December Rant

So I haven't updated in a while, mostly because I haven't really felt like doing anything. I'm so burnt out from working graveyard shift and trying to keep up with 11 hours of school. I failed. I ended up dropping out of one of my classes cause I got too far behind and was never going to be able to catch up. The chances of me passing my writing class are pretty good, but I'm not so sure that I even squeaked by with a passing grade in Biology. It kicked my butt. If I didn't pass it and have to do it again, I won't be taking any other classes at the same time next time around. I just took my final for that class tonight and I don't feel good about it.

So to sum up the last two-ish months... At the beginning of November I went to Nashville for a weekend. I wish it had been a longer trip, but I couldn't justify skipping more school. My good friend Walker was getting married and I wasn't going to miss it if I could help it, so I was able to get a couple nights off work and spent just under 3 days in wonderful Nashville, TN. I flew in on a Friday evening, picked up my rental car at the airport and drove straight to a venue called The French Quarter to watch 3 guys I knew from working at Vandy who were in the band Station R, which was playing there that night. A few other people from Vandy also went, so I got to have a nice little reunion with them and got to enjoy good music.

Saturday was the wedding. It was a really nice ceremony in a cute little church in a rural area outside of Nashville. I had a lot of fun getting to visit more with friends from Vandy and getting to be there to see Walker get married. After the reception, I went down to Vanderbilt to visit a bunch of people I used to work with. I walked the rounds with my old partner Don for old times sake. It was fun to see how many of the frat kids recognized me out of uniform.

Sunday I went to visit my dog Tank at my old roommate's house. I miss that dog! After that I met up with a bunch of the Team Nashville and Minnesota cops from the Police Unity Tour. It was a lot of fun visiting with all of them and hopefully I'll get to see them all again in May when we do the bike ride for Law Enforcement United (Same people, new organization). I stayed out way too late with those guys and only got a few hours of sleep before I had to fly back to Salt Lake early Monday morning.

Since I've been back, I've mostly just been working, going to class and doing homework. I even crammed in a few overtime gigs working Univ. of Utah football games including one where I actually had to travel down to BYU for the BYU/Utah game. That was kind of miserable cause it was freezing, but at least I was posted down on the field so I had a great view of the whole game. It would've been better if Utah had won, but oh well...

On Thanksgiving I played in the 3rd annual Turkey Bowl that my dept has. I'm the first girl they've ever had play. It wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done. I went from having no physical activity whatsoever since softball season ended this summer to playing flag football that morning. I was definitely hurting after that. Since we played in the snow, it was hard to stop or change directions suddenly, so sometimes it was more like tackle football. I ended up with a busted lip and bruises all over my body.

I took last Saturday off work and got 4 tickets to the Jazz/Lakers game. My date had to bail on me last minute for family stuff, so it just ended up being me, my brother Tyler and his girlfriend Lydia. We had a really good time and the Jazz kicked the Lakers trash so it was worth it. We ended up giving the extra ticket to some random homeless lady outside the arena so she could either sell it or just get out of the cold for a little while. Nobody ever showed up in the seat so I don't know what she did with it.

I've got 3 1/2 more weeks of graveyard shift, then I get to go to the swing shift (2pm-midnight) till at least May, so I should get several months of more normal sleep. YAY!

I'm Allergic to Kansas

I spent all last week visiting Kansas. I haven't really spent a lot of time in Kansas the last few years which was enough to make me forget that my allergies get really bad EVERY time I spend more than a day there. I don't know what it is that floats around in the air in Kansas, but my body hates it. I went to Kansas for my fall break because I needed to get away from everything work and school-related for a bit. It's all been pretty over-whelming.

So I flew in on Saturday, the 10th and by Sunday morning I felt like crap on toast. I pretty much felt crappy the whole week. I couldn't breathe through my nose at all, I was totally congested, my eyes watered like crazy, and one morning my eyes were literally glued shut. It was gross. Friday night my arms completely broke out in hives, so that made my flight back to Utah Saturday an itchy, uncomfortable ride. I drugged up on allergy meds and benedryl to try to get rid of the hives. It worked, but I was too drugged to go to work Saturday night. So yeah, kind of a crappy week. It's almost got me convinced to go get an allergy test done to figure out what all I'm actually allergic to. I say almost, cause that would mean I would have to find a doctor in Utah and I hate finding new doctors.

Only kind of though. I did get to spend some quality time with two of my best friends, Miranda and Serina. I also got to spend an afternoon with my oldest brother which was cool. I probably get to see him the least of all my siblings. I wish he lived closer. I hung out a couple of days with Miranda and her almost 4 year old twins. They both told me I was their best friend at different points and I watched the Care Bear movie with them, so it that was fun too.

So as I've mentioned before, I have pretty much the cutest godson ever. In June his family moved to Kansas so that his 5 half-siblings could be closer to their dad. I can't hold that against them, cause I think it's great that they get to see their dad more, but I sure miss them all a lot. I used to go hang out with them at least every other weekend when they lived here in Utah. So David (the really cute godson) turns one today and I wanted to be there for his first birthday party, so they held it a week early while I was visiting. It was pretty cool. I just wish I had felt better. Here's a few pictures from his party.It was probably one of the largest parties for a first birthday I've ever been to, but it also probably had the best food, so I definitely enjoyed it.

He wasn't real fond of the birthday hat, but I was able to snap a picture before he tried to rip it off.He really liked his chocolate cupcake too.

This was one of the things that I gave David for his birthday. It's a Lightning McQueen ride on toy. He LOVES it. I also got him a Utah Utes hoodie (the one he's wearing in the picture at the top of this post) and some other cute little clothes that he wasn't real interested in.

Fall Frenzy

So I realize it's been a while since I last blogged, and I don't really have a good excuse except that I've been really busy with really mundane boring stuff. So even if I had time to blog, it would have been boring. So here's a fun little recap of my last month...

A while ago I decided to go back to school and get a bachelor's degree since nobody gives a crap about Associate degrees. So on August 24th, I started working on my degree in Exercise Science at the University of Utah, where I happen to get a 50% discount on tuition because I am an employee. Cool huh? That part is, but everything else about going to school again sucks. I'm taking Biology 1210, Intermediate Writing and History of Film which adds up to 11 credit hours. I pretty much don't like any of the classes and they all involve a ridiculous amount of writing assignments, which takes up way too much of my time outside of class. NOT COOL.

So at the same time that I'm taking all these classes, I'm still working 50-60 hours a week between my job as the Po-Po and my job working security at the zoo. Since school started, I have volunteered to take a lot of ER shifts so I can sit and do homework when it's slow in the ER (which is rare, but still).

I also took on the job of being one of my department's 3 system administrators for the reporting system that we use at work. Last week the department sent me to a conference put on by the software company puts on. It was boring and because I'd only been an administrator for like 2 weeks at this point, they kept using all kinds of jargon I am not yet familiar with. So that sucked, but at least they fed us well.

On September 16th, I moved out of the folk's house and into my own place in West Jordan. I got a discount because I have a take-home police car, so I ended up getting a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom apartment so I can get a roommate later if I want, but for now I think I'm going to enjoy having lots of space all to myself! I'm still in the process of getting things unpacked and arranged the way I want them, but when I finish, I'll post pictures.

I would probably have most of my stuff unpacked by now except for the last week I was house-sitting/dog-sitting for my coworker again while she and her husband took their two bloodhounds to a Police K9 tracking school in Colorado. So it was just me and their retired K9 German Shepherd Oskar for the week. He's probably the only dog I know of that actually watches the TV, and he likes to bark at it when he sees animals or people running. It was kinda funny at first, but it got old real fast.

So anyway, that's pretty much all that's new with me. I'll try to get those pictures of my new place posted soon, but who knows when I'll have time!

Bad Night...

I'm not having a very good night. I worked some kind of snowboard movie showing thing tonight as an overtime gig and it did not go well. There were a few hundred little skater kids in this auditorium, and they had issues with the sound, so while they were trying to fix it, these kids kept yelling obscenities and wouldn't shut up long enough for the guys in charge of the event to tell if the sound was fixed so it took forever for them to start the movie. I think it was supposed to start at 8pm and it was 8:55pm when it finally started. Then they were throwing snowboarding gear out into the audience after the showing, so there were people climbing over seats and throwing trash... It was giving me a headache, then when it was finally over, I went outside to help usher them all off the property so it could all be locked up for the night. Then I get a message from the dispatcher that security drove by where another officer and I had parked our patrol cars and said that someone had put stickers all over them. Sure enough, when I got to my car, there were about 8 stickers covering the windshield and a couple on my hood/headlights. I started peeling them off before I thought to take pictures.

I was a little more than pissed considering if there had been an emergency call where I needed to be able to leave fast I wouldn't be able to do it because I wouldn't have been able to see out of the windshield without spending all that time peeling stupid stickers off first. So here's a couple pictures of my car after pulling a few of the stickers off, but before I finished. I still have sticker goo all over my windshield and it's been too dark to tell if the stickers that were on the hood did any damage to the paint. Of course there were probably a ton of witnesses, but none of the little dirtbags was going to come forward and rat out their stupid little skater friends. Oh well, I'll be sending some hate-mail to the person in the scheduling office about this group and hopefully we won't be hosting any more of their snowboarding films after tonight.

Braces... again...

Let this be a lesson to all of you who may have braces now or may have them in the future... when your orthodontist tells you to wear your retainer all the time... DO IT! I didn't, and now I have had to get braces for the second time. It's not fun and I look like I'm 14 years old again... :(

Holy Haircut

So about a week ago I got my hair cut. It's probably the shortest I've had my hair since I was 2 feet tall. It's quite a change for me. What do you think?

Work work work, all day long...

I've been working a lot and haven't really felt like I had any one thing to blog about since my last post, but it's been long enough I think I've got enough for a recap...

This actually happened before my Buckskin Gulch trip, but I didn't get pictures from it till just a week or two ago. My department had official departmental pictures taken back at the end of June. Then the photographer's car was stolen and his camera and laptop were in it, so we lost all the pictures he took. Luckily several of the other officers took cameras and took a bunch of pictures themselves, so I was able to get copies, but they probably aren't as good as the ones the photographer took. Anyway, here's a few pictures from that...As you may remember, I played on a summer softball team with a team at work. I missed a few weeks with the broken hand, but as soon as I got out of the big splint, I started playing again. It was a little difficult because I couldn't bend my thumb, so I couldn't really grip the ball. As a result, I couldn't throw it as far and when I threw it, I had to catapult it. We ended the regular season with a record of 4-6. Then we started the playoffs and made it to the fourth round before we got out. I really had fun. Here's some pictures from the last half of the season.

August 5th was my 25th birthday, so we had a little family party with really good chocolate cake and homemade cherry pie. It was yummy, and my brothers really made me laugh a lot.

Last Friday I got my take home police car. It's a 2008 Chevy Impala. It's going to save me a lot of money in gas and it's going to be so nice not to have to clean up after other officers in the shared cars anymore. Here's a picture of it in front of my house.

Sunday night I drove down to St. George, Utah for the Southern Utah Gang Conference. It consisted of 3 days of training about gangs, their codes and symbols, patron saints, and internet gang investigations. My favorite class was the Patron Saints of the Mexican Drug Underworld class. It was taught by a retired El Paso, TX officer who has gone to Mexico and researched the drug cartels and the saints they pray to for assistance in their drug trafficking. It was so interesting and I bought the DVD he has put together with all his research. Anyway, while I was in St. George I got to see my best friend from high school, Crystal and her family. Her husband took these pictures of us on his cell phone, so the quality is not the best.

Anyway, I think that's pretty much what I've been up to. Sorry my life is kinda boring...