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!