St. Louis Cardinals

The Cardinals flag is flying in our office, they swept the Cubs this week. If you are a Cards fan, there are not many other teams you want to see them sweep as much as you do the Cubs. We have a lot of fun with baseball in the office, since the group I am here with is from the Missouri Air National Guard out of St. Louis 5 of the 7 of us are Cardinal fans. The others favor the Diamondbacks and the Royals.

Seems no matter where you go, if you are a Cardinals fan, you'll run into a Cubs fan. It's no different here in Afghanistan. We have one in the next office, a civilian contractor that works in the air traffic control tower. We have an ongoing banter with him whenever he comes into the office. Today, I had to correct him that the Cardinals are up three games in head to head games this year, not just two as he claimed. One of the Cards in the office told him he could fly the Cubs flag on our flag pole if the Cubs win more games than the Cards. Little chance of that happening.

The corn and cucumbers are growing, I think they like the heat and sun. We haven't had much for rain since I planted them, so far I've remembered to water them every day. We also rigged up a makeshift irrigation system for the corn, we extended the condensate hose on the air conditioner to get the water to the corn, works pretty good, but doesn't produce enough water for the entire patch. One of the KBR employees that works for us as a surveyor has adopted the cucumber patch. He has been working on them this week and they look like they are doing better. Maybe we'll have some corn and cucs before we leave here.
Here's another example of Afghani contractor ingenuity -

The contractor is constructing the concrete drive and awning on this building. When they installed the columns next to the building, the posts were a little too short, it didn't look like we would be able to open the doors when they were done. No problem, the contractor cut a couple pieces of 2X6 for spacers to get the needed height.

The next example I noticed this morning when I was taking a look at the contractor's work. They were supposed to attach the side X braces with lag bolts. When I looked closely the contractor had pounded the lag bolts into the wood. The head of the bolt was flattened and driven into the wood. One of the army mechanics in the building came out to talk to me and confirmed it, they installed the lag bolts with a sledge hammer. If you don't have a wrench, no problem, just drive them in like a big nail.

Other than these "minor" touch ups, the contractor has done a nice job on this project. Just needs to follow the drawings and specs a little closer. We have been taking a closer look at the projects this week as we had a bad failure earlier this week. A wind storm came in on Monday afternoon and took down a structure that was under construction by the airfield passenger terminal. There were a couple people injured by the structure when it collapsed. It appears it failed due to some of these "acts of ingenuity" that the contractor took on this one, not building it exactly as designed.