Boys and Their Toys

It's so much fun having a brother who is as obsessive-compulsive as I am.  I just never know what new thing or project will have captured his attention when we touch base.  Case in point:

My brother and a friend of his recently purchased some hunting land up in northern Michigan.  Since then he has "had" to purchase a 3-wheeler to get around the property and various other toys for their hunting estate.

Now I use the term "estate" loosely because with their 20+ acres, they inherited a small, rusting trailer, a fire pit, an outhouse that was falling apart, and piles of rubbish scattered about the property.  Oh, and they have apparently also inherited swarms of mosquitoes and some fresh swamps after the recent heavy rains they've had in the area.

But the item which has given me the most chuckles has been the "Loveable Loo."  My brother was attempting to explain it to me the other day.

"So you basically go to the bathroom in this bucket, right?" I asked.

"Well, yeah, but it's a really neat set-up," he replied.

"And what do you do when the bucket's full," I asked.

"You dump it in the mulcher," he responded.

"I don't know, John," I said.  "That sounds an awful lot like the old slop bucket we used to use on the farm at night that we'd just dump in the woods in the morning."

"No, no, the waste from this turns into 'humanure' which you can then use in your garden.  It takes about a year," he explained.

"Heck, they were using 'humanure' in Morocco when we lived there back in the '80's but it didn't take a year.  They just squatted in the fields and had instant fertilizer.  Remember how we always had to wash our vegetables extra good," I asked.

"No, listen, this is a proven system and it's perfectly safe but you have to mulch it first.  It's ingenious, really.  And the best part is that there is no smell at all from the Loveable Loo," he maintained.

"So how's it working," I asked him.

"Well, we used it a lot this past weekend when we were up there but we had a bit of an odor problem," he replied.  "I think we were using the wrong kind of sawdust."

"Yeah," he continued, "We had some guys over building a storage shed for us and they wanted to use our outhouse but we didn't let them.  It was just too smelly."

"What did you have them do," I asked.

"I told them to just go out in the woods," he laughed.

"Shoulda had a slop bucket," I chuckled.

The Loveable Loo.....I'll let you decide.