"Traveling Jeffward"

Gotta Stop Leaving Ya’ll Hanging

Wow, I’ve been slacking with these posts ey?  Allow me to catch you up.

There’s not too much to chat about from Thursday & Friday afternoon, other than March ended & April began.  We had an interesting instructor put his own spin on teaching us cultural diversity; he basically looked like a shorter version of (comedian) Daniel Tosh with a marine type build.  We were told prior to his class that we’d be “lucky” if we didn’t get made fun in the class…he was funny and everything but we’ve had far more ruthless instructors than him.  He had half of the afternoon, the other half consisted of us going outside, breaking into groups, and then practicing our responses to crimes in progress.  It was weird getting back into the swing of dealing with criminals & what not…it showed when it was my turn at first but I knocked the second encounter out of the park.  At the end of class my class neighbor got excitedly announced $.40 wings on Wednesdays at Granny’s Closet, aka my favorite restaurant in Flagstaff, as he gave me a pound to celebrate.  I got excited with him until I reminded him it was Thursday and his face sunk.  I got excited about a potential security manager job in Atlantic City when I was job searching at night.  The description fit me and my experience perfectly so I worked on a professional resume, after months of building and editing a government style resume, and had my friend who looks over them as a side job check it out for me.

I probably had my worst workout ever in PT on Friday…which aggravated the hell out of me considering I had one of my best workouts of the year on Wednesday.  The first half of class was very boring.  For some reason the 1^st hour was spent learning about the law enforcement issues the US Forest Service deals with and the 2^nd one brought back one of the instructors from our scenario day at Sunset Crater; I think he talked about resource issues…can’t remember.

Friday was a bit of a longer day, we went until 6 instead of 5.  After those two instructors did their thing, 3 NAU police officers came in and talked to us about directing traffic and introducing vehicle searches…then we got to go outside and actually do them which I thought was frigg’n awesome!  Again we were broken up into 3 groups and there were 3 stages, 2 were campus intersections & 1 was a vehicle search but not just any vehicle search…a 4RUNNER search!  My group started with busiest intersection on campus. Some of the girls looked nervous, I regulated as usual…all of those cross-country races and Fair parking details really paid off for this one.  The vehicle search was a little tougher for me.  I had to find a (rubber training) knife which the officer hid in the sunroof…that crafty little wanker.  Class ended and I took a different way home…past Granny’s Closet.  They had a sign up advertising $.25 wings today, as an April Fool’s Day promo.  I immediately texted Josh, I could hear his excitement in his “What for real?” response…but the conversation died there. 

When I got home I looked over the suggestions Mrs. Claire had for my resume and then I applied to the Casino Security Manager position.  Just a quick backtrack, I’ve been waiting for this job to be listed for a few years now.  I applied to a similar position several years ago and was called back for a second interview.  While I was on the 2^nd interview, the position got filled; with me right there in the room talking to somebody from human resources!   I think the job would be cool because it’s in NJ, it’s very good money, and it’s in Atlantic City!  The place where I met Laura! Just as I submitted my application I got a text from Josh.  “Gonna hit up Granny’s, wanna join?”  “Sweet, when?”  “We’re here now.”  Thanks for the heads up bud, I wasn’t even out of my uniform yet. Hahahaha.

This place is AWESOME!

When I got to Granny’s, Josh, Brad, & Pat were just about done eating.  I ordered some wings, they hung out, then EJP and his lady met up with us.  It was a good time.  The best part, my dinner cost $3.34 before tip.  There was another “Art Walk” in town so we decided we were going to stroll around for a little bit. We didn’t go into any art galleries or anything but I think this Walk’s theme was music…because there was a lot of it in the air.  People were on street corners and outside shops jamming on guitars & banging on drums….there was even some sort of drum line in the middle of town square (I guess, that’s the only way to describe it) that brought about one of the biggest outdoor dance parties I’ve ever seen.  We made pit stops at a book store, a cd store, and some sort of costume store before calling it a night.  Our group was in the book store for a long time.  Most of the shops downtown are small, older looking things, and this sucker was warm…so I hung outside while just about everybody else bought a book.  Similar story at the CD store but this place had some sort of mutt looking dog laying in 1 of the 2 aisles that you could travel on in the store.  I’m assuming the dog was the store owner’s and he was licking some sort of open wound near his rear leg.  What’s with these dog owners in Flagstaff; don’t they take care of their pets? The costume store was interesting, I crammed a bunch of hats on my head that were way too small for my head, and there were 2 dudes playing Call of Duty in the back of some guy’s Kia outside in the street.

King Jeff...crown be too small

Now feel free to tell me if my expectations are too high but two of my classmates were talking about jobs when we were walking around town and they were actually pumped at the possibility of making $12 an hour doing a fire job!  Getting paid $12 an hour to risk their lives fighting fire; they got more excited about the availability of working OT…which would come out to what I was making as straight time back for the Monmouth County Park System….which wasn’t enough and was one of the driving reasons for me coming out here in the first place.  Can anybody tell me why these guys were acting like they’d be big “ballers” with just $12 an hour?

We didn’t stay out late because we had actual classroom at 8o’clock in the morning tomorrow.

Radio Check 1-2

Now I’m a little confused as to why we had to have a 4 hour radio class at all, let alone at 8o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, especially since we use plain talk instead of 10-codes for the Park Service.  Now I know how the gun gurus felt when we were learning the basics of firearms.  I’ve been using radios for 10 years so it was extremely difficult to stay awake in the class. The whole class grew ornery because our radio session went way into lunch (12) and we had to be back at 1 for our final day of DUI procedures.  The class is also showing signs of “Senioritis” as some of them received demerits for using their computers in class for things other than what’s going on in class instead of waiting for breaks.  Others got demerits for horsing around and I think somebody else threw water on somebody but I’m not sure.  I think a lot of people have mentally “checked out”, even more so since the job situation is looking sketchy.  Ironically, 2 of the people that got in “trouble” already have jobs.  Group behavior is a funny thing.

John, Travis, & I had lunch at the school cafeteria. We had quite the odd combination of food; turkey sandwiches, tater tots, breakfast sausages, hard boiled eggs, and some pasta.  Very strange.  We headed back to class where we had our good friends from the Coconino County Sheriff’s office as instructors just one more time.  One of my classmates got pulled over by a Sheriff’s officer during the lunch break.  He told the officer who his instructors were going to be and I believe the officer let him go and suggested he ask our instructors about some story he was involved it.  We spent some time in the classroom and then it was time to head back outside for some practice…in groups.  John, Josh, & I alternated being cops & suspects and walking each other through our two common FSTs (field sobriety tests).  It was the first time we’d ever gone through the exercise as officers; it was pretty cool and I can’t wait to try them out on my drunk friends when I get home.  It was a pretty tame night.  Nick & Carter made a banging steak dinner for us complete with corn on the cob & homemade mashed potatoes and then it was off to bed.

Dark Night

What a beautiful day to head down to Sedona for our night shooting qualification course…that was until we got down there.

Travis offered to drive me down, I was more than happy to take him up on his offer.  We were a little delayed in getting down there despite being able to sleep in a few extra hours.  On the way down we stopped at Safeway to pick up some fresh potato & macaroni salad for the class BBQ that was serving as our dinner for the evening.  The ladies behind the deli counter were in the back…kitchen or something…and we waited awhile for them to realize we were there.  I tried everything short of walking back there myself to get their attention, thus we were delayed even further.  Things almost got super scary right after that.  That’d be when a giant RV pulled out in front of us as we were heading to the no passing zone Switchbacks that connect Flagstaff to Sedona.  Luckily we had an opening to pass in a passing zone prior to The Switchbacks because my man was crawling.  Some of my other classmates weren’t so lucky & they got stuck behind that beast…all the way down the Switchbacks & through tourist trap downtown Sedona. We arrived right at our designated meeting time, which wasn’t too bad because we passed our lead instructor in town.

The wind was whipping around like crazy.  It was shredding our paper targets before we even got a chance to finish stapling them up, and it wasn’t slowing down anytime soon.  Jacob “Lewkis” Lewis snatched me up to be his partner as soon as we got there…most likely because he’s tired of me not having any pictures of him doing any of these exercises.  Too bad I forgot my camera; my Droid will just have to do.  My buddy Jake said easily one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard as far as a play on words with my name goes, “Jeff Ward…hey if I’m walking towards you, does that mean I’m walking Jeffward?”  I loved it!

We worked on the transition from our shotgun to handgun…which was pretty awkward, then we shot the (unbeknownst to us) shotgun qualifying rounds.  We got 4 slugs and had get 3 of them inside the scoring zone of our target from 25 yards out…I just went ahead and all 4 in that sucker…WINNING! We then qualified with the buckshot rounds which were kind of interesting considering something flew at my arm from my neighbor’s gun or shot while I was shooting and hit my arm.  It stung for a little bit and then when I was done shooting, I saw that I was bleeding.  Weird.  After we finished up with the buckshot, we cleaned up the shotguns and put them away…for GOOD!

My perfect slug score...with Jacob's 3 outta 4.  Much better than the 1st time I ever shot a slug when I put a hole in the roof of that outdoor range in Virginia.
The perfect circle holes are where the slugs went through, the other holes are the wads from the bullet.

When the shotguns were away, we got over an hour of “play” time with our handguns and the metal targets.  It was basically controlled chaos.  We got into 6 lines and could shoot however we wanted too…safely…from 25 yards out.  This exercise saved the whole firearms experience in my opinion.  We were told not to get down on ourselves and to just work on whatever we needed to work on.  It was the best I’ve shot yet!  Originally, we alternated from standing to kneeling.  Some of my classmates tried weak hand only.  I started the trend of shooting the other lines’ targets and acting like I was shooting from behind cover.  Right before halftime of “play time”, I decided I was going to work in a magazine exchange.  Our instructor huddled us up for halftime and told us to keep shooting however we wanted to but to work in a magazine exchange in the process…damn it! We kept shooting and our instructor kept bringing us more ammo.  It was awesome!  One instructor couldn’t believe how good we all got.  Some of my classmates tried different variations of prone (laying) shooting and two even tried holding the upside down and pulling the trigger with their pinkies, which they paid the price for when the slide cut up their hands.  The biggest stunt/tactical thing I did was shoot while holding my flashlight in my left hand; something that our instructor wanted to do later that night but never got around to doing.

Flashlight in the support hand while trying to even out the sunburn

The whole point of “playtime” was to take up as much time as possible so we could get our dinner in then it would be dark enough to do our night shooting.  Well dinner was awesome; we should’ve been doing this all along.  Everybody brought something for the BBQ.  When people were done play shooting they’d go help cook or setup while the rest of us finished up and then put all of the target stands away.  John’s wife made a 7 layer bean dip and we all housed it; it didn’t have a chance.  I don’t usually eat that sort of stuff but it was amazing.  So were the mint cookies that Carter made.  Dare I say it, they could quite possibly rival the world famous Mama Cookie.  The dough looked mint chocolate chip ice cream and the cookies tasted like it too.  The food was awesome and it served as yet another morale booster.  Giant burgers, bbq grilled chicken, brats (I’ve never seen so many people obsessed with brats as I’ve seen in my time out here), and even some venison steaks. Deliciousness followed by test time.

Sean on the grill

Fixins Bar

It quickly became night time.  We had a brief talk of flashlight techniques but never got to shoot with them…at least the rest of the class didn’t…and it was on!  The first group still had some ambient sunlight left so they could still see the target a little bit.  When my group went we could hardly make out the silhouette of the body on the target and it was even harder with my orange tinted safety glasses.  The cool thing was that the sights on our guns glow in the dark…we were somehow supposed to line that up with the middle of the silhouette.  We shoot a total of 30 rounds spread out among the 3,7, & 15 yard lines with a mix of 2 handed, support hand only, kneeling, and from behind cover shooting. You need a 21 to qualify…that allows you to miss 9 shots and still qualify.  Everybody qualified on the 1^st try yet we shot the course 3 times.  I have multiple theories as to why but it all seems unnecessary.  At any rate, I shot a 25, 26, & a 23…the last one puts more stress on you because its timed and you shoot between whistles instead of verbal commands.

Shooting in the dark is hard

Shooting in the dark is freaking trippy, that’s the best way I can put it.  The night was absolutely beautiful I do have to add.  It was the 3^rd best night sky I ever remember seeing, based solely on the beauty of the stars.  The best night was the night we had our WFR mass casualty mock scenario and the second best night was the first night I brought a security crew up to work our first ever Harvestfest…but both of those nights were on a mountain so we were closer to the stars and that’s cheating.  Everybody was exhausted but we got 3 qualifications out of the way with 1 more left to go.  When I got home I quickly realized that skipping on the sunblock was a bad idea.  Lobster Jeff!

NVRGVUP

Looking back on today I’m reminded of my future 4Runner license plate, NVRGVUP.  The day started off on a good note, with pancakes.  It temporarily got better from there.  Just as I was putting my phone into my gym bag for PT I saw that I had an e-mail with the subject line “Referral Letter: Vacancy ID....”  Oh great, another rejection letter.  I opened the e-mail and was surprised at the contents inside.  “Rating: Eligible.  Status: Referred.”  It was from Kings Mountain National Military Park, which I think is near the border of North & South Carolina…40 miles outside of Charlotte. I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I had basically given up on this whole finding a NPS Ranger job; the budget has to be passed, the more experienced guys are getting the few jobs that are out there, no more jobs are being posted, etc.. Now I’m not getting my hopes up by any means.  Basically getting referred is just like being any other actress that is nominated for a movie award in the same category as something Sandra Bullock.  They give you that line “it’s great just being nominated” because they have no chance.  Right now, that’s how I feel. 

Even if I somehow land this job, it won’t matter if I don’t pass this PEB resulting in not getting my certificate after all of this is said and done.  I only bring that up because my workout today sucked just a little bit less than my aforementioned Friday workout.  My bench press is back to lacking and I’m still sucking wind when doing just light jogs outside.  I swear there’s something in air up here at 7,000 feet.  I’m in worse shape after 3.5 months of PT than I was before I came out here…how’s that possible? Gotta dig down deep and keep blasting my Hatebreed.  NVRGVUP

 "I promise to myself to never be my own Defeatist"

We apparently have a very boring week of class ahead of us, as opposed to all of the other fun stuff we’ve been doing lately, as we’re now diving into resource protection aka, the only thing that separates NPS LE Rangers from other Law Enforcement Officers.  I got to serve as Class President for about 2 hours today while Travis did his physical for his job.  That means I got to pass around the sign in sheet AND get the class lined up for our uniform inspection.  Yup, that’s basically all the Class President does. 

Fun fact, we had 2 a instructors today…a guy and a girl.  The guy’s name was Kim & and the girl’s name was Jeri…hahaha.  I checked my e-mail during our first class break and the top message was somebody I’ve never heard of and had something to do with “you recently submitted an application” in the title.  I opened the e-mail; it was from the hiring ranger at Kings Mountain and he asked if I was still interested in the position.  Interesting little tidbit, the e-mail was only sent to one other person…not sure what that means but that was pretty instantaneous as opposed to the NJ/PA park that I’ve been waiting to hear from for over a month. My calls to their hiring manager have resulted in only me leaving them voice messages. 

Class continued to bore me to tears.  I got home & headed right back out towards the gym but first, had to make a pit stop. Before heading out, Jasper (neighbor’s dog) startled me because he never barks.  He would come to the fence for me to pet him and then he would run toward the house, jump in the air, and bark then come to me and start the whole process over again. I looked to see what he was barking at only to see the same black cat that tortures Fiona from outside the window, sitting on the roof of my neighbor’s house.  I tried taking a picture of the whole scene but my neighbor walked out just as I was doing it…talk about awkward.

I stopped at Safeway to see if they sold glutamine, a supplement that helps repair & recover your muscles, and they give you a gas discount when you shop there. No glutamine, plenty of gas, now it’s time to go workout my ass.  The gym was super crowded.  I got in some time on the bike, banged out a bunch of abdominal exercises, finished my chest workout from PT, and headed to the hot tub. When I got home from the gym I chatted with Mama Jane for awhile and worked on some stuff on the computer including some teacher assessments for class and my PT mid-term. My sister Maureen sent me some Youtube videos of her inside cats trying to break out of the house; I’ll pretend it was to come out to find me despite only knowing me for 2 weeks.

Tomorrow’s Resource Stewards

The title for today’s section is basically our class’s motto because it’s what sets park rangers aside from other law enforcement officers…as previously stated.  For the next week we’ll be going over various types of resource law enforcement; today we talked mostly about animals and it reminded me of why I wanted to become a park ranger in the first place.  We usually have Tuesday/Thursday mornings off…I don’t think we have any of the next/last 3 Tuesday mornings off and that kinda blows.

Class started at 10 today but it was one of those mornings that I just kept smacking the snooze button…so hard to get out of bed.  I loved class today for the most part.  We watched a buttload of videos dealing with animals – poaching, importing/exporting, & some feel good stories about rescuing them.  Most of the footage we watched absolutely made my blood boil.  I can’t believe how dumb people are…just ruthless when it comes to slaying any & every type of animal that’s out there.  Did you know that the gall bladder of a black bear can go for $1,500???  A gall bladder!  People buy them because they’re said to be some sort of “cure all” for all kinds of ailments. That’s not even the claws or teeth people make into jewelry or the various uses for their paws, heads, hinds, etc..  One video even showed bears being captured and used to training hunting dogs.  They showed packs of dogs attacking the bears…I actually wanted the bear to kick all of the dogs’ asses. 

Just 2 weeks prior to the PEB

If you didn’t know this by now I absolutely love animals.  I’m fascinated by every type of animal out there and I probably should’ve been a vet. Up until about 6 months ago I had 3 dogs, 15 koi fish, and 2 red eared sliders turtles.  When 2 of the dogs moved out, 2 cats moved in just 2 weeks prior to my departure for Flagstaff.  None of that even covers my baby, Indy…she lives with Laura’s family.  Behind Indy, my turtles are probably my favorite pets for 3 reasons.  1. Because they are actually mine. 2. Their uniqueness. 3. Because they let me pet them even while they are in the water or sunbathing…because when they see me they think I am going to feed them.  Cool story about those turtles…I sort of “rescued” them, even though they are illegal to have in NJ.  They belonged to a girl I went to college with but her mom could no longer take care of them.  Since you can’t release a domesticated animal back into the wild…since they’ll die or could spread diseases…I told the girl that they would be a great addition to my koi pond.  I’ve had them now for almost 7 years…they RULE!  Sorry for the turtle story but part of what we saw today dealt with “turtle dealing” and it made me think about them.  There’s a tortoise that some of these poachers sell for $50,000!!!  That’s nuts!  There were two scenes with German Shepherds acting as search dogs and I swear they looked just like Indy!  It’s funny when my class neighbors, Josh & EKV, get as excited for me whenever I see German Shepherds.  

Meet Shamrock & Mr. Turtle

We talked a little bit about some archaeological resources, aka Indiana Jones stuff (awww Indy).  Kathy was on patrol looking for some classroom rule breakers and all of this was taking place during “Sugar High Week.”  I’m not sure why it’s being done but there’s a table set up outside the offices by our classroom and every day, in different time blocks, there’s a different “sugary treat” just given out.  Today was cookie day! None of the cookies looked that great but I think I had some sort of mint one. We got out of class at 4:40, 20 minutes before we were supposed to get out, but I ended up staying until 6 so I could see how all of the ranger pictures I’ve taken so far look on the projector.  That’s right…I have close to a slideshow hour’s worth of pictures just of my classmates & I.  The program has students from each class put together a slideshow…I wasn’t one of the original ones that volunteered to make it happen but since I’ve basically become the class photographer, I’ll be joining in the fray. 

When I got home from class I changed, moved some laundry around and headed out to The Plex, I NEED a very good to great workout to make-up for the shitty ones I’ve put out the past few days; I succeeded.  I’m not sure how this happened but I beat my 1.5 mile time by 30 seconds…and I wasn’t even breathing hard or nothing when I was done.  I’m not sure if it was the treadmill, my music blasting, or my pre-workout Powerade energy gels but I straight up dominated that mile & a half.  Let’s hope that carries over to April 20^th.  I did some more ab work and a lot of stretching then I headed down to the bball court…it was mobbed. 

At one point, and this was pretty comical, all of the hoops had a segregated group shooting at them. I’ll just leave it at that.  Then “Uniter Dub” sprung into action and I asked if people wanted to play…I ended up getting a 3 on 3 game going.  My team had a hippie, a skinny Mexican named Jose, & myself…we played against 3 of Jose’s friends.  The leader of the group had a bit of a sarcastic humor about him, probably thought they were gonna school us.  The hippy & I dominated.  I was on fire…just about everything I threw up went in.  It felt great playing again..I wanted to keep going.  It was almost closing time but we got one more game in…with some new teams.  There were 2 girls from a local high school shooting around and some dude was with them, hippy & I picked up Yao Ming’s cousin and we hoop’d it up.  The guy on the other team had some hops, he kept swatting my teammates but he couldn’t stop me…I even pinned 2 of his layups (blocked his shot by holding it against the backboard).  Once again, I wasn’t tired or winded…something freaky happening here. I know I’ll blow it in PT class tomorrow.

I stopped by Circle K (damn that place is shady) on the way home for some milk and some Redbox movies, Takers (sucks) and I’ll finally get a chance to see The Fighter. Got home and chatted with Mama Jane & the roomie, showered, put laundry away and finally wrapped up this post.  That’s all folks.

Flagstaff Observation

Hey Babbit - My time downtown on Friday night really brought some things to my attention.  You won’t find one brand name shop or restaurant in the heart of town anywhere…or at least none that come to mind. In a way it’s very cool to see the small town sustain itself by replenishing all of the small name businesses.  I’ve heard & seen the name Babbit everywhere since my first day in Flagstaff yet I don’t really know the story behind the family. I know they own a gigantic ranch but they have all kinds of shops & goods in town.  Whoever this Babbit family is, I know they are loaded.  I’m not sure of the relationship but if you remember the family that I told you about from my WFR course..well the husband & wife are now running the ranch or something…and there name’s not Babbit

Whole New Program – My class, NAU PRTP Class 21, is the last class under the current regime.  Kathy, our director, is leaving the school because her husband (and former director) got a full time gig at Glacier National Park.  I’m not sure what his title is, but one of our cool regulars is leaving as well to work with juvenile delinquents…as the rumor goes.  That’s old news.  I just found out yesterday that our PT instructor, Mike, will be leaving the school as well once this semester is done. I wonder what the class will look like next semester.

MOUNT UP!!!