Getting Down To It

Chlorophyll? More Like Bore-a-phyll!!

So this past week is all a blur.  I think I’m blinded by Senioritis mixed in with a bunch of wanting to be home so I’m already almost done packing, a side of wow they wait until the end of the semester to throw in a bunch of last minute work, a dash of disappointment that I can’t help but feeling like this whole trip was a bit of a waste because I have no job when we wrap up, topped off with a whole lot of I’m really going to miss these Unstoppables after this next week comes & goes.

Class wise, this has been the most boring weeks yet.  I still have no idea what we talked about.  We were supposed to expand our coverage on resources that need protecting…but I don’t feel like we really covered that.  Our instructor was basically taking over our class for 4 days; we even had to do a paper and an oral presentation that was graded by him. Monday was just spent with long awkward stares at the front of the classroom. I won’t bore you about that anymore, it was bad enough living through it once.  I put some pieces of my portion of our group project together and worked through a homemade review sheet for our test in the AM and then crashed for the evening.

Overtime

Woke up, ate my coco dynabites while I skimmed through the study guide and then I was out the door.  While we were taking our tests, Kathy checked our flashdrive notebooks for our FINAL notebook grade. That’s pretty exciting.  What’s not exciting is that she told me I was missing one of the PDF presentations that we’re required to download as each instructor presents them.  The thing is, I did download it, it was broken or something so it didn’t show up…so I got a 90%.  I finished the test in 10 minutes; got a 93…maybe I should’ve not studied my entire school life.  After the test I filled out my evaluation of our PT class, you can imagine how that went.  

We snuck in a class picture retake today...as if you hadn't already seen it.

We were supposed to write a paragraph, I wrote about 6.  The general consensus of the class is that the program is subpar and the instructor, Mike, is more into himself than he is the class. Considering just about everybody in the program, including Mike, are leaving…I dulled down my criticisms significantly.  We still had over an hour before so CJ & I headed to the campus bookstore  for some last minute t-shirts, grabbed some grub and then headed to the classroom….where I stayed until 8:30 at night….10.5 hours on campus.  Being unable to concentrate on school work at home, I stayed at my seat until I had my part of the paper done.  Unfortunately I wasn’t done-done. I still had to go home, do my PowerPoint presentation portion and then organize everybody else’s slides.  Who’s exhausted? THIS GUY! 

This was up in one of the classrooms I walked by on my way out at 8:30...the first line is definitely an attention grabber.  I literally walked past it and then walked backwards to see it again.

Humpty Dumpty Hump Day

I don’t know what’s going on with me but my entire lower body is super sore.  We got through warm-ups in PT and then we had a 25 minute run around campus…that sucked.  We were basically told to partner up and stick together when we ran so Jake & I kept together but were both struggling with soreness…so we didn’t get as far as we normally do.  Mike informed us that today would be our last “hard” class as we get ready to de-load and prepare for the PEB.  I can’t believe that all of this stuff is coming to an end.  

One thing that made things super awesome today was the sudden outreach from a bunch of my dudes back home.  There’s a tradition at my old park.  When a ranger leaves, transfers, or whatever…they pin their nametag up on the bulletin board that’s outside of our locker room.  My dude Augun sent me a picture of it with the message, “I hear you wanna  wear this again.” It’s true…I reached out to one of my supervisors earlier this week, as well as my main man from the MCPS, Simpson, and expressed my interest in returning to the park.  I filled Augun in on the woes of trying to land a federal government job at this point in time…something he told me would be an issue even before I came out here…and I’m assuming he told everybody else that was at work at the time because I got text messages from a couple other of my old partners in crime.  They said they needed me there…awwww.  A great friend and fellow oH6 member, Kush, also checked in on me to see when I’d be coming home and told me he’d sign up at my gym so he can become my training partner once I got home.  AWESOME!

Kush getting me in a triangle choke. I wonder if this is the training he had in mind.

New day but class remained boring. My group was hoping to not have to present today, as we were told that half of the groups would present today, the other half tomorrow…we got the reprieve.  I took advantage of the extra time to clean up some of the slides, add some new ones, and finalize my thoughts on how I wanted to present.  Then I discovered a new addiction…the television show Friday Night Lights.  (thank you Netflix).  I’m so hooked on this show that it is currently Friday night (HA) as I write this and I’m already watching episode 16.  This was the perfect distraction for the next 4 hairy-scary days we have ahead of us. 

Is Anybody Else In Here?

Today, Thursday, is the beginning of a fairly hectic 4 day stretch that basically wraps up the semester. We have my presentation, some other class stuff, 1 hour dinner break, and then we meet at the NAU police station for our run at building searches and high risk vehicle stops.  Let’s Get It On!

We weren’t robbed of our morning off today but I still woke up around 830-9 and still felt very sore in my legs and lower back.  I got out of bed, stretched for a little bit, and did my morning thing…then it was time for MORE Friday Night Lights.  I only stopped watching when I got a surprise phone call from Laura. J  She Rules!  I managed to do some laundry and grab a Lean Pocket while on the phone with her but other than that, I was zoned in on the Dillon Panthers.  I get so caught up in the stories that I actually talk to the TV…and yes I watch by myself.  I even laughed with a long “oooohhhhhh” when J. Street told his g/f Minka Kelly that if she wanted to get laid so bad then she should go see “Riggins”, aka his best friend who she cheated on him with hahaha.  When he said that even I could feel the punch in the gut sensation hahahaha.  Good show. Good show.  I watched it right up until it was time to leave for class; again…great way to distract me from the day ahead of us.

I called Laura on the way to class and I told her how nervous I was about our presentation.  I don’t really get nervous anymore but I was for some reason today.  Our topic was “water resource issues in the Southwest” and it was such a broad topic that I wasn’t confident enough that I was covering the right material in my section – climate change’s effect on these water resources.  Doesn’t this sound like real school work?  What’s up with this crap?  When it was my time to present I worked in a lot of “Jeff Ward Style” with my jokes, puns, and awesome pictures that all got some laughs…one of my favorites was when I had the slide entitled “Winter in the Southwest” and I put up a picture of Brad Winter (my fellow jokester in the class) from the WFR Mass Casualty Scenario (he’s the one that barfed in the bowl that I held for him that day) and I continued on with the presentation while keeping that slide up lol…but I stumbled getting the facts out.  We ended up doing a good job so life was good.  Each presentation was supposed to be 20 minutes long but everybody went way longer and we still needed our instructors to speak, so the dude that’s been getting us out close to a half hour early these past few days ended up keeping us 15 minutes late today.  This normally wouldn’t have been a big deal but that meant we only had 45 minutes to find dinner and then meet at NAU PD.

I worked this little beauty into my presentation and got a bunch of "awwww"s for it.  Yes I love Indy A LOT!

Attempting to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, I shot over to Walmart for some Subway and to buy a cup for this weekend…we’ve been told several times we’ll need one.  I don’t know what’s up with that Subway but the two times I’ve been there, the two employees on the clock are in the back jerking around. I don’t have time for this crap.  One of them came out, made my sandwich wrong, gave me a giant sized cup when I asked for a small and charged me way more than he should have.  I couldn’t be bothered with that right now.  I inhaled grub and ran to look for a cup…they didn’t have my size, no not youth extra small you jerks, so I ran out of the store and booked it toward the police station.  

We met up outside and then staggered into a classroom.  The instructors were all very cool.  They were mostly NAU PD. One of our first D-Tac instructors came out and student “bad guy” volunteers along with Kathy & Doug (our 2 directors) all crammed into this tiny classroom to observe the tactics portion. We got an hour of classroom time, half for building search techniques & the other half for high risk vehicle stop techniques, and then split the room in half and outside we went.  My half started with the high risk vehicle stops station.  Since a lot of you are probably wondering this just like some of my classmates were, a high risk stop usually deals with well known armed suspects, a stolen vehicle, or there was a lengthy pursuit involved before stopping the suspects.  

The police cars (Ford Expeditions) in our station were set up in what’s called the “left fan” position…contact officer vehicle directly behind the suspect, cover officer vehicle directly to his left.  Here’s a cool little fact…the suspect vehicle was a 4Runner!  We would go through the scenario in teams of 4, a driver & passenger in each patrol vehicle.  I was the first person to volunteer but I went to the cover vehicle, driver side..aka I wouldn’t be doing much.  Turiya was my passenger, Jake was the contact officer, and John was his passenger….pretty solid group.  Jake handled the business with the PA, Turiya did the cuffing, and John & I watched the vehicle at all times.  We couldn’t see any more suspects so guess who’s turn it was to do something…THIS GUY.  I had to “slice the pie” as I approached the vehicle, try to feel for any movement, jump up & peek into the rear windows without breaking the light beams that were lighting this car up, and ultimately open a rear door to make sure that the truck was clear.  Even though it was a scenario, my blood was pumping with all of those police lights going haha. 

After a brief stint at the other high risk station, of which I didn’t get a chance to participate but offered some useful observations, it was our turn to head in and do the building searches.  We got a tour of the building we’d be searching, the NAU Res Life Warehouse, and then it was time to go.  For those of you familiar with Ikea, specifically all of the shelves by checkout with all of the stuff you’re supposed to pick up with a claim ticket or something, that’s what this place looked like. There pieces of beds, fans, refrigerators, couches, lamps, you name it and it was on those shelves….which meant there were tons of places for the bad guy to hide.  

John & Curtis were first and I just gotta say it…I loved watching John do his thing.  Don’t get all crazy eyed people John was a marine so he’s trained in this sort of stuff.  Remember back when I talked about Instructor Money owning the fire class because he was in his element…same thing holds true here.  Watching John work through the search was like watching an action movie unfold before my eyes.  You Call of Duty freaks got nothing on him.  The point of their scenario was to miss suspect, have him sneak up on them, and then see how they react when faced with the threat.  That all happened, the suspect was pinned between two mattresses hahahaha.  

With the odd # in our group and the clock ticking, Josh, Jake, & I tackled the exercise as a threesome.  We entered the warehouse, Jake on point with the AR-15, Josh took the first aisle, and I covered our “6”.  We got kinda hung up after the first aisle but we moved down to the second aisle and I made my way down and searched it.  When I got to the end of that aisle, Jake & Josh spotted the suspect and began shouting commands for him to stop.  Wisely, nobody took off after him.  We regrouped and moved to the next aisle…which was right across from a set of stairs. Josh checked the aisle for further threats and when he returned, I headed up the stairs…knowing nobody else was up there but I did it for experience. It was as if we’d done this before but we managed to stay in step with each other as we progressed down the corridor.  I made my way through the upper landing applying any and every clearing technique I’d seen in movies, when I got to the other set of stairs I could see the suspect’s feet under a shelf at the last aisle.  I shouted for him to freeze and put his hands up and you could see how badly I startled him…it was awesome. I waited at the top of the stairs for Josh to clear another aisle and then I made my way down the stairs, focusing on where I saw the suspect…walking right past another aisle that wasn’t cleared…so that was a minor booboo.  We eventually got to the last aisle and executed a flawless arrest.  The NAU instructor loved our tactics but assistant director Doug suggested that we might not want to separate in the future.  LDC & Turiya got a crack at the warehouse then we headed to the other side for the office clearing scenario.  We didn’t have enough time for everybody to do it so John & Jake went through it and the instructor explained everything and then we were done around 10:15. 

On the way home I stopped at Super Walmart with Nick to check out their cup situation; we each got one.  When we got home we moved an old washer to the curb for pick-up for Mama Jane and I did a little bit more packing while watching even more Friday Night Lights.  I don’t know if it was because I was amped up from the evening’s festivities or nerves about the next few days, but I was up pretty late.  I even went out and cleaned up some of my car around 2 in the morning.  I was up so late, Laura was up for work & we were texting each other.  As soon as she told me to get some sleep…I crashed ha. 

One More Week

Two good things about today, graduation is one week from today AND we don’t have PT this morning.  Unfortunately, we still had to go to class at the same time we normally would’ve if we had PT.  We had a refresher course on some of our law enforcement procedures, then lunch, and then it was time for some more fun.  We worked with the D-Tac instructor from the night before as we did a handcuff refresher out in “The Quad”…in front of a whole bunch of student spectators.  Half of the class started out as officers while the others were suspects…duh.  The officers had to do some calisthenics (burpees, pushups, situps, jumping jacks, etc) then run into the field of suspects and then work through handcuffing them.  They went 3 times, practicing 3 different cuffing positions/techniques/stances, whatever, and then switched roles.  The PT crap before sprinting to the suspects was annoying. Especially in duty gear and while wearing pants that are much bigger now for some reason.  

After the handcuff refresher we worked on regular vehicle stops…I know I thought it was weird that we did high risk stops before regular stops too but what can you do?  Vehicle stops and courtroom testimony are the two elements of law enforcement that have made me apprehensive about pursuing a career in law enforcement for years now and now I’ve been exposed to them both.  Once again, the class was split in half and we took turns practicing the regular vehicle stops.  The cars were already in place then we simulated a call to dispatch, made contact with the driver, decided whether to warn or cite the suspect, and then let them go.  We were taught a couple of different tactics for making the vehicle stop…one of them involved calling the driver back to the front of the “squad car” and conducting the contact right there.  Our instructor asked me why nobody was trying the “call back” technique…I told him it was probably because we did it last night but said I’d do it…so I got to demonstrate in front of my group…yay!  As has been the theme lately, class ran late; this time because we added an introduction to defending against edge weapons (knives) after the vehicle stop portion of the day.  Kathy walked out to her car when Nick, Carter, Kopplin, & I were leaving and she brought up the fact that we'd be done in less than a week now.  Not only did I get her to pound the potato but she told us she'd cry and that she would hang with us afterwards.  YAY!!!  As of right now, I don't know if I'll be around afterwards because there is still nobody secured in shipping my car home so I may be road tripping it...YIKES!!!  If that's the case then I'm leaving right after graduation I wanna make the 35 hour trip in time to be home for Easter Sunday. 

I got home, got changed, and then headed out to find something to wear to graduation.  I checked out Old Navy for a pair of khakis and ended up buying a pair that’s a little smaller than I usually buy…I hope it works out.  Went to Sears and got a sexy shirt & tie and then came home.  Caught up with Mama Jane, talked about graduation with Nick & Carter, and have been typing this…and watching Friday Night Lights…ever since. 

It’s time for bed now.  We got an early/long day tomorrow.  I believe it starts off with shooting each other with less than lethal bullets…hence the need for a cup.  Two more days then I can breathe easy.

Good Night

Flagstaff Observation

This Party’s Almost Over!!!

MOUNT UP!!!