Shower Curtain and Cats

A shower curtain. That was what I got in the mail yesterday. It came in a box with some other necessities sent with love from my parents, but the shower curtain was by far the biggest morale booster. It took me by surprised how excited I was about a piece of plastic, especially when I don't even shower much in my own trailer. I usually end up showering at the base gym because it's more convenient, but now I think I will use my little bathroom for more than my early morning bathroom runs.

I got two surprises as I was typing this; a box from Dell that contained the repair disks for my laptop (still no computer) and access to my blog. Must have been the recent power outage that pulled the firewall down. Regardless, I’m happy to be able to reply to some of the comments people have written in the past few days. The system is slow so I couldn’t go back too far without clogging things up on my end.

While the system is up, I figured I’d post a picture or two. But that’s when I remembered that I can’t because the only way for me to access the memory card on my camera is through the card reader built into my laptop. Doh! So, instead I’ll give you a picture of my little friend P-Cat that I happened to save on my thumb drive prior to frying my laptop.

Now, we have a lot of stray animals in the area and for the most part, you are supposed to leave these animals alone. Ailments like rabies and diseased ticks are not good reasons for you to go home from a military deployment, so it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie (this includes cats, lizards, spiders, scorpions, snakes, mice and rabid camels). Westerners are drawn to pets for some strange reason. Ask any combat unit that touted a puppy, cat, or other scaley squad mascot in a group photo why they were breaking the rules to feed and care for a mangy animal and they probably couldn’t give you a good answer. I don’t know the psychology of it all, but I do know that we view animals a lot different than the Iraqis. Iraqis dislike dogs. I’ve heard lots of reason why from different Iraqis, but for the most part, it is not in their culture to keep dogs as pets. Therefore, we have a lot of strays that roam the streets between the bases and even one dog that strolls through the base without much hassle (affectionately named “Blanca” by the Peruvian guards at the front gate who semi adopted her). Someone has even given her both a regular and a flea collar to as a form of identification to denote that she’s “one of us”. She’ll stop and let you pet her now and then, but she usually moves with a purpose among us, heading to where she knows the food is or to some cool sleeping spot when the sun gets high. She is one of only two animals I see every day on the base near my trailer, the other being P-Cat. Now, I first saw P-Cat sleeping near one of the high ranking officer trailers near the palace. Some Colonel from the previous rotation use to feed him daily and when he wasn’t sticking his head in a bowl of mess hall leftovers, I would see him lounging on the mesh chairs on the trailer porch, being your typical lazy outdoor cat. Well, the old regime moved out and the new group of soldiers moved in, unbeknownst to P-Cat. He still waited anxiously for his next meal by a trailer and was very friendly to the passing soldiers in an attempt to convince them that they needed to pick up where the Colonel had left off. Now, I’m normally more of a dog person myself. In fact, I’m allergic to cats and dogs (more of the former), although I’ve had both growing up. I currently don’t own any pets either, so why I got attached to this cat is beyond me. Because of my crazy schedule, I don’t get to see him at the same time every day, although I do try to pass by his haunts as I make my way to and from the bases. He’ll tiredly yawn at me from his second story perch telling me he’s too tired to bother getting up to greet me and at night on my way back to my trailer he’ll run out and run between my legs looking for a scratch behind the ears. Now this doesn't mean I intend to get off the plane next April and procure me a kitten, but it gives me something near term to look forward to instead that distant redeployment date.

I need to see if the magic disks will make my sick computer all better. Wish me luck.