Champions of Kuwait

Sorry for the lengthy delay in posting.  My typical routine is to draft and edit these posts on Sundays, last Sunday I was up at Ali al Salem and didn’t get back until late and this whole week was quite busy.  But, that means I have some interesting things to relate.

I have mentioned that I started playing softball again while here in Kuwait.  We started out a little rough, losing our first game 18-2, but since then we have been on a bit of a roll.  Last weekend we drove up to Ali (some of the team was in what we lovingly call a Scooby Bus, see below) to play in a softball tournament up there.  It is an airbase, so the teams we faced were primarily Air Force, although a couple Army teams from Arifjan came up and the Navy Customs group up there also fielded a team.  We played 4 games over 2 days and just ran right through everyone, winning the whole thing.  That is why I didn’t post, we got back on Sunday afternoon and I just crashed as this old body got beat up a bit, including getting involved in a Pete Rose-like play at the plate (I was safe).  As you can see, these fields are just flat places in the desert with a fence around them.

Simultaneously the team was playing a season here at Arifjan; we entered the playoffs as the #1 seed and the finals were this past week.  Thursday night we won the league here, making us the champions of all of Kuwait (as far as we can tell, anyway).  Our team would just go on these streaks where we were unstoppable – in the final game we put up 13 runs in the first inning and we did similar things in other games.  Early in the year our defense won our games, as the games piled up we slowed down a bit and made some errors, but not enough to hurt us too bad.  So that is what I have been doing the past two weeks I have been deployed – playing softball and beating up on my body.  My legs are all cut up and my joints ache, so I took the past week of workouts off.

It isn’t all softball, naturally, this week we moved our tent.  Our little compound of three tents has to move, as I have mentioned before.  I usually prefer to just take the bull by the horns and go do things, so that is what we did this week with our tent, leaving the HQ element in the old location.  It also makes us the guinea pigs, we get to figure out the problems as it is easier for us to have a backup plan than the HQ folks.  All they have are those two tents while we have offices in multiple locations throughout Kuwait that we can use if we really have to.  If you have moved before you know that moving the big stuff is easy but the little leftover unclassifiable stuff kills you.  That is pretty much how it went, the internal walls (think Office Space in a tent) came down, the desks and computers and file cabinets all went into a large conex box (those 20 and 40 foot long containers that China uses to ship virtually everything you use), trucked over to the new place and we started setting up.  All that is left is that last little bit of random stuff that needs to be put away, the guys really did an amazing job when you consider they all have to do their regular jobs on top of helping with the move.  I have a great company.

Overall it went very well, I included some pictures of the progress.  As guinea pigs we did uncover some issues, our biggest one is phones.  We had old phones with wires like you have in your house, our new tent uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), basically using the bandwidth of the internet connection, which means our old phones can’t plug into the wall.  This is a bigger hurdle than you might think, as these phones are not just lying around so we still have a skeleton crew in the old tent manning a couple phones. 

On the bright side we have lots of new neighbors.  Our old location was pretty isolated as they are shutting it down.  Now we are in a neighborhood with about 16 or so other Army tents and more going up around us.  Lots of folks stopped by this week to say hello and welcome us, just like you might do to a new neighbor.  There hasn’t been a pie or an invite to dinner yet, but they do have a tent with four of those massage chairs in it and I can’t wait to try them out.

I appreciate all the kind notes and e-mails I get.  I can’t always respond right away, but I do read them all!  And now for your moment of zen...