I still love my Dickies belt

This post is a first for my blog.  In all of my previous 148 posts (I just checked that number) I have never reused a photo from a previous post.  That will all change today...

Once again, here is the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of my own belt buckle, previously used in a feeble post on March 18th of last year.  In that post I extol the virtues of this fine $12 belt and hope that I can come up with some equally worthy thoughts.  After 9+ months and over 100 posts, I now have those sentiments...

Today I was asked to go across the street with Andrey, Sergey and Yuri (which could be anyone as those are the only 3 names available here) to bring a defective hospital bed back to camp.  The bed was donated as part of our ongoing humanitarian aid distributions, which are largely medical in nature.  We arrived to find that this bed is a hydraulic-type lift bed for which the head end doesn't lift, leaving the patient nearly upside down.  Obviously this won't do, so we start wheeling it towards the stairs to return it to the Hope Center.  Though most of the hospital has wide, double doors for obvious reasons, we came to one that was only a single.  This meant having to lower the bed all the way down and flip it onto its side to clear the frame.  Unfortunately every time that we tried this, the hydraulics that were still functional, once relieved of the weight of the bed, proceeded to expand sideways.  Being without rope, we opted to stand around and discuss in rapid Russian - or at least 3 of us did - how to negotiate this door and the flight of stairs that lay beyond.

This is when the Lord brought to mind my wonderful Dickies belt and that it had faithfully held my pants up for close to a year.  To the mild surprise of the guys and a random babushka, I proceeded to theatrically whip off my belt (having no better way to propose my newly conceived plan) in the middle of the hospital hallway.  Quickly seeing the merit to my idea, Andrey and Yuri followed suit (to the growing consternation of the babushka) and soon we had securely belted the bed to its frame, rendering its pesky hydraulics immobile.

After having gotten through the door, downstairs and outside without any Super Bowl-esque wardrobe malfunctions, we were able to reclaim our belts.  At this point Yuri, who has a reputation as a gruff, no-nonsense kind of guy, was profuse in his praise of my problem-solving skills.  He went so far as to ask if I had previously been involved in road construction...(I don't know what that means either but despite the horrendous roads here, he seemed to make the suggestion in a complimentary manner so I will accept it as such).

After the fact, I realized that this single incident will probably be the lens through which all of Yuri's further dealings with me are viewed.  I have passed some vague, undefined test in his book and henceforth we will be much more like peers in the facilities arena (plumbing and electrical excluded) than I ever thought would be possible this early in my tenure.

Just a funny story that I thought I'd share...