive Web site, a Facebook page and many other connections to the high-tech world. And since I miss the people I work with the best of these high-tech connections is "Distillations" the CHF podcast (Free subscription on iTunes.)

when I go to the gym or in have a few minutes I can listen to the weekly podcast on various subjects in chemistry and the world around us. I liked the podcast when I was in America, but now listening Jen, Jim, Sarah, Bob, Jody (not THAT Jody), Audra, or the always mysterious Anke talk about chemistry in the kitchen, or medieval love potions, or how to be green and clean, I hear voices that I miss. Of course, they are all being professional and informative as they speak, but I have heard everyone who is on the podcast laugh and make jokes in person, so I can usually remember some funny thing Anke said about Medieval cures that were worse than the disease, or Jim showing me a Ship of Fools, or Sarah making jokes about almost anything.

CHF is a great place to work. If you don't believe me, listen to the podcast. Almost everyone who is "on the air" is on the staff.

So if high-tech might have kept me from becoming a writer, it certainly is nice to have it for things like listening to people I know and like on line.

Then and Now: Staying in Touch

When I was stationed in (West) Germany, my peak income as a sergeant was $5,000 per year in 1979, the third year of my deployment. At that time the only options for staying in touch with America were phone calls and snail mail. I phoned my family once in a while, but mail was the only real option. Compared to now, calling home cost a fortune: a ten-minute phone call cost at least $5 when most of us made less than $100 per week.

Now I call landlines on Skype from here in the Middle East and half the time I am charged nothing. Phone cards have rates around 20 cents per minute for a call that is as reliable as calling in the states. Email only costs the access fee for internet, same with Facebook and every other electronic means of calling/writing home.

I am very happy to be able to talk to every member of my family every week. I also call friends and co-workers just on a whim because it is cheap and easy. This blog allows me to stay in touch with a lot of people without clogging their email InBoxes.

But no Blessing in this life is unmixed. I learned how to write on my deployment to Germany. I joined the Army a High School graduate who had no aspirations of going to college. Seeing the beauty of the German countryside, talking with Germans, training with British troops, flying to France in a helicopter for a War Memorial ceremony all were experiences beyond pictures. I wanted to tell my family and friends about them.

I don't know how it started, but a few months into the deployment, I started writing several drafts of the same experience as letters. First I wrote to my Mom. She mostly cared that I wrote, not what I wrote, so she got the first draft. Then I would write to Frank Capuano, my best friend from high school, or someone else who I wanted to tell about simply being in a foreign country. Sometimes I would write another more letter, same story. But the last letter in the series would be either to my sister, Jean, or my uncle Jack. They were the best writers I knew personally so I by the time I wrote their copy, I was 4 or 5 drafts from my first thoughts.

A year later when I got a job on the base newspaper it was because of all that practice writing. Even though I write every day now, the process is not the same. I write, I hit the PUBLISH POST button and never revise.

Of course, if I were writing five drafts of each post, I would be posting a lot less. But I have no doubt that I learned the craft of being a writer by those laborious rewrites. I will be writing other posts on this subject--in one draft.

We Arrived--Weather Forecast is HOT until November

We got to Iraq today. It was a 30-minute flight that took 11 hours if you include getting up at 0030 (just after midnight), loading baggage at 0200 after waiting for the bus for almost an hour, two hours for the 20-mile ride to the airport squeezed into a bus with seats not made for soldiers wearing body armor, another hour to load the baggage on pallets for the plane (300 duffel bags weigh 50 pounds or more each) then waiting on rocks for four hours for the plane to take off. Finally, the same 20 guys from who loaded most of the baggage unloaded all of the baggage.

Now that we are finally here, Iraq is flat, dusty and hot. It should stay that way for most ofthe time we are here. Tomorrow we will begin work. Today most of us took naps and called home after the short flight that took so long.

My Birthday in 1979

I got an email yesterday from Bruder Timotheus of the Land of Kanaan, Darmstadt, Germany, asking if I remembered what I did on my 26th birthday in 1979. I had no idea.

So Bruder Timotheus, then Sgt. Cliff Almes, reminded me that May 2, 1979, was his discharge date (He used the military acronym ETS (expiration of Term of Service) showing just how deep they burn those acronyms in us.) On that day I drove Cliff from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt in my 1969 Renault TS with a 4-speed shifter on the column.

On that day, Cliff began 10 months in the novitiate of the Franciscan Brotherhood at Kanaan and later became Bruder Timotheus. He is still there. He is also an American so he fixes things at the monastery and for the last ten years has been the network administrator for Kanaan Ministries.

I talked to Cliff today on Skype. Birds were singing in the background as we spoke. It is spring all over the northern hemisphere, but spring has a very different sound and feel in central Germany than in Kuwait.

Tour of Our Camp

Here are a few views of our current home taken by my Battle Buddy.

The Showers at the edge of tent city


Our Tents


Blast walls surround every building or group of buildings. Units decorate the blast walls as they pass through the camp.


Starbucks seen from the dirt road out front


The Post Chapel. That is a Baptist full-immersion baptismal out front!!

Starbucks Update--56th Birthday in Kuwait

STARBUCKS IN KUWAIT. THE SAND-FILLED BARRIER IS TO THE LEFT.

Today I traded my $99 bike for a Venti Carmel Macchiatto at Starbucks. One of the baristas here asked me about buying it. I felt strange selling the bike, but I could trade it for a latte. So I got a 2-week bike rental for $99 and a free latte!!

Tomorrow I will celebrate my 56th birthday in Kuwait. I was thinking I would celebrate my natal day in Iraq, but Kuwait is close.

Then and Now: Contractors and Training

One of the big differences between the end-of-Viet Nam Army and today is Contractors. In the early 70s, soldiers scooped creamed chip beef on toast in the the Chow Hall serving line. That same soldier got up every day at 2 am to start cooking our high-calorie breakfast. Soldiers drove buses, dug field latrines, hauled ammo and did most other tasks, important and menial, in our every day lives.

Now contractors do many of these jobs. The intent, I suppose, is to allow the soldiers to concentrate on training, and to have more soldiers be warriors and fewer be cooks, clerks and drivers.

Which sounds good, but as someone who has been both a consultant and a corporate manager, I can tell you the world is a different place when you are paid by the hour (contractor)and when you are on salary (soldier). Soldier time is a fixed cost. If we wait three hours, the budget does not change. Contractors get paid overtime if things run late. Everyone in every part of government is worried about costs, so soldiers now know that training begins and ends when depending on the bus schedule.

In the 70s Army if we went to a training area and screwed up something, the soldiers who drove the buses waited till we were done re-running the course for a couple of hours. On our recent convoy training the big former infantryman who conducted our training said if we did not complete the exercise to his satisfaction we would do it again till we got it right. We (and he) all knew he was full of crap. No matter how badly we did, the buses were scheduled to arrive at 2pm on the last day of training. (Actually, we did very well so he got to leave early.) And his shift ended at noon that day. So the contractor was not paid past noon and the civilian drivers would have to be paid extra if they waited for us (NOT vice versa). So he could bluster, but at noon on the last day, he was gone. The buses arrived at 4pm, which was OK because a few hundred soldiers waiting out in the desert is OK--no additional cost when soldiers wait for the bus.