After somehow surviving the trek through the mountains, we were on kilometer #50 or so....already my longest bike ride ever involving by far the most elevation change ever. I was feeling pretty punked but I felt that I might be able to survive as we were heading into mostly flat territory. At the bottom of the last mountain, we were cruising though the center of a small town, most of us taking a stab at our water bottles. I was in the process of gulping when the car in front of be stopped abruptly. I was drinking with my right hand (stupid rookie!) and only had my left hand available for breaking. The left hand break is for the front wheel... Well, if you are cyclist or motor-biker, you know that using only the front wheel break in an abrupt stop usually ends rather badly. And a 'rather badly' is exactly what happened. The bike almost immediately jack-knifed and I was quickly involved in an altercation with the asphalt road. The road won the argument of course.

I was lucky though. My bike was fine and I was only a little banged up. Thank God for helmets! I hoped back on and tried to soldier through the rest of the trip.

This only cued up the next problem which was the speed that the group wanted to finish the ride in. Before long the group started into 40 kmph speeds along the flat roads. When riding by myself, I rarely exceed 32 kmph. I was in even more trouble...

My being thoroughly beaten by the mountains, exhausted by the sheer distance covered, and beat up from a fall, met head to head with my sheer competitive stubbornness (i.e. foolish stupidity!).

I kept up...sort of...and finished the 90 km. But it was a near thing. It has taken four days for me to feel even remotely normal (today). *sigh*

Aurora thought the whole thing was pretty funny, and started jumping on me as soon as I got home. lol

Alternate View

Shortly after moving into the house, I purchased a road bike (a la Lance Armstrong) from a local Mom-and-Pop shop in the town of Aviano. Road Bicycles are eminently popular here and are accepted and revered in way that they never will be in the States…I ride it to work almost every day now. I even wear all the crazy cycling clothes… Lucas and Aurora have also hopped on the ‘bicycle band wagon’, and can be seen tearing up the neighborhood streets on weekday afternoons. They usually ride with a pack of four or five like minded, like aged, and like sized cyclist. This usually results in a rather difficult set of obstacles for me to negotiate as I return home from work each day. Lucas and Aurora do not wear the cycling clothes…usually, it is all we can do just to get them to wear clothes at all.

I have an important but highly un-architectural job here at the new post. So as ever I am back to double fisting copies of Dwell in my right hand and Armchair General in my left...or maybe its the other way around (that’s the whole problem isn’t it: which one has precedence?). Here’s betting that most readers have never heard of either publication….and that any reader that has heard of one has not heard of the other; each one desirable and interesting to specific groups of individuals/professionals; groups that think little of each other and have even less in common. Ah well…

** Interestingly enough, this is the 200th entry in the Frantz Workshop blog. So Happy 200th to the blog!

So now I am in Japan trying to out process so I can finally manage my way back to the States. Out processing is proving to be very difficult. This is verbatim a conversation that I had yesterday morning while trying to clear my medical out processing requirements:

pf: "Good morning, I'm here to schedule a PHA (Physical Health Assessment)"

Airman ‘Snuffy’: "Uh, Sir, we don't do that here"

pf: "OK, where do I need to go?"

Airman S: "well, you need to call 2655"

pf: "Im here at the hospital right now...can't I make the appointment in person?"

Airman S: "Oh no Sir, that would be a violation of the 'Privacy Act'. You must call the hotline, that is the only way to make an appointment"

pf: "I'm just trying to schedule a regular PHA...how is this a violation of the Privacy Act?"

Airman S: "Sir, that would be against the law"

pf: "You mean there is a law that says I cant schedule an annual physical in person at a heath facility"

Airman S: "Sir, we don’t make the rules, we just follow them"

pf "...right off a cliff, eh?" sometimes it is completely impossible to keep sarcasm at bay

Airman S: "Sir?" He didn't get the joke. And somehow didn’t grasp the stupidity of the situation

pf: "May I speak with your supervisor?"

Airmen S: "My Supervisor?"

pf: "Yes, I think that would be best"

I repeated the conversation with Airman Snuffy's supervisor to no affect. Trying not to be the ‘ugly customer’, I relented.

Supervisor of Airman S: "Sir, please use the phone in the lobby...that's what seems to work best for every one"

I took a deep breath and tamed my urge to unleash the highly colorful explicatives that had moved speedily to the tip of my tongue. Simultaneously, I tried to understand how the Hospital had reasoned that my 'Privacy' was going to be better protected from the phone in the lobby, surrounded as it was by two dozen impatient patients. More explicatives came to mind.

I called the number. After eighteen and a half minutes of call waiting, Airman 'J', who was somewhere in the same building that I was calling from, answered the phone.

Airman J: "Good morning, Sir or Mam, my name is Senior Airman mumble mumble mumble Medical mumble 374th mumble mumble I help you?" all said in a speedy mechanical monotone....similar to an infomercial disclaimer

pf: "Hi, yes, my name is Captain F~, I'm PCSing, I'd like to schedule a PHA"

Airman J: "Have you filled out the online questionnaire?"

pf: "questionnaire?"

Airman J: "Everyone has to fill out the online questionnaire before they can make an appointment. Your Training manager should have told you this. It must be done at least 10 days prior to any appointment."

pf: "I'm sorry. I just got back from a 15 month deployment. I don't know who my training manager is. And besides, I don’t have installation internet access (my account was deleted while I was away) so I cant fill out the survey."

Airman J: "Sir, we cant do anything for you until you fill out the survey"

pf: "OK, ...well I'm here at the hospital right now; Ill come to you...where ever you are...and fill it out"

Airman J: "Sir, you cant do that. You have to go to the website and fill out the questionnaire"

I got the impression that he had had this conversation several times before. So I decided to give in to the insanity.

pf: "Alright, alright, what's the website address?"

Airman J: "You can get that from your Training Manager"

pf: "Like I said before, I've been away for 15 months, I have no idea who my Training Manager is.... Just give me the website and I'll take care of it"

Airman J: "Well I don’t know what the website is." then added "You'll have to get it from your training manager"

pf: "You don’t know what your own website is?"

Airman J: "That’s not my responsibility"

pf: "You must be kidding" It was April Fool's Day after all. I started looking around the lobby for the camera crew….but to no avail

Airman J: "I’m sorry Sir, I truly don’t know what the website is…but your Training Manager...."

I expressed my displeasure and hung up.

Naturally, back at the Squadron, no one knew anything about this website. The Training Manager was on vacation (of course) and everyone seemed to think I was crazy. All of them asking things like "Well, have you called the Hospital?" and "Well maybe you could do it in person...".

Finally, after further shenanigans, that I do not have the patience or heart to write about, I found the website. The online questionnaire asked things like "are you male or female?", "how tall are you?", "what color is your hair?" The first 20 questions continued in this fashion. Naturally, I wanted to break things and yell many bad things. These were the intensely 'private' questions that the Privacy Act supposedly prevented me from answering in person at the hospital!!!! Argh!

However, the next 20 questions were somewhat private in nature. Most of which were along the lines of: "how is your mental-heath today?", "Please rank your mental-heath on a scale of 1 to 10", "Have you felt depressed for more than one day consecutively in the last month?", "On a scale of 1 to 10 how angry are you right now?" --- finally it hit me: The whole string of shenanigans was a scheme to drum up business for the psychiatrists.... I was after all approaching a near homicidal state by the end of the day….

Man do I need a vacation!

Anyways, as i am getting short on time over here, in the next few weeks, I'll try to put out a few posts describing what we have been up to (in better detail than usual). So check out the gallery when you have a chance: Projects Part I

Gabion baskets are basically steel mesh baskets which are filled with rocks. They are typically used for retaining walls, and are used extensively across Afghanistan. They are also extensively miss-used across Afghanistan. In this case, the water control gates for the Irrigation Headway have been wired strait into the baskets. The structure failed with the first flood of the year as the gabion baskets could not even begin to handle the pressure leveraged by this particular river. The baskets collapsed onto and ruined the control gates.

This is our repair underway, it will be reinforced concrete and in a much better location...and it will last a great deal longer than five months. In your face UBL!

Nan garhar's Critical Irrigation Infrastructure

Existing primary irrigation structures are in red. The dashed lines represent the primary canals and the red fields indicate the area irrigated.

The blue areas represent projected irrigation structures. The small blue circles represent locations that will support and benefit from medium size watershed dams. (The dams will also double down as macro-hydro power production plants). The longest red dotted line at the center is Nan garhar's Grand Canal (or Dur anta Canal). At the Eastern end of the Grand Canal is the Dur anta Dam, which serves as the Canal's single source of water. The Grand Canal feeds about 35,000 hectares of arable land. It's primary artery is 72 kilometers long with well over a thousand kilometers of secondary and tertiary canals.

The Dam, the Grand Canal, and all associated structures were built with the financial and technical assistance of the Soviet Union between 1965 and 1967 (approximate). The Dam was designed to provide 50 cubic meters of water per second to the canal while simultaneously using the remaining available water to generate 11.5 megawatts of power. Due to a number of reasons, the Grand Canal now receives only between 30 and 40 cubic meters of water per second, while the electrical output is typically around 5 or 6 megawatts (with a high of 8.5 megawatts and a low of .5 megawatts).

The canal as it runs through Sur-kh Rod District

Pump station #1 in South J-alalabad

Failed secondary canals near Ad-ah Farms

The canal's maintenance facilities. Unchanged since 1965...asbestos roofing and all.

The Grand Canal has about 25 major siphons. The picture above is the up-stream control gate of the fifth siphon along the canal. The siphon was damaged some 15 to 20 years ago and has been deteriorating at an accelerated pace ever since. If it were to completely fail, it would shut off irrigation to a tremendous about of land, and cut off the livelihood of more than 600,000 Afghans.

Over the last year, we spent a great deal of time documenting and cataloging the problems with the Grand Canal. And then we spent a bit of time setting up a major repair project, which will start in a few months.

From left to right: Ken, Chad, Nadir, 'yours-truly', Sadat, & Clay

Today marked our last day together as a group. Chad is flying out this afternoon....though it will be another two or three months before he is reunited with his family.

The road through Gandomack Sherzad

An impossibly bad road in central Hisarek

Up stream from Goran Kach

For my daughter, who likes balloons.