Communication Breakdown

I bought a cell phone from an Iranian company here called ROSHAN and I'm pretty sure that means I am funding terrorism. They are cheap little phones and I bought a sim card and a 50 dollar pay-as-you-go calling card. I was told I could call home for about 25 cents a minute. Not too shabby. I called Valli and had a great conversation with almost no delay. But after ten minutes I had burned through my 50 bucks.

Hmm.

Maybe it's a little more than 25 cent a minute. But i found out that incoming calls are free. Valli bought an ATT intl. card that she discovered had an only slightly better rate of 2.50 a minute.

Getting closer.

Valli gets online and finds a company thats sells minutes at about 15-25 cent a minute. Perfect. She can use it to call me during her free times and it only costs us and time for the card. So we do that and the conversation goes something like this.

v: Hi!

d: What?

v: Hi, it's Valli.

d: Hello?

v: HI!

d: Hi.

v: What?

d: HI BACK!

v: oh. I got a calling card.

d: What?

v: Nevermind.

d: What?

v: What?

d: I CANT HEAR YOU!

v: WHAT? I CANT HEAR YOU!

~call dropped~

So we are still working on the whole cell phone thing. I suspect it might soon get scrapped as a failed experiment. But by golly, Harrells don't quit. Until we have wasted a pantload of time and money trying it out, anyway.

BUT I did get a personal dial-up subscription today for only 100 bucks a month. That ought to buy the Taliban a RPG or three. Thanks Iran. And Russia. And China. And Pakistan. And Columbia. Thanks for helping me keep the fight for Afghanistan going. And if I left any other countries out I'm sorry.

But if it means I can Skype its totally worth it. Right? And it means I can do my homework from my room. I just finished my first assignment, a Memo of Introduction for my business writing class. I also wrote this blog. So. Ya. Totally worth it.

"The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance." John Ruskin

The flowers we have been enjoying in Tennessee are great. From our crocuses, irises, tulips and hostas it's nice to see so much color. Though we've labored hours on many plants the ones we've enjoyed the most preceded our arrival. These tiger lilies could have been planted here thirty years ago for all we know. For as thick as they grow, they very well could have been here that long running the length of our front yard and framing our mail box. Dave took these pictures and did a wonderful job.

He couldn't pass up the opportunity to exhibit his shiny hog. Which he took to the local race track last weekend for a little drag racing. He was delighted with his times and speeds. Legal speeds, in this instance, of 87 mph in 1/8 mi. Unfortunately, our camera was not in attendance or we would have some video to share. A similar outing may not occur for quite a while, since the motorcycle is currently lame with a flat tire; due to all it's burn out on said excursion.

Take Notes

...or rather don't. Take change instead!

Yesterday we bug-bombed our ant-infested car and needed something to do while the fumes worked their magic. We decided to go see a flick but didn't want use our week's date money on a Monday. I raided my change cup instead.

The change cup has been hit pretty hard recently so all it had left was dimes and under. Anyway- we had enough dimes and nickles to pay for a pair of movie tickets. To make things easier for the ticket guy we separated all the change in little baggies and added up the totals. But when we paid, he said he had to count it all out by hand. Super-lame!

He didn't count out our 100 dimes and our 60 nickles. Instead, he just stood there holding the baggies- looking at them. Then he'd move a few coins around and sigh, then he'd look at us, then look and the coins and sigh again. Eventually he must have decided that counting up all our change wasn't worth his time. Since he couldn't print us a ticket without counting the coins, he let us keep them, and told us to go see the show without paying.

What the what!? Go without paying? How awesome is that! There is such thing as a free lunch, and it's at the Great Escape Mega-Plex. So now we'll never have to pay for a movie again. We'll just keep breaking out the coin baggies over and over.

I highly recommend everyone do this, just don't do it at the same place I do, because then I will have to cut you.

Why I Can't Get Promoted

Some of you who have experience with the military might wonder: Why hasn't Dave been promoted in nearly three years? I myself wonder that all the time. In this post I am going to try and answer that question.

To get promoted in the Army you need four things: time in grade, points, a peer recommendation and a visit to the promotion board.

Way back in the day- when I got back from Iraq- I was too lazy to do anything about it. I didn't have the time in grade, and I didn't feel like gaining points through gay Army correspondence courses when I had a new wife, new house and various other distractions.

A year down the road- Now I have the time in grade, and I've stocked up a bit on points by now. Now I have no time. My boss (the one who is supposed to recommend me) is gone for months doing some kind of Army training and I am left in charge to keep the Aid Station functioning and get us all packed up and ready to go to Afghanistan. We worked long days and weekend during this time. I sure as heck wasn't studying for any boards, and I can't recommend myself. So- no dice there.

Then we get to Afghanistan and I move to the Medevac. Now I have lots of time to study and scrape up the few remaining points I need to make that cutoff. So I told my new boss I was ready to go to the promotion board. I had all my points, awards, comendations, letters from previous supervisors- everything all ready to go. And he said he won't send me to a board until I have finished my progression as a flight medic. And that is understandable. He wants to know that I can do the job I have now, not the one I was doing for the last three years. Fine. Another month or two won't hurt.

After seven months of delays, broken aircraft, trainers going on leave and getting send to other bases, crappy weather, and an overwhelming number of medevac missions I was finally progressed and signed off as a flight ready crew member. I went to my boss again to send me to the promotion board. He said not yet. I needed some more experience flying missions and getting familiar with working with a crew, managing mass casualty scenes, and working on the patients. Okay- whatever. He wants me to have more mission experience. Cool.

Two months later: I don't know anyone who has been the rank of Specialist as long as I have unless they have been busted or can't pass a physical fitness test. People who have been in the Army less then two years now outrank me. It's getting a little insane. Every week I hounded my boss asking him to either recommend me for a board, or give me a written counseling statement explaining why he wouldn't, and what I still needed to do or be before he would. Finally he did. He said he would send me to the board. I would go in November and I have tons of time to prepare.

Two weeks later, or about a two weeks ago: I pissed off my platoon leader. I bit the hand that feeds. I had just finished a really crappy mission where lots of things went wrong. My platoon leader was chastising me for something that I had no control over while I was trying to restock my aircraft in the dark for the next mission. And instead of saying- Yes Sir, it's my fault. Everything is my fault and you are right. I said something like- I'm doing the best I can and you don't know what you're talking about.

A couple days later my boss told me I wouldn't be going to the board. The PL had shot down his recommendation because I have zero military bearing and respect for my leadership. Which isn't completly true. I have a little military bearing, and no respect for hypersensitive crybaby officers or condescending pigheaded jerks. It's been my biggest problem since joining the Army. And that incident confirmed it. So being hardworking, dependable, highly skilled and knowlegable, experienced and exibiting many other leadership qualities is not enough to get promoted. Not in this platoon anyway. It's so frustrating to watch my peers fly through the ranks. Friends with easy jobs and supervisors who don't care. Peers who are overweight or undertrained- but get sent up the ladder because they have a buddy somewhere. It's discouraging. But at least now I know what I need to work on. All the hard work in the world doesn't get me what I want until I learn how to bend over.

Hopefully I will be sent up in the first few months back in Fort Campbell. A lot of the leadership is moving to other places or getting out of the Army, and I will be one of the most experienced medics left. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And did you guys all see the size of that truck Valli bought? Its as big as our house! My wife is the awesomest.

Wants to be a Daddy

Watching things like this make me want to have kids so badly! I am missing out on so many wonderful and tender experiences. I have heard many women blame those kinds of feelings on their ovaries. I don't have ovaries. And mentioning testicles in a blog in offensive, so I'm not going to mention them. Them meaning testicles.

If you already have all the kids you want, maybe you shouldn't watch. Precious moments like this remind me of the gaping hole in my life that can only be filled with a bunch of little Dave-Valli replicas.

If I dont get kids soon I'll have to steal me some.

Mud, mud, glorious mud.

This was a big week for mud. On Tuesday, I got my truck stuck in the mud while taking on off-road trails in the back roads on post. "I just couldn't help myself" didn't seem like an acceptable explanation. The other Harrell was justifiably pissed, but she was still a great sport about the whole thing.  I called Brian to bail me out after my co-worker Kenny and I spent a couple hours digging, rocking and making a mess. Good times. Friday night the Wife and I went rappelling at Kings Point Bluff, and Saturday we went caving in Austin Peay (pronounced "pee") cave. Again... lots of mud. It was really awesome. However, something about my wife is extremely attractive to bats. Every few minutes she would make some comment about getting blasted in the face by the wing beats. I hardly saw one the whole night. What can I say.

The opening in the cave was out in the middle of a cow field. It had a pit type entrance that a couple of the guys fast roped down and the rest of us rappelled in. There was no dead dog bones at the bottom of this one, but a whole cow. Pretty amazing. Enjoy the pictures. Also, I am getting seriously tired of calling my wife "the Wife". I just can't take it anymore. It's so stupid.  
Your suggestions for a new interent code-name are extremely welcome.




Kenny, the really good sport.

Brian, my hero!




Me and that girl.




Christine and whats-her-name taking a break.




I don't know how she managed to stay this clean.




Eternal caving companions.  James and Tammy.

Sold Out

"I hope this movie is really good since we are going to hell for seeing it",
I whisper to my wife as we snatch two REALLY good seats in the local theatre mega-plex. We went to see Transformers last night. We arrived 15 minutes before our show started but it was sold out. So were the next 3 showings- which meant bumming around for 2 hours, or getting creative. Not that creative. We just bought tickets for a different movie and went into the sold out show. I only felt bad because I am supposed to have grown out of doing stuff like that, and my wife was with me. She's above baser things. Only once the show started the place was only three quarters full! So I didn't feel bad at all after seeing that. I think everyone outside waiting their two hours would be a little indignant if they knew that "sold out" didn't really mean it. If not we felt indignant for them. Does anyone know why theatres do that?
(Ha! Asking a question like anyone is actually reading this! Silly Dave.)

And oh- its was worth it. So worth it! We loved that movie. When we came out into the parking it wasn't full of cars. It was full of Autobots and Deceptacons. Except for ours, it's a sport bike and there were no motorcycle transformers- sad. We both stood next to it for a few seconds thinking the same thing: "GO!"
Maybe it's the transformers best kept secret, or they are waiting to but it in the sequel. Oh, I hope so. We love our bike.