Second-guessing.

There's nothing like reviewing a body camera, and a car camera, of footage of your use of force, to make you second-guess yourself.

I have had more than a few talks with another officer on scene about what we did, and what we maybe "should have done."

So tonight, when I watched the movie Sully on my computer, I was struck by the way we second-guess ourselves in life-or-death situations. This movie was about an airplane captain who saved 155 lives by making an emergency landing on the Hudson River, and how he then had to rehash the event over and over.

I thought about how my young subordinate officer had kicked himself for not having taken the shot on a man who had threatened him (and me) with a gun. I thought about how I may have made a mistake, also failing to shoot the armed man when he pointed his pistol at me.

I thought about how other officers, from other agencies, have told me that we had screwed up. How we had "been lucky." How we should have shot the guy.

And, watching the movie, seeing the depiction of Captain Sullenberger being second-guessed, I broke down crying.

I am so proud of my officer. I don't want to work with a man who doesn't second-guess himself on issues this important. My officer didn't shoot for all the right reasons. And it turned out fine.

I'm just so damned proud of him.

We did our jobs.

Femtophotography.

I've always been impressed with the 1/millionth second photography. Bullets through apples, milk splashing, stuff like that. It's still amazing.

But it hadn't occurred to me how we could use lasers and digital cameras hooked up to serious computer processing to take faster pictures.

We can view images of light passing through small semi-transparent substrates in realtime perceptible time.

Watch this video, and be awed:

Not feeling absolutely terrible awful. .

My jerk of a partner* has decided to force me off my couch and into the world Not Imminently Expecting A Downturn In Health. He wants me to run. I pointed out quite logically that this was a stupid proposition, as Matt Doesn't Run. So he put this regimen of running to me, to get to running 5k in 8 weeks. I flippin' doubt it, but the first week is easy enough, so I started this:

To give me company, I brought the 10 year-old and the 13 year-old. The 13 year-old was a little hard to convince, until I reminded her that she is attending two summer camps this year, both with lots of swimming, and her swimsuit is a bikini. (Insert suppressed fatherly scowl here.)  She decided that she needed to come along. Note the ambiguity about the total time. Is that 5-minute walk part of the 20 minutes? Frankly, I doubt it, but I was completely prepared to scale it as it it were. We did horribly. The elder daughter finished. I finished. My 10-year-old lagged and didn't really finish. We went home and felt sore and bad about our physical fitness.

Two days later, we went for the second iteration of Workout 1. See, each week, you do each workout three times. We were dreading it. And surprisingly, we did great. All three of us did quite well, today. I can't explain it. I don't ever recall the words "I feel great" coming out of my mouth after a run, before. (I cannot express here how deeply I generally loathe running.)

I'm actually vaguely looking forward to Saturday's run with the girls. They're a great pair of partners to have along. And come on-- we can endure ANYTHING for half an hour.

________________________
*Actually, I love this guy like a brother.

Epic weekend.

This past weekend was my three-day weekend off.

On Friday evening, Scott, my best friend of 29 years, called me and said that he and his parents and kids were having dinner and seeing movies nearby. I hopped in the car and met them at the cinema to see Act Of Valor, which I had it on good authority was worth seeing. It was. I found that the reaction to the movie by the packed theatre was almost identical to what Tamara observed: no one moved for 5 - 10 seconds after the lights came up, and what slight voices were heard were very hushed, as about 300 people (?) left. Something about a dead warrior's best friend telling the dead man's son about his father's outlook on life, and quoting Tecumsah to him, that hits you (well, me, anyway) right in the middle.

I won't reprint those strong words here. I suggest that you read them all (just three short paragraphs), because there is iron and tenderness in the admonition there.

Scott and I went with the kids for ice cream afterward, and who doesn't like to watch kids enjoy ice cream? I ask you.

On Saturday, after fire training, I dropped by my shift partner's house to drop something off. He had out cases of quality Belgian, American, and German beers, and entreated me to try a sample, with his old roommate. Never one to insult a gracious host, I had a sample. He pushed another into my fist. I explained that I had to drive home. Nonsense, he argued. His bride would be happy to do so. She smiled and said that she would be glad to do it. I looked at her face, and saw the love of a good woman spouse for her life partner. She really wanted me to stay, because it gave her pleasure to see her husband happy. We ordered pizza a spiced mussels from a local Italian place, and commenced to enjoying great beer, and better stories around the kitchen table.  My shift partner's friend had some great ones about his time in the Navy, and he appreciates good beer like I do. Before long, my partner and I were conducting SFST's on each other, and laughing about the outcome. It was all very silly, I assure you.

It was 3:00am when his wife dropped me off at my house. I had dropped by their place at about 6:00pm. 

I woke up on Sunday feeling great. Seriously. I haven't had a "choir meeting" like the one on Saturday night in years and years, yet I felt as right as rain.

And I was late. Dad wanted to go see a matinee with me. We picked up my car, and went to luncheon on Mexican food, and went to see Act Of Valor again. I watched for tactical techniques. Word is that a lot of the scenes were shot with live ammo. The operators were for-real operators. Many of the scenes were shot with Canon SLR digital cameras, from first-person perspectives, so that you see what the operator sees. I thought it a shame that the director had the guys in low-light using IR goggles but red-dot lasers, when he could have shown the IR beams that they all had on their M4s, through their goggles. But that was a very small criticism. I almost never see movies twice. This one was worth it.

I thanked my wife and my partner's wife for making Saturday night possible. Understanding spouses make a huge difference.

I'm about to go to work, and I'm looking forward to it. Such is what a good weekend can do for you.

Well, that's cool.

As I'm now 40, I finally got into the doctor's for my 40,000 mile checkup. "Check me out from head to toe," I asked.

The doc did the normal poking and vitals-taking, and looking, and ordered a bunch of blood tests to see what all was going on inside me. I allowed that I actually felt fine.

"As to the prostate exam," he finally said, "we use the Prostate Specific Antigen test.  The PSA is a much better indicator than feeling, through a rubber glove, and through a colon wall, a specific gland which we have personally  probably never checked before, for change. The digital-rectal exam is 60% accurate. We can do better than that. So we'll just look at your blood, and if the PSA is too high, we'll deal with it from there."*

I looked at him, realizing that I got to leave my pants on.

I pointed at my face in a circular motion. "This is not the look of a patient who is disappointed."

They should advertise this from billboards along the highway. "We'll check your prostate, without putting our finger where the sun doesnt' shine."

__________________________
*Yes, I'm aware of a fairly high incidence of false positives. But that's okay; you run it again, and if it's still positive, you run an MRI, CAT, and/or sonograph.

Awesome. Not enough, but awesome.

I love a movie grill. I can combine my dinner with my movie, and have a beer with my popcorn, and make it back home to the sitter without taking all night.

Down in Austin, one of the best of them is the Alamo Drafthouse. Now, I've never been to the Alamo Drafthouse, before. But I know that they are made of win. How? Why, I know this because, not only do they kick out a teenage girl who couldn't stop texting during her movie, but when she called to make a complaint, they posted her profanity-laced voicemail on YouTube, and on their blog. (Cussing bleeped, but it's clear what she's saying.)

My only complaint? They evidently ejected her with her aforementioned phone intact.

I get down to Austin a fair bit, and the next time I do, I'm getting a beer and a movie at the Austin Drafthouse, at one of their five convenient locations.

Take what you will from it, I guess.

The history of our national day of giving thanks is disputed.

It has become fashionable lately for people with (Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" playing on infinite repeat) to tell us that Thanksgiving is a terrible celebration of the massacre of the trans-historic indigenous peoples of North America. There's quite the movement afoot to banish the holiday, or to reinvent it as a day of sorrow and atonement.

Hey, if that's all you've got in your box, then I guess it's going to rattle around a bit.

If you're an atheist, then the question arises: to whom are you giving thanks? Certainly not to God. Okay then: how about just appreciating how you got the things for which you may count among your blessings? Somebody likely helped you get there. Thank them. If you did it all by yourself, thank the person in your mirror. Saying "thank you" is polite.

I've always liked the way that William Bradford looked at Thanksgiving: as a celebration of capitalism as a way to get through the harsh winters. It seems that before, the Plymouth Bay Colony had tried collectivism of corn, and that hadn't worked out; the hardest workers got no more than the shirkers, and they had almost starved the year before. So when they tried the concept of working for one's self, and trading for whatever was needed, the colony flourished.

It is interesting to note that some of the colonists worked for the local Indians, planting and such, to get their seed corn. I've heard one reference to them working "as slaves" for the indigenous people, but slaves don't generally get to walk away with any profit for their labors. This was an exchange of labor for commodity. That yellow seed corn was truly their specie.

Here at Better And Better, we try to see the optimistic side of things*. So on this day of Thanks Giving, I'm asking you all to simply see what is good in your life, and spend at least part of the day loving that.

______________________________
*We've also been known to fail at this, on occasion.

The passage of time.

This month  marks 5 years since I started this blog, and also half a million discrete visits to my blog.

I've met some good friends here, whom I identify with.

Thanks for the good times, friends. Let's continue to try to see the other side of the issues that we discuss, even if we don't ever believe that we'll agree with them.

And let's continue to laugh. You people crack my happy ass up.

Project A Kon

And speaking of Larry Correia, that reminds me-- I ran into a guy dressed out as one of his characters out of his excellent series of Monster Hunters International books.

He was very nice, and let me take his picture. I mentioned that I'd been a moderator with Larry at The Firing Line and The High Road for some time, and he asked if I wanted a patch. I've never gotten an MHI patch, so I was excited to get this one. I think that I'm going to sew it onto my patrol bag. I may put velcro on the back, and put it on my department gas mask bag, or on my fast response bag.

I ran into the guy at A-Kon, an anime convention for serious nerds. What was I doing at A-Kon, you may ask? Well, I think that I was being a good daddy. See, my elder daughter and her best friends have gotten deep into reading all manner of Japanese cartoon books called Manga. They watch videos of Japanese anime. They copy hundreds of Japanese pop songs in MP3 format to trade among each other to play on their iPods and phones and convert to CD format to play on my dadgummed car stereo when we go places.

So when my 12 year old daughter, who had just been recognized by Duke TIP as a really bright kid for doing exceptionally well on the SAT in 7th grade, got all A's for the six weeks, the semester, and the school year, she was getting a big reward. And she wanted A-Kon. I took her and her two best friends.

Folks, I've been to a few county fairs, a goat ropin', and I've seen ducks copulate, but I've never seen anything like this.

We drove into downtown Dallas to the hotel. No parking for blocks. We finally drove into a parking garage that was almost full, for $18 to park. We walked into the hotel amidst hundreds-- nay-- thousands of people dressed in various costumes. My daughter was not in costume, but she had dyed her bangs aqua (hey, they grow out). She was so normal-looking, that she was almost invisible. I just wore khakis and comfortable shoes. I was invisible.

We walked in as the conga line of several hundred passed us. The leader was a belly dancer with 8 foot butterfly wings of gold. Following her were all manner of costumed nerds who were in their natural habitat, mostly between the ages of 14 and 30.

It was as if, repressed of their chance to be social during their daily lives, these youngsters had finally found Their People, and took the opportunity to crawl out of their shells. They were jubilant. When they found someone in a similar costume, depicting the same character that they had come dressed as, they didn't get upset. Indeed, they would happily embrace, as would long-lost friends who had finally reunited. I saw this over and over again. They minded not at all if you asked to take a picture of them (or better yet, with them). It was a high compliment, and the most popular had worked on their poses. My daughter was a little jealous of her friend who was repeatedly recognized for the character whose costume she wore.

I paid the registration fee for all four of us. But that was it. (Besides snacks, lunch, supper, and a little help with a pin when a girl came up short.)

We saw furries, cross-dressers, perverts, and robots, both real and imagined. We saw storm troopers. We saw girl storm troopers. We saw video game characters. We saw faux Florentine fencing demonstrations. We saw people dressed as stone angels. We saw browncoats. We saw steampunks. We saw movie heroines. We saw superheroes. We saw strange mixes of culture that defied explanation. It was a throng of nerd-dom, taking up three stories of the hotel.

And next year, if she gets all A's, I'll take her to do it again.

A happy ending.

Yesterday, I did some checking. I came across a phone number for the landlord of the now-empty rent house across the way where the little dog used to live. I called but couldn't reach the landlord. I left a message with several contact numbers for me, and why I wanted to speak with him or the previous tenants. No call.

I have of course already left a letter on the door of the house, with my number and address. No call.

Today, my wife took off of work. I woke up to find her sleeping beside me late this morning after she had taken the kids to school. (I had gotten off late last night.) Later I woke to hear her puttering about the house. The little dog yipped. I hoped that my wife had let her out to pee. (We've been slowly training her to be housebroken, and she really does prefer to go outside. ) I went back to sleep.

A few minutes later, my wife walked into the bedroom to announce, "I just made a puppy deposit!"

As my last thoughts on the dog were concerning its need of house training, I of course immediately thought that she was referring to a deposit, from the puppy. Look, I was sleepy.

"Huh?" I asked.

"The girl who owned the puppy just knocked on our door. She asked for her puppy. I gave the perrita to her, and she said 'thanks' which seems to be about the only English that she knows. The puppy is gone!" my wife gushed.

I sat up quickly. "She's gone? And we didn't have to let those vile thieving children have her? The communists and terrorists don't win? Huzzah!"

To celebrate, we walked to the diner, and ordered the specials. I had meatloaf. She had chicken-fried steak. Hers was better. The tea was strong, the coffee was fresh, and the terrorists hadn't won.

A good day.

Ridiculous off-duty.

Pretty much, every day this next two weeks that I'm not at my day job, I'll be working off-duty. I've signed up for 80 hours' worth.

The good news is, this is one of the sweetest off-duty gigs that I've ever had thrown my way. I wish it could go on for many more weeks. If I get every single shift that I've signed up for, I will be set for this semester and next semester for my grad school (this should finally end this lengthy ride), and pay for my wife's school this semester and next, along with paying off a lingering credit card debt that we haven't been able to retire since our vacation last year.

I didn't set the rate. I would have been embarrassed to ask for that much, given how easy the work is.

I LOL'd

By which I mean to say that I barked loudly in a short fit of laughter upon seeing this.*


_______________________
*Language warning.

Made my day.

My partner told me last night that in working with me, he has learned:
--that there is another viewpoint to each situation, and
--to search for it.
He said that it's made his life more complicated, but he sees things better.

This may be the nicest compliment that I've ever received, professionally.*


______________________
*"We really trust you" and "You're ethical" aren't to be taken as compliments; those are expected character traits, even if I feel pride when I hear them.

Without going into details, let me just say again that:

DAMN, but I love the protection that the mobile video camera on my patrol car provides me with.

I'm going to have to face it: I like people.

Look, I know that I'm supposed to be bogged down by the crushing weight of my knowledge of how sucky humanity is. I know that I'm expected to be all cynical, especially because I'm a cop, and know the evil that men and women do.

But I just can't muster the across-the-board disgust. The fact of the matter is, most people are just folks, and most of them are actually kind of interested in doing the right thing. And, without looking too very hard, you find that there are a lot of really nifty people out there.

There are area experts who are willing to share their knowledge, for free, just for the price of you asking them to.

There are bakers who will work hard to make something tasty, just to see you smile when you try their wares.

There are fellow travellers who will stop and help you when you're broken down, just because they really would want someone to help them.

There are store clerks who genuinely want to know if you're having a good day, and then hope that they can help your day get just a bit better by the time you've left.

Vine and I, while getting gasoline and soft drinks at an Omaha convenience store, found ourselves chatting with a friendly clerk. She was a middle-aged Mid-Westerner, with just a hint of Fargo in her voice, who smiled because she wanted to, not because the job made her do so. We walked out, pocketing our change, and commented on how that one person had managed to brighten our respective days. I sort of felt like this guy.

I don't expect you to become a fat, dumb, and happy person all the time. Not in the least.

But I do wish to remind you that there's a whole world full of decent, pretty awesome people, who did NOT make the news last night. People who put in an honest day's work for nothing more nor less than their pay, and go home at day's end to lead uneventful but decent lives. These people don't make the news. They're not "Everyday Heroes", because they're not heroes. They're just good people. That segment of society is under-represented onscreen, which means that people seem to forget that they are literally surrounded by good people.

This is not a rant. The day that I find that this blog has been reduced to nothing more than a vehicle for rants is the day that I close my Blogger account.

Nebraska. 2 The People.

As previously mentioned, I took a little trip to go hunting with my new friend, up in Nebraska. He had friends who were farmers who have been praying that the state of Nebraska would let them shoot more deer, as they've been overpopulating the state at an amazing rate. They spend much of the days in the woodlots, and come out in the evenings and nights and eat the corn and soybean crops. They get very, very large. They are healthy, and their offspring thrive, too.

The farmers are very tired of the crop nuisance.

I like good red meat.

A common goal is achieved.

The Good Farmers
Vine took me out on Saturday, and introduced me to Jim and his wife Pat, a very nice couple. The word "accommodating" is simply not strong enough. The word "friendly" is not strong enough. They are very decent, civilized, excellent people. They are, from what I see, fairly typical of the good people of Nebraska, but they bear special mention, nonetheless. Jim is a classical farmer, who keeps track of the price of corn and soybeans and their futures, and considers how many more seasons his old International Harvester grain trucks will keep giving service. He maintains his combine, trucks, and fuel and water pumps by himself, without a professional mechanic. He leans strongly conservative, but clearly dotes on his liberal wife. He dispatches nuisance animals, but doesn't really hunt. He grins sheepishly as he talks to his named farm cats out front of the house.

Pat cooks large farm meals from scratch, serves them toothsomely to her house guests, and cheerfully talks about local and world events, as well as family lore, with bright intelligence. She's educated, and has a full-time job in addition to being a farm wife. She's active in her church, but doesn't give off even the slightest hint of judgement when you don't.

They both clearly are in love with their daughters. To say that they are proud of their daughters' ongoing career successes would go without saying, but it's also clear that they don't really worry about whether their offspring are financially a success-- they just want what's best for them. Like any good parents would. And make no mistake-- these are good parents.

After over three decades together, they still obviously appreciate the company of each other.

Are you beginning to get the idea that I liked these people? Because if you haven't been, then either I'm not articulating clearly, or you're not paying attention.

They clearly think highly of my friend Vine, which is another good reason for me to think well of him, myself.

A fire extinguisher in every lawn shed...

It's springtime, and my lawn has erupted with every kind of grass, weed, flower, bush, and vine. There are neat little rectangles of dark green where the rolling chicken coop has been and where I have spread rye/bluegrass/fescue blend seed behind. There's a fair bit of Bermuda, and more dallisgrass (a.k.a. crab grass) than I care to admit. Also, there are the nettles and dandelions.

When I was a little kid, I loved dandelions. Their flower was a happy yellow, and their puffballs were fun to blow. Now, as the guy who mows the lawn, their puffballs irritate me. They send up their puffballs the day after I mow, making my otherwise decently-trimmed lawn look raggedy. It's really quite amazing how fast they go up. And my mulching lawnmower does nothing to kill the seeds; it just plants them right there in a dense pattern.

I'm not much one for weed killing chemicals in my lawn. But I like fire.

Enter the Dragon. No, you Bruce Lee fans, not that silly movie-- I'm basically talking flame-thrower, here. The dragon is a nifty device that attaches to a standard 20 lb propane tank, and shoots out a 3 foot blue flame on demand. It's loud, and scares the neighbors. Fired at weeds, it fries them down to the roots, leaving nice ash to nourish the new grass seed that you then throw down. Organic as hell. Fun. Fire. What's not to like?

The kids, playing in the yard, each wanted a turn. And who am I to deny them this fun? They shot some undesireable plants, and went back to the trampoline. I kept at the weeds. While I went about the yard spraying blue flame at pesky weeds, I found a poison ivy vine growing up near the fence. I'm highly allergic, and my wife is allergic to everything, so I saw this as a nice time to really fry a dreaded enemy. I let it have it. I gave it an extra squirt of burning propane, just to make sure the roots didn't come back. I moved on to other parts of the yard.

About 20 minutes later, I found the garden hose stretched across the yard. I pulled it to the hydrant to be coiled, and found that it was just running. Well, that was odd. Why was it just running in the yard? I grumbled about wasted water and the kids, and moved on. Then I found what the hose had been watering: The fence. Seems that I had gotten a bit carried away, burning that poison ivy bush. The fence was wet and charred around a new hole at the base, next to the dead poison ivy bush.

I worried. Had my neighbor seen his fence burning, and run over to run the hose to put it out before passive-aggressively leaving it running as he stalked away? Oof. Not good for neighbor relations.

I went inside and polled the house. My wife assured me that she hadn't used the hose. My 11 year old daughter said that she had not used the hose. I found my younger daughter watching SpongeBob Squarepants, and asked her about the hose.

She gave me half her attention. "What? Used the hose? No." She went back to watching cartoons for a second before turning back to me. "Oh yeah. I forgot. I noticed that the fence was on fire, so I put it out. Did I forget to turn off the hose, Daddy?"

"Uh, yeah. Hey, kid-- good job on the fire-fighting, but you might tell your daddy when you've done so, you know?"

"Okay, Daddy," she said, and went back to watching SpongeBob and Patrick Starfish torture Squidward.

I'm proud of my just-turned-8-year-old little girl, but kind of amused at her nonchalance at her actions. This could have become a Big Deal. As it was, I just replaced two fence stakes the next day. Took me 10 minutes, tops.

David Benke.

When it is Go Time, you must have your decision made, already.

David Benke, a math teacher and track coach, had several points to his advantage yesterday when a crazy man* was shooting children at a Littleton high school: he could run, and he could think, and he had at some point made up his mind to do what needed doing. In this story at CNN, Mr. Benke mentions being conscious of how long it took the guy to rack a round in after each shot. He launched his 6'5" frame into the guy, disarmed him, and held him. Yeah, yeah, others helped, and that's good. But who shall bell the cat? Who's first?

Why, it's the person who already decided before it all came down. If you will keep it in your head that you are a sheepdog rather than a sheep, then you are a lot closer to winning than some might think, even when apparently "unarmed."

There are some things worse than dying. I'm glad that David Benke didn't get hurt, but he would still have been a role model if he hadn't been successful in his attempt to stop the attempted murderer.

You are the first responder. Act accordingly.
___________________________
*Whose name I'll not bother mentioning here. He gets no glamour from me.

Things that I'm loving right now.

Z Packs.
Flonase.
Steroid shots in the butt.
Dense cardboard boxes found at my front door, with my name and "ORM-D" plastered on the outside of them.
Marked-down whole bean "Fair Trade" Brazillian coffee, still vacu-sealed, that we got at the thrift store for $2/lb, which we're going back for, because the rabble won't buy it without a recognizable brand label onit.
Hamilton Beach digital slow-cookers (Blows the old Rival Crock Pot right out of the water.)
Pork roast with fresh herbs, fresh out of the HB slow-cooker.
New mattress.
Excited little girls on the eve of their 7th birthday.
Cool spring dew on the lawn while I'm covering my tomatoes for the night.
The strong feeling of a framing hammer driving long ring shank nails into 2X6's as I quickly assemble garden frames without a wasted stroke. (Surprised me.)
Fresh chocolate cake.
A call from a co-worker who genuinely wants my input, and who doesn't get mad when my answer isn't the one he was hoping to get.
Home made strawberry icing.
Powerful LED flashlights.
Washing machines (clothes or dish) that actually work right.
A coffee machine at the PD again.
The prospect of another package arriving at my door soon, to provide me with octuple the memory currently on my desktop machine.

Made of convenient coffee WIN!

May I suggest, for your coffee-drinking convenience, the Hamilton Beach BrewStation with timer?

In the kitchen of Casa G, we've got the large one, the model 47665, which not only will brew you 12 cups of drip, but it will dispense it without pouring from a carafe, it will keep it hot for hours without burning the coffee down, and it will make it in the morning for you after you set its simple timer.

No more broken glass carafes. No more spilling. A small footprint on the counter. At $55, we were pleased.

Look, it's not French press, but you're not going to do that every day. You can cover a lot of sins by using good fresh ground (even better: fresh roasted) high quality beans. And, seriously-- this thing is really, REALLY convenient.

Better & Better gives it Two Thumbs Up.