Two big milestones in one week

So I can no longer be nominated for best new blog. Last week was my first year anniversary of my first blog post. It doesn't seem like it's been a year, but it has. I also passed a thousand hits sometime last week as well. It's not entirely accurate because I did have a different hit counter for a couple of months that stopped working, and I also didn't even put one on my page for awhile, but I have now definitely had at least a thousand. I didn't really know how to celebrate such a monumental occasion, but I think I've figured it out.

Here are two pictures that should hopefully get a laugh out of a few. The first one is a shot of the toilets we use here. Notice anything strange about the toilet? First, the toilet is backwards compared to most toilets, and second there is only water right in the hole, and no where else. It's the perfect reason why you should challenge your ideas every once in awhile. The guy who designed this toilet thought that he had a grand idea. He thought his toilet was better than every other toilet out there. He thought his toilet was so good that he convinced enough people to actually make them, and they convinced enough people to actually sell a ton of them (at least all the toilets on base, whether they were the only ones we could buy, or the cheapest I don't know). All it would have taken, somewhere in the process, was for someone to take a shit on one. Had they done that it would have been very evident that this was not a good idea. Without being too graphic, lets just say two things. There isn't much distance between the top of the bowl and the bottom of your arse. There is also a problem when it comes to flushing and friction. Let's just say that I only got a clean picture of the toilet because they had just cleaned it. One of my fellow soldiers described it as "taking a shit on a plate". Oops, so much for the graphic part. Sorry ladies.

The second one is of the stalls that we get to use for our bathroom business. They went to all the trouble of making these stalls out of sheet metal. They don't look prefabricated, so it actually took a little bit of extra effort to do. The walls are just barely too close, which would make sense to maximize space, but what you can't see is that on the end of the stalls there is plenty of extra space to spread these out a little. Then the toilet paper is awkwardly behind you. See the white thing in the front on the left? That's the shower curtain door. There is one great thing about these though. They do flush (mostly) and they are cleaned daily by a very diligent cleaning crew. I've also never seen one out of toilet paper, which is a real plus when you consider that we are a couple hundred yards away from our B huts.