I Left Jersey For This???

Giants & Lumberjacks...representing Freehold to Flagstaff

Wet Wintery Weekend

Just when I thought it was safe to send home some of my excess winter gear, this weekend happened.  Nick and I began getting ready for our first weekend on the range down in the warm, sunny, red rock desert-y cactus land of Sedona, Arizona by heading into Super Walmart on Friday night after our trip to Buffalo Wild Wings.  We headed in and basically shopped as if we were preparing for a class trip and I picked up an awesome cooler bag that’ll get plenty of use at Bamboozle and other events when I get home, as well two folding chairs as suggested by our instructor.  The sky was clear upon arrival at Walmart, different story when we left.  The snow was really coming down but it didn’t last very long. 

After being given the heads up about the “nightmare weather” of the weekend, there was talk about staying in a hotel room down in Sedona.  In the midst of packing I asked Nick if he thought I should just book a room, just to make sure we got some place to stay.  Good thing he talked me out of it.  I packed as if we would be staying down there anyway, posted my last blog entry, and hit the sack.

When I woke up Saturday I saw that the snow didn’t do much damage but at this point of the day it was actually SLUSHING outside.  That’s right…SLUSH was falling from the sky.  Very strange.  We packed up my awesome cooler bag and headed to pick up Travis.  I made the joke that we were the Secret Service because we were driving around the (class) president. Haha.  We met up with the rest of the class and were pessimistic about our chances of us actually going down and shooting today.  I didn’t want to get out of the car it sucked so bad outside.  The class all huddled together then our firearms instructor pulled up to us and we could see he was on the phone.  He and the program director decided to pull the plug on trekking down to Sedona and we were going to spend half of the day in a “classroom” at the Arizona Game & Fish Department office and then call it a day. 

Group of Very Disappointed Rangers Getting Slushed On.

As soon as we got into the parking lot at the office the snow started falling; big fat slow flakes.  We made a modified range around the classroom and went over some basic techniques, just killing some time.  Our instructor said the storm would worsen around noon and would get even worse overnight.  Hearing this bad news meant that no range day tomorrow either was as inevitable as Justin Bieber being reduced to only a backup dancer for Usher now that puberty is making him sound even worse than he did before.  We were cleared out the office around 11:45 and we brought Travis home, the snow stopped at this point.  Travis invited us in so we could get some lunch on and watch some TV, but I was hesitant.  I love hanging out with my boys. I’d hang with Travis any time, any day of the week, but I was wrecked!  I got crap for sleep the night before and after awhile, the morning began to slowly drag on.  I just wanted to lay down and I didn’t want to get stuck there in the storm.

We decided to hang for a little bit.  I walked in the house and the Country Boy had his country music channel on the TV.  I sat down and changed it right away hahahaha.  You may remember me mentioning his cats in a previous post, Scrappy & Killer.  Scrappy is a big fat ol’ thing that stumbles every time she jumps off of the couch, Nick calls her Black Garfield even though she’s gray.  Killer is the only domestic animal I’ve ever met that didn’t like me….I never could get those deer at Holmdel Park to come and talk to me when I was on late shift.  When I first met Killer, all she did was growl, hiss, & moan at me.  We’ve made progress since then.  She’ll come up to me, smell me, let me get a few quick pets in…then she’ll BITE me.  It’s usually just a little taste without much force behind it, but then the growling and hissing ensues.  Little bitch cat.  She even ate a tiny piece of string cheese out of my hand then bit me one minute later.  I would flip through the channels and she would sit right next to me in attack mode, staring at my hands…she’d make a good law enforcement officer haha.  While flipping through the channels I came across the NAU basketball game I wanted to go to on Wednesday night.  We watched that for a little bit and caught the end of Enemy of the State.  Forgive me for giving you such details but catching some television is a rarity so deal with it. 

The snow started falling hardcore so I really wanted to book it out of there and get home for 2 reasons.  Neither Nick or I have an ideal drive in the snow car (I’ll gladly take a donated 2010-2011 4Runner SR5 if you’re concerned for my safety J ) and if we are parked in the driveway then we’ll have less to shovel when we need to leave.  Nick appeared to share the same concern but we stayed and kept Travis company for awhile longer.  I tried chasing down the doctor’s office because they had to reschedule my appointment with the insurance people…so I called them to pass the time.  They let you know your place in “line” for your call to be taken; I had 2 people ahead of me for 20 minutes so I just hung up on them.  Nick said we’d go about a half hour ago, I never took my jacket off, and every time I looked out the window you could see less and less of Nick’s tires with all of this snow mounting up. We finally decided it was time to go which gave Travis an opportunity to take advantage of our new found time off so he could go apply to jobs in town.  He’s been trying since he got here January 2^nd.

Where's the Mountain?  Apparently that van never moves.

The roads were awful.  Nick recognized that we probably should’ve left earlier and I told him that’s why I suggested it over an hour ago.  We got to our street and his tires just spun out in the snow.  The driveway was blanketed and we were in near whiteout conditions at the base of our mountain…you couldn’t even see Mt. Elden.  He parked in front of the driveway and I ran to get the shovels, he wisely advised changing out of our uniforms then we went to work.  This is where all of those long winters at Holmdel Park paid off.  I don’t know about you folks but I find the best way to shovel a driveway is do side sweeps instead of going vertical from the house to the street.  I thank my sciatica ridden back for teaching me that little maneuver.  Trust me kids, it saves you time and your back.  We banged out the driveway but by the time we got to the bottom, the top was dusted once again.  We don’t have a very big driveway folks, this storm was nuts!  It took some effort but Nick got into the driveway and we headed inside where I found I had two picture messages from Arkansas of Benjamin playing in the snow…YAY!

Benjamin in the snow

Benjamin Semi-Covered in Snow

I caught up on my Netflix’d Spartacus, have I mentioned how much I love that show?  This season is a prequel to last season and this past episode answered just about every question I had about transitioning into last season…if that makes sense.  I was so happy to have these answers, then I was bummed to find out that there’s only 1 more episode left of the season.  A 6 episode season!?!? That’s CRAP!  I wanted to sleep so badly but I couldn’t during the day, so I caught up on one of my guilty pleasures...Jersey Shore.  I hate this show.  I hate most of the people on it, their lifestyle, and the fact they are rich just for being talentless scumbags….yet I get sucked in all the time.  If I wasn’t from Jersey I definitely wouldn’t watch it, Vinnie & Pauly D are hysterical, but other than that it’s just an awful show.  Moving on.

Nick & I shoveled the snow yet again, he was getting a bad case of cabin fever so he wanted to run to Subway.  I was going to go with him but I was whooped and I felt like doing nothing. We got him out and he was on his way while I tackled this insurance issue. I have until Wednesday to prove that I tried applying for this AZ health insurance thing or I’d be forced to cover all of the costs for my visit almost 2 weeks ago.  The website they told me to use was wrong and I already talked about trying to get in touch with them regarding my appointment.  One thing I learned as a ranger for Monmouth County is how to adapt to any situation thrown at you.  I worked some magic and found the appropriate website to handle this insurance crap.  I hope I did it right.  Now I won’t have to sit around the doctor’s office for another hour or 2 and I won’t miss another class because of it.  While completing this tedious task, I heard a familiar voice out in the living room.  A voice I haven’t heard in these walls for a long time.  It was Arkansas!  She joined Nick on his trek to Subway and they returned with a $5 footlong for me!  Aren’t they great? 

The snow fell off & on and there was no way I was driving out in it so I just kept it low key for the rest of the night.  I think at one point I fell asleep sitting up in a chair with my friend Fiona sleeping on my lap. I tried catching any updates of the NBA All Star weekend on ESPN and that brought me back to a happy place.  I wasn’t able to find any video or anything of the Slam Dunk contest yet I was still happy checking out the site.  No luck other the names of the winners on the NBA front but I found joy in seeing that the ESPN Fantasy Football page already started ranking players for next season! Call me obsessed but my obsession won me 3 Super Bowls, which in turn, covered my rent while I’m out here in Flagstaff. MOUNT UP!!!  

I still haven’t heard from any other parks and this new found computer glitch had me freaking out so I checked our job website to check my application status.  For every job we have to upload a couple of documents…resumes, transcripts, etc.. Well under the column for uploaded documents it said “none”…for EVERY job I’ve applied to.  Naturally I freaked out and sent out a mass e-mail to the class asking them, and the program director, if they knew why that was.  No wonder I haven’t heard anything back from them, I thought.  Two of my classmates immediately responded and calmed me down while I made most of the rest of them nervous that the same thing happened.  It’s a confusing story but it involved a third party website with whom we actually complete our applications.  Tragedy averted.

I watched the newest Family Guy on Hulu and I’ve gotta say, Family Guy is incredibly done.  It just looks amazing.  The last episode they added had Peter & Brian in the movie theater and they were watching The Sound of Music…the actual movie.  Peter punches the screen and falls behind it. They flipped the image on the screen around like it actually looks (or at least it did in Inglorious Basterds) from behind the screen.  Simply awesome!

Modified Day Off

 For the first time in about 3 weeks I woke up feeling 100%; feeling Unstoppable.  I believe there are 4 causes for such a feeling.  1.) I woke up to a text message from Laura that ended with the phrase…I Love You.  It’s the little things.  I made sure to tell Jane & Nick that she sent that…I’m not sure why other than the fact that it made me very happy.  2.) I was no longer feeling the effects of this bronchitis that has been absolutely wiping me out for nearly a month now. 3.) We have an unscheduled modified day off. 4.) In exactly 2 months from today I’ll be back home. 

I’ve been violently coughing my brains out & gasping for air even while at rest for quite awhile now but I woke up refreshed today.  Good thing too, I knew the driveway would need a 3^rd stint of shoveling and we had to be at the Sheriff’s office in an hour for a brief training period. Since our range day was cancelled for today we were able to move our 1 hour of firearms training that was scheduled to take place on our last day of Spring Break to today.  Good for us to be able to get something done today, bad for any of us that may have people coming out for Spring Break as we just went from having to spend an hour of that day to possibly spending at least a half day if not a full day at the range that day…but that has yet to have been determined.  This training session was basically playing a life like video game that goes way beyond anything Wii, XBOX360 Kinect, or Playstation Move are doing.  You run through a bunch of video scenarios and shoot (or don’t shoot) a Glock (gun) that’s equipped with a laser pointer. We were informed about this exercise on the first day of class and it’s something that I’ve been secretly nervous about ever since, yet I wasn’t sure why. We found out yesterday that the exercise was going to be moved to today and we got some more information about it.  The more we learned about it the more the class pictured the shooting scenario scene from Men In Back.  I’ll come back to that though.

What I Woke Up To...Trying to 1-Up Augun

Another text message I got this morning was from my boy Augun back at Holmdel Park.  Apparently the winds were so bad there over night that they blew the port-o potties all around the parking lot.  I used to hate having to fix that.  The picture had the caption “This is how my day started.”  I went outside and started shoveling then figured I’d respond to him with a picture of how my day started.  I shoveled for 45 minutes and got done just in time to get changed, grab a bagel thin, and head over to the station.  Our road was still in bad shape but I could see the road we had to take into town looked like it had been plowed so I wasn’t too worried.  I’m not sure what the term or whatever is for when you see a piece of the puzzle/picture and everything seems one way but then more is revealed and then everything is ugly but that’s basically how the rest of our journey to the sheriff’s office was.  Only the little window of the end of our street was nice and plowed with asphalt showing the rest was a wintery mess.  I don’t mind driving in the snow, I prefer not to but if I have to I don’t mind.  We were in the car for less than 2 minutes and I was irate that this little training session wasn’t cancelled.  I probably had 40-50ft of visibility, I was sloshing all over the place, and I still had to drive up hill at one point.  Yesterday I told Laura that if the streets were good enough for me to get to this training exercise then I would be going to the gym afterwards.  I drove by the gym….and the roads were in no condition to be driving to this exercise.  I followed whatever tire tracks I could to get around in the mess and the trail brought me to a red light with me near the left side of the middle lane and I had to turn right and I see this white truck coming up the turn lane to make the same right at the light; low and behold…it was a 4RUNNER!!!!!  Anybody else picking up on these signs?  I followed the older version of my dream car until I reached the road we had to turn onto, aka the path nobody seemingly has traveled.  I begin making my left turn and I instantly fishtail at a 45 degree angle instead of making the 90 degree angle turn.  I thought for sure I was going to smash into a curb or snow bank and be stuck.  Fortunately my beat up trusty old Matrix stopped its momentum and I was able to spin into the road.  “Tell me again why we didn’t cancel this today?” I asked Nick.  We found the sheriff’s office and their parking lot was hardly even touched.  J~DuB Jerzee was not happy. 

I recognized some of the cars in the lot as those belonging to some fellow classmates so I knew I didn’t miss the memo about cancelling the exercise so we walked inside.  There was an officer at a desk to greet us and he told us we could head back to the area, which was something new because we were instructed to arrive on the hour with our group of 4 and then head in.  Considering we already broke the rules by arriving so early I told him we would wait for the rest of the group. The lobby had a TV type monitor that was scrolling various announcements in a slide show.  ANY OF MY LAW ENFORCEMENT WANNABEs PAY ATTENTION. Flagstaff PD is hiring for all types of positions, officers included.  There is a catch however, I think you need to reside in Flagstaff for at least a year.  Bummer.

We waited until 11, our assigned time, and had the officer escort us back to the training room.  He mentioned that people had been staggering in earlier so maybe our other 2 group members were there…they weren’t.  I could hear loud commands from a computer describing scenarios, then yelling, and then computerized gunshots.  It sounded intense! As the group before us left, the rest of our group showed up and we headed into the training room for a briefing.  I asked the last question so I was selected to go first…which is exactly what I wanted because after you go you can stay and watch everybody else…nobody got to watch me.  We got done rather quickly so everybody got a crack at 1 extra scenario that nobody else in the group got to do, so they at least got to see me go once.

I regret to inform my family and friends that I was killed in the last scenario while foiling a bank robbery…but it was a computer/screen error, not my excellent shooting.  Please bury me in my hypothetical 4Runner…it has a lot of trunk space.

On the way home Nick uttered one of our favorite words, “lunch?”  If that word, or dinner, is used in the car by itself it usually means that we’re going to stop somewhere or make plans to go somewhere later…that wasn’t happening today.  “Yeah we’ll put something together when we get home.” I responded. We got home and guess what we see, the driveway covered with a 2.5 inch thick blanket of this cold wet white stuff.  Hmmm…how odd.  Considering I shoveled “my side” of the driveway before we left I figured I’d be okay to pull in without a problem….wrong.  I got halfway up the driveway and started drifting sideways toward Nick’s car so I stopped and parked right there….even though I owe him a sideswipe or a rearending.  We got out and went right back to work shoveling the driveway.  At least today you could see Mt. Elden, but yeah…still snowing. I shoveled enough to get my car up the rest of the way, removed what was missed from where I parked, and then headed in to start thawing some tilapia and washing some clothes. 

Winter Wonderland

It Snowed This Much in About a Day & a Half, still snowing.

Nick came in after finishing “his side” of the driveway and started up on the cooking while I priced out some training equipment for the ranger class.  I screwed around with my iTunes while Nick cooked and while we ate.  I found myself thinking a lot about going to the beach and Great Adventure with Laura today so I texted her and told her I couldn’t wait to go to the beach with her.  I haven’t been on a beach in over 3 years, I used to live there!  Nick went out for a hot chocolate, probably stir crazy at this point, and I headed to my room.  Sunday is apparently maintenance day.  I catch up with e-mails, bills, laundry, cleaning, etc.  Today I also caught up with a long lost friend…video games.  I haven’t played a video game console since New Year’s Eve, that’s pretty big for me.  Today I broke out the Heavy Rain…the game is pretty awesome.  You play 4 different characters who are trying to find one of the dude’s sons who they suspect may be the Origami Killer’s next victim.  Before getting into the game there was some update that took over a half hour to complete, which gave me a chance to send some e-mails.  The update made it so you could play the game with that Playstation Move thingie that Playstation bit off of Wii.  That’s just insane as it completely transforms the game; essentially you act as the characters instead of controlling them with a controller.  I don’t have or want this PS Move thing so I stuck with the controlled mode but I can’t believe what technology is capable of these days.

 

Jane got home and made tacos for Jim, Nick, Arkansas & I while I helped my sister compile a resume then after dinner, the 3 Double Ds watched Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade and I began working on this post.  While writing this Nick asked me copy all the pictures I have from being out here onto his flashdrive.  When I brought his flashdrive to him I opened his door and announced “here’s what the whales are saying”, which was a perfect execution of a Brian Reagan line that got wasted because he had his headphones on and was watching something on his laptop.  DAMN IT!

Brian Reagan - Whale Noises...hahahaha

Anyway, doctor early in the AM. 

Two months until I'm home!

Goodnight.

MOUNT UP!!!

Flagstaff Observation

Where’s the sand? I’m not 100% sure this is true or not but the massive snow plow trucks that handle Flagstaff’s snowy business don’t salt or sand the roads, they just leave huge piles of ice & snow at the foot of your driveway that you need a jackhammer to break up in order to move.  They have to put something down on the road but it isn’t very visible so it definitely isn’t salt or sand.  I figure with them being so close to the desert that sand would make sense…but I think that goes back to Flagstaffians hating everybody that isn’t one of them, i.e. Phoenixians.  I thought hippies loved everybody.  Then again, I bet the Park Rangers are doing a smashup job of protecting the Federally preserved sand around here.  BE UNSTOPPABLE RANGERS!