Welcome to Balad

...and other smelly things

I was thinking about Portapotties yesterday. There was a good reason for this. I was in one, and it wasn't, uh...well-kept.

Here at work, we have four such powder rooms in a row on this end of the building. One is labeled "Women" and the rest are left for the men to defile. But they pop in periodically to pee on our seat, too, so we can feel like "one of the guys."

It's cumbersome* to use an outdoor toilet with twenty pounds of bulletproof vest and kevlar on. I don't feel this excuses poor aim, mind you. It definitely doesn't excuse cleaning up one's own messes, unless they're afraid that heavy ol' vest'll put their backs out if they bend over to wipe the lid, or something. Dunno.

* Or...challenging, if you prefer a more optimistic term.

As I was saying, I was forced to use one of the less pleasant sandboxes yesterday. In the course of my unavoidable delay, I began to understand why the men use ours.

See, all of them have urinals in them. Ours, too. But in ours, whoever cleans it places little smell-good mothball-looking things in our urinal, then places a large rock there at the opening to keep them from going down the drain. The result is a Portapotty that usually smells quite decent.

The men's Portapotties don't get the deoderizing mothballs. The things are kept as clean as the ladies' john, but they smell revolting.

The logic, as usual, escapes me.

Our outhouse is also kept graffiti-free. This irks me.

I enjoy reading good graffiti. Most graffiti isn't, of course, but occasionally, you stumble across a jewel, scribbled there on the bathroom wall. Most really good one-liners require some inanity to build off of, so it goes without saying that you don't get good graffiti on a blank wall.

Here's a sample from one of the johns outside DFAC 1*:

On the other side of this door is not the Garden of Eden.

Below it, someone else wrote:

It's not too nice on this side, either.

* Gleaned from Jeff. I've never set foot in them. My nose won't allow me to get that close. I've had occasion to use one public Portapotty in Army territory since I arrived and I swear I'll let my bladder pop and drain into my legs before I'll repeat the experience.

We do have "indoor" toilets. They're very nice. You can remove your gear and relieve yourself in comfort. Sometimes, though, they smell worse than the Portapotties. You'd have to smell it to believe it.

Come to think of it, there's very little here that isn't an assault on your olfactory sense. We have burning garbage at the north end of post and it's inescapable when the wind shifts. There are SSTs in action at all times at various parts of the camp. Depending on the time of day, the outhouses might smell better than the air outside.

In other news, we found a mouse in the office today.

Cute little devil, ain't he? He was trying to figure out how to get into my Creme Savers and was making a bit of racket doing it. We opened the door, stomped our boots, and he bolted for freedom.

And there he goes.

One of the wild kittens that live under the trailer will probably eat him for dinner.

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