Pet Peeve

What is it about those Blue Tooth earpieces that make people think they look cool wearing them all the time?

Back In Town

I'm back now after a short (way too short) vacation out of town with Mr. Hooter and our friend Travis to Heber Springs for some fly fishing. It was a very good time, though I could have used another couple of weeks. Pictures are soon to follow. Travis experienced his very first trout on a fly rod, and after months of an extremely distrubing lack of fishing in our lives, Marden and I finally got to wet our fly lines again. However, time was so short it just felt like a tease.

Warning...this post is about to take a whiney turn - but I have to vent. I can't seem to get re-charged after getting back from ALETA! I'm always tired, run-down, and quite possibly the Pissiest Person Presently on the Planet. I have no time to even keep the house clean, let alone dabble in the hobbies that make my little world go 'round, leaving me to ponder if a certain job is really worth feeling like it owns my soul more and more. Life just wasn't meant to be this way. I haven't seen my fam in MO for who knows how long, and this part of Arkansas is feeling more alien every day. Sleep is my only real escape, but even my dreams are making me feel exausted. A couple of nights ago Sasquatch was giving me legal advice in a British accent.

Yep...I need a REAL vacation, but since we're just now hitting the busy season that's probably not going to happen for a while. *sigh*

On top of that, Sally is definately prego with the mutt-pups...hopefully the vet will still be able to take care of that issue. I think this rainy day is getting to me...

All Better

I got the stitches out of my hand this past Saturday, and as you can see - it healed very nicely and much quicker than I had hoped. I've got a farily impressive scar to show for it, but that's ok. Everyone knows that real chicks have scars, though I must admit most don't get them changing light bulbs.

On a different note - one related to my previous post - I saw a copy of the local section of a local paper today. Headline reads "4-Year Old Hunter Bags First Turkey"

I give up.

A turkey is just a bird? I think not.

Turkey is just a bird my foot...I'm pretty sure wild turkeys are some minion of an alternate dimension, only seen by human eyes when you're in your car or on un-huntable property.
Sunday evening, while visiting at the in-laws (the hubby was on a field training excercise - some army thing that did NOT sound fun), I decided to try my luck on an evening turkey hunt - my first solo hunt. Now, I'm just a fledgling turkey hunter. And to make things even more frustrating, I was spoiled by bagging a nice buck on my very first deer hunt last year. However, this would add up to be my 3rd year of turkey hunting with no turkey. This time I was determined.
Dressed in camo head to toe and armed with my trusty shotgun, a myriad of calls, and even some decoys, I headed for the woods. Sneaking through the trees like a soldier stalking Charlie on the Ho Chi Min trail, I first used an owl locator call, just like the pros. Nothing. No problem...I knew where these guys roosted. So I found a nice spot close to the area with lots of feathers and scratch marks where there HAD been turkeys, and proceeded to let out some calls. Nothing. Nothing for a looong time. Of course, I'm not altogether convinced that my calls even sound like a turkey...rather, they sounded more like a duck with a speech impediment. It's getting dark...my butt is numb...I'm pretty sure there's a tick stuck to my ear... At least I thought I knew where they roosted...apparently they'd decided to check into the nearest Holiday Inn Express. No turkeys. I headed home.
Well...it's just an evening hunt...I'll get 'em early in the morning when they first get up! I got up before the butt-crack of dawn, and by the time the sun started to rise I was camped out under a big oak, decoys set, waiting for that gigantic gobbler to poke his head into my sights. (Never mind that in my eagerness to get into the woods I'd sounded like a drunk elephant crashing around...a big no-no) And I waited. Let out some calls. Waited some more. My butt again went numb. Pretty sure there is another tick in a not-so-scratchable place. Just when I thought about getting up and trying another tactic, I heard a soft, "yelp yelp yelp" of a hen. They DO exist!!! "Hmmm...well, similar to humans - where there's a girl, there's got to be an amorous boy not far behind", I reasoned. An hour later I decided maybe not. I'd started to hallucinate that the turkey flock was watching me, asking each other, "how long do you think she's going to sit there?" I finally relented.
At this point I've really decided that turkey hunting is no more than a waste of valuable sleeping time. I think I'm going to stick to trout and deer...critters that I DO know exist, and are catchable. (And make a tasty supper)

So things have been interesting since I've returned from the Ivory Tower of Knowledge...what with the hazards of the new gun belt, a new employee who's evidently extremely sensitive and can't take constructive criticism, and the stitches in my finger and palm.

Today just kind of took the cake.

So I'm doing a monthly report, and Maintenance calls me to ask if I put another dog in the pen with Sally, and when I said no, they said..."um...well, you'd better get down here. They're kind of...um...stuck together." Ewww nooooooooo. Yes, there IS another dog in the pen, and NO, it's not mine. Actually, it looked like a fat half Rottweiler, half weenie dog, and he’d pried the door open. I shut the little hussy in the house and shooed him away, but I'm afraid it may take a bb-gun for him to get the message that Ashlie’s Red-Light Doggie District is now closed. Then I called the vet in a pure panic see what to do, because I SURE don’t want Beagleweenieweiler pups – they said since she’s getting fixed on the 25th, it’s no problem. Big sigh of relief.

Then, the Rudest People In The World called the park. I think what they wanted was directions to Crowley's Ridge, but the Ranger had answered the phone. They hung up on him because of his "smart mouth", which I don't understand because I was standing right there and heard the whole conversation - he was being very friendly. Then they called back and berated me about "how he was rude to my friend" and "how we need to screen our employees better and teach some customer service!" Then after getting no satisfaction from me (evidently), they called back and showed their sophistication by yelling, "F*&# you and your job, BITCH!" and hanging up. Classy.

It does all have a bright side. Sally will not be a mama of any strange looking puppies, and I was told by my friend Cheryl that I am now a real officer, having been dubbed the title of "bitch."

Grace Strikes Again

Well, it's about that time for something stupid to happen to me requiring a visit to the E.R., and Friday that stupid thing happened. While changing a lightbulb with a long pole (which was broken) I lost my grip on the pole and redecorated my hand. This is 12 stitches later...ew ew icky poo!

I'm just fine...now the stitches are getting annoying and I can get them out in less than a week. After that, should be good as new. And I'm already tired of hearing, "How many Ashlie's does it take to change a light bulb?"

Picture pages, picture pages...

Yay pictures! Finally, yes I know. So here we are at the driving track. What you can't tell is that this car is going at a very high rate of speed - I believe this was during pursuit drills. During pursuits, we students drove our cars (one at a time of course) after a "suspect", which was an instructor. After riding with this particular instructor, I decided his mental stability may be in question. All the while another (also very crazy) instructor stayed on our tail, trying to distract us by slamming us in the rear end, running us off the road, and general fun stuff along those lines. If we were able to blow this picture up, I believe you'd see three students who just crapped themselves.

More driving (notice all the dust...that is actually pure panic in solid form):

And next we have a photo of us being all tactical during Tactical Shooting Week. Obviously I wasn't being tactical - I had already gone...I was sitting on a bucket taking a picture.

Felony traffic stops...(just a walk-through...the "real" ones were kinda crazy)

FREEDOM!!!

Howdy folks! I hear you've been wondering...Well, I'm out of school and am now a full-fledged Ossifer of the Law. I now have to sit in my office all geared up, complete with a bullet-proof vest which makes me feel like a fat stuffed turkey. Law Enforcement also comes with some unexpected hazards...for instance, I keep forgetting that with this gun belt I'm wider...I forget to open the door wider, and as a consequence I keep getting stuck in the door. Going to have to work on that. And today my seatbelt got stuck in my gun belt, which resulted in a not-so-graceful exit from my truck this morning. And finally, when taking a bank deposit in while in uniform and geared up, it's a good idea to refrain from getting a free donut that the bank offers, lest you want to hear snickering from other bank customers. All this I've learned in a single day on the job. Not to mention last night when on my first patrol as an officer, my first stop to check the welfare of some campers after a hellacious storm we had - I brilliantly locked the keys in the ranger truck running and with the headlights on. Makes me wonder what's in store for tomorrow?

Anyway - so sorry I've been MIA lately...things just got ultra-busy, and my weekend time was at a premium. The last three weeks of ALETA were interesting to say the least, and are worth recapping. What with the screeching tires, shooting each other, the meltdowns, and getting caught by insturctors while pretending to be "beamed up" through the skylight. Soooo...here we go:

WEEK 10:
This week we began practical excercises, which would last the rest of ALETA time. We were divided into groups - squads A&B, squads C&D (yay! C was known as the "screw-up rogue squad", which Kendra, Travis, and myself happened to belong to), and the whiney E&F squads. Each group did something different, then rotated the next week.

We (C&D) started out at the range for "Tactical Shooting" with handguns and shotguns, plus training on the FATS machine - which is like a huge real-life video game. Our luck would have it that most of the week was rainy, but that didn't stop us from being all tactical. Lots of running and shooting. Lots of yelling. Lots of getting soaked. But, rest assured that we can now make our paper man targets sorry for being printed while on the move...and as i said, we were very tactical. The most fun part of the week was called "Hogan's Alley", which is a course set up for one person to go through at a time, which I failed miserably. The point of Hogan's Alley in a nutshell is "DON'T SHOOT THE GOOD GUYS!"
I shot the good guys...at least a couple of them. What happens is you're given the scenario of being called to a situation where shots have been fired including several cops and several bad guys. All the while you're sneaking around this course, hiding behind walls, tires, and other obstacles, and you come into contact with targets and have to decide whether to shoot them or not. In my run, a cop and a paperboy bit it. :) I'm sorry, but in a "shootout" situation, if you're a cop in plain clothes, don't hold a big gun aimed at me and hold your little 2" badge down at your leg...Also, if you're a paperboy, don't look like a long haired 40-year-old creep holding a rolled-up newspaper like a shotgun, or you, too, will eat some lead. Needless to say, I got a big ZERO on that excercise....which is ok, cause Travis did too, as well as most of the class.
The other fun thing we did was night firing - firing 25 rounds at targets by only flashlight, and the other 25 rounds by only blue flashing lights. I was a complete retard with my flashlight, which chose that particular moment to go dead. I had to borrow someone else's, which was completely different...Travis said it looked like my flashlight was trying to attack me for most of the excercise. The blue light excercise was a tad better, though since I was on the end of the line and farthest away from the lights I could barely see...pretty much I just aimed in the general area and let rounds fly. Still, all in all I did pretty good...my final target only had 3 rounds out of 50 outside the target area.

WEEK 11:
This week was Driving Course Week...also known now as The Week I Broke Kendra's Hand. More about that in a minute. For driving, we were given several old state trooper cars with lights and sirens for these excercises, and it was a complete blast. Never would I have dreamed that driving 30 m.p.h. through cones could be so fun and hair-raisingly scary at the same time. Best part was doing the controlled skids on wet concrete...at the end of the excercise we each got to do an uncontrolled 360 as fast as we could go...you can imagine how that went! I think my brief but successful stint as a 2-time dirt track Powderpuff Champion must have helped, especially on the pursuit course, which was definately NOT done at 30 m.p.h.
So one evening we received baton training, which was actually supposed to be several weeks ago, but they missed it somehow. Kendra's my partner, and we're facing each other swinging away with our batons, just like we're supposed to be doing (though instead of "GET ON THE GROUND!" like we're told to, we're yelling stuff like "QUIT LITTERING!" and "PUT THE DOG ON A LEASH!") and somehow we get too close, and WHACK! Kendra's hand was about twice the size it's supposed to be. Oops. As you can imagine, I felt about 2" big for the next week.

WEEK 12:
We all breathed a HUGE sigh of relief...this was actually the last week!!! This week we had Building Searches and Felony Stops...which Kendra had to do in a cast. Heh. The interesting thing about these excercises is that they include "simunition", which means we use guns a lot like the ones we carry, only they shoot rounds which are kind of like paintballs - just smaller and more painful. We were able to wear helmets and body armor, but that doesn't protect arms and legs. Pretty much this week of training made me scared to death to be a cop - a lovely way to end 12 weeks of training. Luckily I only ended up with one bad simunition hit in the leg...the rest on the arms were pretty mild. All in all, it was pretty fun...we had some good thinking scenarios, as well as some pretty wild scenarios where it was a shoot-'em-up-free-for-all.

And finally - graduation! It was as cheesy as I'd ever dreamed graduation from ALETA would be. A couple of bright spots were that State Parks graduated well - Travis sang the National Anthem, and Matt and I tied for first place in PT scores. Travis WOULD have taken top academic honors, but missed a single question on his last test which knocked him out of the standings. When the scores are so close that I can have a 95+ average and still be down halfway in the class rank, anything can happen.

So now here we are...all graduated and back to our "normal" lives. I suppose my posts will be more regular now, and hopefully will regain some of the daily happenings humor of pre-ALETA. I hope that ALETA hasn't ruined my sense of humor. I don't think it has...Travis told me that if God has a sense of humor at all, when we die we'll be assigned to gate duty and can make fun of everyone coming through. But who are we kidding - you know we'll be assigned to some kind of spiritual doggy doodie pick-up crew for our immature behavior as of late.

All in all, it's been an interesting experience. I'm so glad to have my "real" life back after 3 months of hiatus. The only thing that made it halfway bearable was being there with friends. I have to say that the wry humor of Travis made life easier, and for Kendra and I to survive living together through three months of duress says a lot for a friendship. Thanks guys.

p.s. - Barring any more technical difficulties, pictures are soon to follow!