This and that: February 9, 2015.

--I worked an off-duty job last week, and am expecting a little bit of mad money from it. I'm going to buy me a Canon Rebel body, and then go lens shopping. It's embarrassing that I don't have any kind of DSLR, with my family.

--I took the helm for a week as the OIC of my P.D, while the chief was out of town. Nothing happened.

--I went to a Traffic Incident Management school for a couple of days, put on by the North Texas Council Of Governments. The instructors were great, and passionate about what they were teaching. They were fervent in teaching that, if you want to contribute to the safety of first responders and the public at large, you MUST clear the roadway quickly. Statistically, for every minute that a traffic incident continues, there is a 1 to 1.5% chance of a secondary event occurring. That's astounding. They had plenty of evidence to back it up, and were proponents of taking a quick picture of the crash, and using push-bumpers and-or chains to clear disabled vehicles out of lanes so that traffic could get moving again. The instructor said, "My dream is to see push bumpers put onto fire engines. I may retire the day that I see that happen."

Firefighters like to block off extra lanes for the safety of the first responders. The doctrine that these guys were trying to push was to get the firefighters on board with clearing the lanes, in the name of preserving the safety of the motorists upstream of them. I get that.

-- I've been working out again, trying to bring back the physical gains that I had made before the holidays. That left rotator cuff is telling me that I'm stuck at the amount of weight that I'll be benching for awhile, but I'm making nice gains on the eliptical machine, and on the abdominal curl machine. I'm trying to get my wind up, and strengthen my core. Everything else is gravy. Well, losing some more weight would be nice.

--Spending time on the eliptical machine got a LOT better, once I realized that I could use the little Galaxy tablet that my mother gave me for Christmas to watch Archer episodes on, with my Bluetooth headphones on. I, uh, had to turn it off in a hurry the other day when my Bluetooth wireless connection failed and the speaker began blaring the unfortunately blue dialogue at Missus Grundy, trudging away on the machine next to me.

-I taught my 12 year-old daughter the painless-until-resistance-is-encountered come-along hold we call "the Gooseneck." It's mostly used for escorting drunks away from a location. I should make sure that my 16 year-old is good with it, too. Lots and lots of times, just getting a belligerent drunk out of a confrontation will deescalate a tense situation into nothing.

-The Open Carry Movement guys in Texas have a very, VERY vocal minority who are frankly assholes. These asses will ruin it not only for the open carry proponents, but also for regular 2nd Amendment people. The most common method of the OCM activists is to carry (legally) long guns in public places in a prominent manner. It's one thing to carry a gun, and it's another thing to carry a gun at someone, as lots of these guys are doing. The nice thing about the Concealed Handgun License in Texas has been that the guy who wasn't being an idjit, and was following the law in keeping their gun concealed, was going to prevent a lot of foolishness in other ways. More on this, later; it deserves its own post.

--I called my best friend (a small business owner) and asked his advice on starting a small business. Two hours' later, we were kind of at an impasse.

--I refinanced the house, with cash back.  Just because you have cash sitting in the bank doesn't mean that you're wealthy. Not. At. All.

--When we refinanced, they made me sign my "signature" about 75 times throughout the hundreds of papers worth of documents. I say "signature" because the rep from the title company insisted that I had to write in script my first, middle, and last name each time. Who does that?!? I then had to sign a sworn affidavit that this was my "normal and true signature," and give and exemplar above the signing. I wrote for the exemplar my NORMAL signature. The lady with the title company pursed her lips and said that might not work, "because they're all supposed to be the same." I made clear that if I were swearing to the validity of the statement, I would see that it was true, and the only way to do that was to actually sign my actual normal signature on the exemplar line. I pointed out that her own signature below her notary stamp only included her first initial and last name. She countered that it was okay, because she had a letter from her attorney saying that this WAS her normal and true signature. I laughed and said that her attorney held no power to grant such status. But I signed the rest of the documents the way she wanted me to, to keep the title company (and my now-irritated wife, also present) happy.

--They had fresh Otis Spunkmeyer cookies on a plate in the middle of the table in the signing room of the title company. I thought that was odd. The lady from the title company urged us to take them, but we declined, as my wife and I are both on a low-carb diet. We finally took them home to our children.

--I've got to make a site plan for the new fence and deck that I'm putting up. Not one in five homeowners in my city gets a permit to do such work, but I'm getting one, because our municipal ordinance calls for one.

--I want a new backup holster for a J-frame, to put on my body armor. This is easier done when I wear the body armor under my uniform shirt than when I wear it in the external carrier. But I'd like to do it either way. Suggestions? I'm reevaluating.

--I'm also getting the itch for a new subcompact auto. I've been considering a Kahr PM9, or a Glock 42. I will say, though, for being a quality little carry gun, that PM9's magazine protruding from the butt by an 8th of an inch irritates me. Not flush, yet not obviously intentionally protruding. Ugh.

--Brian Williams' claims should not blow over. He has one job: tell the news. When he was on the trip in which he claimed to have his chopper hit by an RPG, he was covering a story. When he tells of what happened on that trip incorrectly, he is changing the story. This is a journalistic ethics issue.

--I contacted Tamara for help yesterday, to see if she had another outlook at a problem that I have: I've got a stolen gun report in which the victim DID write down the serial numbers and caliber and make of the guns, but not the model. Sadly, several common gun manufacturers (not Ruger, thank goodness) re-use serial numbers. So when I get "S&W .38, S/N XXXXXX," I can't put it into TCIC/NCIC, absent the model. I had several like this, which I can't put into the system. If the guy had a Model 36 stolen, which shares a serial number with a Model 10 and a Model 42, I cannot in good conscience enter the serial numbers as stolen, and risk the innocent possessors of the other uninvolved firearms being held as a suspect for Theft Of A Firearm (a felony, no less.). Tam tried to help me, but we just couldn't do anything. It's a shame-- the owner didn't remember much about the guns, and a thief may well get away.

--My favorite practice for logging guns is this: Take your driver license out, put it next to the gun, and photograph it in strong light next to the overall gun. Then put it next to the serial number, and take a closeup picture. Email the photos back to yourself along with a description of the gun, the caliber, the value, and SN and model, along with where you got it. Save the email in the cloud, to be found later.

--My Dad is en route to my house right now, so that I can take him to lunch. Then he'll proctor me to make me do a couple more modules of my EMT training.

--I reward myself after a module by watching an episode of Archer. I reward myself while working out by watching the show, too.

Upside down.

After working a full night and then some at the PD on Sunday, I hurried home, and changed clothes and went to the Fire Department. After doing a thorough vehicle check on a new piece of apparatus that we had just gotten second-hand from a larger department, I went to get my physical.

One of the reasons that I went to get my physical is because September is National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, and it was time to see if my PSA had fluctuated at all. The last couple of years, my Prostate Specific Antigen has been so very low that the chances of me being one of the one in six men who develop prostate cancer are extremely low.  I get this every year. No, I've not had the digital-rectal exam in some time. Yes, the PSA test has a certain false result rate. But over the years, getting multiple negatives tends to show a trend line.  Get yourself checked, gentlemen. It was part of the same blood draw that they did for my overall workup. My insurance pays for the wellness check once a year for FREE, and that's not at all uncommon. One single stick in my left arm, and I get to find out all kinds of things about myself. You need to do this.  And you need to donate to the outstanding fundraising efforts being coordinated by my good friends for Kilted To Kick Cancer.

While at the doctor's office, I endured his very nice, but kind of embarrassing praise about my recent weight loss. I guess that 30 lbs is a lot to most people, but when you start at over 300 pounds, it's really just 10%.  My doc asked what I've been doing, and I shrugged and said that I've been moving around a little more, eating a little less, and I've cut carbohydrates in my diet. This last part makes me sad, because it's akin to scrubbing on a stain for 10 minutes, and realizing that you're actually making progress. Dang it-- I'm going to have to keep at it. :(

As you can see from my trend line on my geeky homemade spreadsheet, the progress is slow but sure.  But no one wants to read about someone's diet; I apologize.

I then took the Fire Chief's city truck in to get serviced, and found myself waiting in the lobby of the dealer maintenance department for 2 hours, realizing my blunder: I hadn't eaten all night and all morning, because I was NPO for the blood draw! Curses!  I stopped on the way back to the FD and ate heartily of sandwiches without their buns.

Getting to sleep after 3:00pm, I expected to get up and work on my EMT class online from about 11:00pm until 7:00am. I woke at 3:30am-- I had slept the clock around. I've not done that in a long time. But I'd been up for about 23 hours, too.

So it is that I'm now finishing my weekend kind of upside down. I got up this morning at about 1:30am, when I should have gotten up 10 hours or more before. Today is going to be rough at work.

_______________________

I just now was getting my workout gear together, for a half-hour workout before my wife and kids get up. The majority of my marriage, I've been on opposite shifts from my wife. I have learned how to gather clothes in the dark pretty well. By accident, I've learned the value of a blacklight flashlight.  It turns out that I can shine a pretty bright UV flashlight around the bedroom as I get my stuff together, and this doesn't bother my sleeping wife the same as even a weak white light would. The reflected UV light just doesn't seem to penetrate the eyelids. So now I've got one on my bedside table.