Let me tell you about our recent spate of weather. It has been simply gorgeous. As a matter of fact, I have officially received my first sunburn of this year (the back of my neck, yeah I know, but it still counts). We have had extremely sunny weather with the temperature in the 60s and 70s. It has been beautiful. I am clearly hoping that the pattern continues this exact trend through July and that all of the prognosticators are dead wrong about the temperature reaching 110-120 degrees this early summer. 75 is OK with me.
Because of our lovely weather, CD and I have had the shop doors open during the day. The natural light is much better to work by than the fluorescent light we have been accustomed to in our cave. With the doors open, a pair of finch-like birds has decided to build a nest inside our shop. Being the agrarian that he is, Dobbie coerced me into letting them build their nest in our shop. He has bonded with the birds in a way and has subsequently named them Jack and Jill. No, they are not perching on his finger and he is not communicating with them through whistles. They are simply constructing a nest out of mud and twigs up against the ceiling on the side wall.
The Special Forces team that occupies Camp Ouellette with us has finally left and a new one has replaced them. This new team is much more personal and friendly and on the whole, younger. The youngest, Joel, is 21 and is already a Staff Sergeant. He looks at me like I am an old guy. Actually, his father is only a couple of years older than me. Me, an old guy! Admittedly I have 172 grey hairs in my goatee, but I have yet to consider myself old. I can still out-run 90% of the people on this base and can probably out-run Joel. I enjoy guzzling a cold beer and still enjoy painting towns purple with my young wife. How could I be old? Just because I am older than the new First Sergeant and Sergeant Major doesn’t make me old. I’m still 25 years younger than my father!
Although I am sure Benito Juarez would have preferred me celebrating his birthday over an ice-cold Corona, I am sure he was OK with me celebrating with a South American rum. I had hoped to take his birthday off (as I suppose most people in Mexico did), but unlike those Mexican workers I had to meet the grind head-on and toil laboriously in an unyielding effort to complete a mission here. No, I have never met Benito Juarez personally; however, his day is enough inspiration for me to enjoy a drink with CD regardless of the reason. I even went so far as to have a second. Whew, what a raucous celebration we had here in B Hut 55!
You know those pop and soda cans that we have back there in the U.S. of A.? They are generally 12 ounces by volume although you can find a few in the 16, 24, and 40 ounce varieties. Well, here ounces mean nothing. Obviously everything is in the metric system and no can here would be unruly enough to end in an uneven number like 355 ml. The cans here are all the same diameter, but just have different heights. For example, I have only seen Mountain Dew in 300 ml cans (a little over 10 ounces) while the rest are around 330 mls. I have a couple of cans in my fridge that are 240 mls. The problem with this disparity is adjusting the amount of rum and or whiskey. Throw a couple ounces of whiskey into a glass, add ice, and pour in a 12 ounce Coke and you have yourself a party! Here I go through the same ritual and dump in my 330 ml (11.2 ounces) Coke and the party is different. I like whiskey, but when mixed with Coca-Cola, it has got to be right. I am forced to pay attention to the volume content of the can. One drink might be with a 330 ml can and the next could be a 300 or a 240. Imagine my dilemma. Yeah, you purists out there are wondering why I am ruining whiskey by adding Coke to it. It’s because I am conserving. There’s no Class Six store within driving distance.
Privacy here is non-existent. I knew it would be coming in, but I would love a little privacy every now and then. Showering, using the bathroom, and even hanging out in my room are not private. The showering thing is obvious and you probably understand what I am going through in the bathroom. My room is 72 square feet of efficiency and I can close the door and pretend I have privacy, but you can hear everything that occurs in the hallway and in the rooms on either side of me. Fortunately no one snores a lot so that helps and everyone keeps their TVs and music down or wears headphones, so I cannot complain much about that. The only privacy I can seem to acquire is out on a run. It’s just nice to get away from things for a little while and think about what ever I want until some local driver runs into me with a shuttle bus. Ah, the privacy.
The other night I went for a walk in the rain. I’m not sure why, but just felt compelled to do it. I went out without a hat or my rain parka and walked south towards the PX, grabbed a triple espresso, and walked back. For some reason that just seemed relaxing. It wasn’t hot and it wasn’t cold so getting soaked to the bone was OK. The gate guards looked at me a little strangely, but I was smiling and I guess that is the magic password or gesture to walk into compounds. Who needs IDs?
How much do you think it costs to clean a porta-potty? I have no idea either, but mucho grande denaro is my guess. Let me illuminate you on one of my recent observations. We have porta-potties on Camp Ouellette that get “cleaned” a couple of times a week. I know this because we keep the gate locked and these guys have to get us to let them in. Porta-potty cleaning truck number 11 is the one that visits us. Four guys are in this truck. Two of them are locals and are the ones spraying, cleaning, and pumping while two upper management dudes drive the truck and fill out paperwork. Four guys for one truck! And, the truck that visits us is eleven. Eleven out of how many? Does every truck have four guys? Since they are all KBR workers, I’m guessing the locals are making $1000 a month while the truck driver is probably pulling in $5000 a month and the truck supervisor is probably a $7000 a month kind of guy. That’s $14K a month in salary not to mention the $200,000 pump and spray truck that is being amortized over five years, the fuel, water, cleaning supplies and other miscellaneous items. Some quick calculus finds the $14K salaries, $3500 for the truck, and probably another $2K in all the other costs for a total of $19,500 a month. How many porta-potties get cleaned by this one team? 150 different potties a week? That sounds about right. So that means it costs roughly $330 a week to clean a one porta-potty. I could get my whole house cleaned for less than that a month back there.
You may recall a couple of months back when I referred to completing some of my 44 goals that I arrived here with. I’m pleased to announce through tremendous effort, zeal, concentration, and all-out determination, I have completed 7 of them. It’s been hard. I should have come with goals like, oh, I dunno, send my wife a card. But I didn’t. I showed up with goals like getting my weight down to 175 pounds, build lean muscle mass and get my body fat down to around 12%, improve my run times to consistent sub-seven minute miles and other things like that. 37 to go and they don’t get any easier. I’m hoping to click a couple more off in the coming weeks. I’ll keep all-you-all appraised.
I’m shutting this one down early because I am so late in getting it out. The picture I have included is along my normal run. Occasionally I take the camera with me and this particular morning, water froze on the concertina fence line that borders the mine fields the Russians emplaced during their stay here. The mine fields almost completely surround this base and our progress in removing them is a very slow and tedious process.
Check back next week when I ramble whimsically about an hour in the bunker, discuss my process in the Dari language class, and excite you about our little personnel changeover.
Baamaane Khudaa,
Craig
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