Adelheide's Anecdotes

You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.

2011-04-20T20:01:00.005-05:00

This is a picture of how the flowerbed in my front yard has looked since I moved in back in September. I'm not a fan. So I enlisted the help of my mom and little brother to make it pretty. I took photos of our progress... Before:
Closer view of the "Before":

Step One: Remove all of the weeds...

Step Two: Add Mulch

Step Three: Notice it's a little plain and add more flowers in a variety of colors (the flowers will be a lot more colorful when they bloom).

I'm so much happier with how my garden is looking. I'll be much more excited when the flowers bloom and I can see all the colors.

Ride for Fallen Officers

2010-09-04T01:23:00.004-05:00

On August 22nd, I participated in my first large motorcycle ride. The ride was in memory of fallen police officers. I was pretty nervous about the ride because riding in a big group like that requires a little more skill because you're often riding at slow speeds. For those who aren't familiar with riding motorcycles, you may not realize it's harder to ride slow than fast on one.

It ended up going great and without any major incidents. I rode with a group of people from work. It was Mike, Don, Heather, Smalls, Jordan, Stretch, Heather's husband Mark, and their 3 daughters. Stretch, Jordan and I met at my house and all rode to meet the rest of the group at Heather's house at 9am. Then we all rode together down to Lindon, UT to Timpanogos Harley. They hosted the ride which included a pancake breakfast. I wasn't impressed with the pancakes, but I was hungry enough I didn't care.

At 11am, the ride began. The group was lead by several marked police vehicles and the families of a couple of the officers that were killed in the line of duty earlier this year in Utah. There were several hundred bikes in the group so we stretched out for quite a distance. We rode through Lindon, Lehi, Draper, Sandy, Midvale, Murray, South Salt Lake and then finally arrived in Salt Lake at the police memorial located at the capitol building around 1pm.

They had a nice little ceremony at the memorial and I think we finally took off from there around 2pm. So it was a long day of riding, but I really enjoyed it and it means a lot to me to be able to support the officers who died doing their jobs.

Motorcycles: The Best Therapy

2010-05-18T01:54:00.003-05:00

So lately I've had a lot of run-ins with the people I have to see on a daily basis. This makes my life a lot more stressful than I care for it to be. So today I decided I needed therapy... motorcycle therapy that is...

Let me back-track and mention that I have been having some clutch issues with my motorcycle that had been getting more and more obvious the more I would ride it. So on Mother's Day I ended up taking the night off work so that I could go to my parents house for dinner. I rode my bike out there. The ride home from my parents house was when I decided I really needed to get the clutch on my bike looked at because it felt like it was slipping. So the next morning I decided to take it in to the Yamaha shop and have them look at the clutch and see what I needed to have done. I was somewhat concerned that it might be an expensive fix and was really bummed that I was already having issues with it.

So the guy at the Yamaha shop took a look at it, rode it around the block to see what the clutch was doing, and came back with bad news. He told me the clutch was definitely having problems and was definitely slipping. Upon further inspection he noticed that the motorcycle had too much oil in it and said that could be the problem but even if it wasn't, there was still way too much oil. He recommended an oil and filter change. I asked if that was something they could do that day or if I needed to make an appointment. He said they could do it while I waited. Perfect! So after about 45 minutes, the guy that did the oil change comes out to where I'm waiting and tells me it took him 2 oil pans to drain all the oil and that there was twice the amount of oil there should have been. *So apparently the guy I bought the bike from either did the last oil change himself or he let a moron do it.* He also noticed that I was missing a rear fender bolt and the other 3 were loose. So he replaced the missing bolt and tightened the others for free! He said that other than the bike having too much oil, the bike ran really well. So it ended up only costing the price of the oil change and my bike ran like a champ the whole ride home.

Of course it started raining that afternoon and didn't stop until the rest of my weekend were over. So I didn't get any good rides in on my days off and of course the weather got nice when I had to go back to work. So today I was really feeling like I needed a break from all the stress that I had built up throughout the weekend and it was gorgeous out. I was able to have the whole day off from both jobs, so I went for a nice ride with my friend Heather. It was just what I needed. Motorcycles are wonderful! Anyway, these pics were from our ride when we stopped at the police station to hydrate.

Couldn't Think of a Title...

2010-05-11T23:37:00.002-05:00

So I have a hard time blogging very often lately because I don't think there's really much going on worth blogging about... My life hasn't been all that exciting. I do have a couple work stories that I've been told I should blog about. One is rather humorous, the other not so much...

The first story takes place when I was working an emergency room detail. During such details, officers such as I are assigned to hang out for a period of about 5 hours in the emergency room due to an increased number of incidents requiring police involvement during certain times of the day. On this particular night, I spent most of my time in the ER assisting security with patients who were in crisis. This often includes the mental ill or people who're down on their luck. Sometimes police from other jurisdictions bring these patients in crisis in and drop them off for treatment after they've been called to deal with whatever nonsensical thing it is that the patient did. Anyway, that brings me to the story... city police brought in an individual that suffered from Bipolar disorder and had not been taking her medications. She was in the middle of a manic episode and had been reported to police because she was seen wearing nothing but a 2 piece swimsuit and sandals when it was around 30 degrees outside. They also stated that she kept flashing people downtown. So the police responded and determined that she was not capable of adequately taking care of herself. They filled out the proper paperwork to have her committed against her will until she could be assessed by mental health professionals. Then they dumped her off at my ER so that we could babysit her until while that happened.

So apparently this chick isn't a fan of female police because she had fought with one a week prior and they had left some pretty bruises all over her leg (which he showed me several times while laying on the floor of her patient room with her feet in a V in the air...). So she really didn't like me from the moment we met, even though I wasn't the "b**** female cop" that beat her up. I tried to have as little contact with her as possible since me being a cop just seemed to rile her up more, but at one point she decided she was done being there and tried to leave. Unfortunately that meant I had to intervene since she was under the commital paperwork. So I stopped her before she reached the exit and told her she could go back to her room on her own or I would have to help her. This pissed her off and she went back to the room (probably because I'm pretty intimidating), but she got LOUD! She started yelling, "You just think you look so good in that uniform, but let me tell you, you DON'T! You look like s*** in that uniform!" and "You think you're so important cause you're a stupid b**** cop and you've got that gay batman belt!", but my personal favorite and the line that everyone working in the ER that night likes to quote best, "You don't want to fight with me. I'll go toe to toe with you right now! In the mud! Naked!" I had been pretty composed up to that point, but I couldn't hold back anymore. I politely declined the naked mud wrestling offer and laughed a little. Oh and I should add, that she did say that I would have to take off my gay batman belt, but then she could take me. Luckily shortly after that, she finally let a nurse give her some meds to help calm her down and help her sleep and I never had to fight with her.

My second story is more of a near-death experience. I usually get off work at midnight, but I was working a 17 hour shift the next day, so I had gotten permission to leave work an hour and a half early since I had to be back at 7:30am and live half an hour away. So at 10:30 I headed home and on the way I rolled up on a van that had a broken front axle. I might not have stopped except that it was on a particularly bad curve and it was in the roadway and couldn't be moved to the shoulder. So I put on my emergency lights and directions to attempt to keep it from getting hit until we could get it moved out of the roadway. I had my dispatcher contact a wrecker to come tow the vehicle and tried to keep the occupants of that vehicle as far out of the roadway as possible to prevent any injury should someone hit either of our vehicles while we waited. It took half an hour for the wrecker to arrive. When it did, I was standing on the drivers side of the disabled vehicle helping the tow driver by telling him which way he needed to pull the car to get it lined up with the flatbed. I then saw the eyes of the two guys watching us get really big as they looked at something behind me. At the same time I heard a semi and felt my hair and jacket move as the semi came within INCHES of hitting me. My butt puckered and I'm sure a string of not so nice words may have escaped my lips as I thought I was dead right there.

If I hadn't wanted to get that van out of the road so bad, I probably would have jumped in my car and chased down the semi to cite them for violating Utah's Move Over law, but I just wanted the wrecker to load it up and get it out of there so I could avoid gettting almost killed by any other vehicles that don't think they should move into the open left lane instead of trying to stay in the right lane where we were.

So anyway, I guess two work stories will have to do for now cause I can't think of anything else worth mentioning at the moment. Perhaps I'll have more good stories soon with the weather warming up and more people getting out.

My Motorcycle!

2010-03-21T02:46:00.004-05:00

This week I became a motorcycle owner! I bought this beauty a couple days ago. I just can't wait to get everything squared away so that I can ride it. It's a 2000 Yamaha V-Star 650. Here's some pics...

It's ok. You can be jealous. :)

Work Week

2010-02-22T18:41:00.003-06:00

First, let me apologize for being such a lame blogger. I read everyone else's blogs almost daily, but I haven't really felt like I had anything to blog about for a while. I don't do much but work and school and sleep. Nothing too terribly exciting has happened since the last blog, so you're really not missing out on much.

In my last blog I mentioned that my fall semester grades weren't looking too promising. I ended up with an A in my writing class, a C in my Biology class (this was a huge relief) and even managed to pass my Film History class with D even though I quit going half-way through the semester to save my sanity. This semester I'm just taking a spin class and a yoga class. I went way easy this semester since last semester was so horrible. I love the spin class, but I've found that I hate yoga. I've decided yoga is for people who don't have bad backs. Pretty much everything we do in yoga hurts my back. Plus the instructor is really weird and I'm not much of a tree hugger/hippie like everyone else in my class.

Work hasn't been too terribly action-packed lately either. I keep pretty busy most of the time with reports and responding to calls but nothing really blog-worthy has been happening. This week however has been somewhat more eventful. I usually work Thursday through Sunday from 2pm to midnight, but this week I had signed up to work an overtime shift directing traffic for a basketball game. So I set up to direct traffic at this intersection near the handicapped parking area. This is also a high-pedestrian crossing area, so I decided to use my car to block the right turn lane and to force all the cars wanting to turn right to drive straight to the next intersection where they could turn right and loop around to the handicap lots. Well apparently these hoity-toity people who go to the basketball games have "been turning right here for 30 years!" and didn't appreciate my thoughts on how I was running that intersection.

I had lots of cars stop in the middle of the intersection to argue with me about why it was stupid that they couldn't turn right there. Some of which, decided they didn't care what I was telling them to do, they were going to turn right anyway because they "always turn right there." I had one guy almost hit me when he turned right, so I hit his back driver's side window with my palm and he stopped. I walked up to his window and asked if he didn't understand my signals to drive straight. He gave me the same lame excuses that he had to park in that lot and that was the only way to get into it, even though I explained that the street was a loop and he could get there from the other entrance. He then said, "If you broke my window, you're gonna have to pay for it," to which I responded, "Well I'm sure it'll cost less than the ticket I will be giving you for failure to obey an officer directing traffic." He put on the ugliest, angriest face, said, "I'm gonna talk to Chris Hill about this!" and proceeded to drive away down the direction I had told him not to. So I called his plate number in to dispatch and had them print off his information for me. I'm still thinking about mailing him a citation.

A short while later, I had an 80+ year old man inching forward, trying to turn right even though I was standing directly in his way. He didn't let that stop him and rolled over my right foot as he tried to get around me. I pulled my boot out from under his tire, made him stop and told him, "Sir, you just ran over my foot. What are you doing????" He said, "oh sorry" and proceeded to turn right since I had moved to the side to yell at him through his window. I was too pissed to even think straight. I didn't even get his plate number so that I could cite him later. So if you see an 80 something year old man in a maroon sedan that looks like he might run over a cop and not feel bad about it, that's probably him.

I had a couple other choice words with people who even after talking to me, still proceeded to turn right when I told them not to, but was too irritated to do much about it. The scalpers standing on the corner witnessed all of the stuff that happened and when my sergeant came down to check on the intersection, one of the scalpers told him that I had gotten my foot run over. So of course he made me take my boot and sock off to make sure I hadn't gotten injured. I wasn't wearing steel toed boots, but somehow my toes were fine. The rubber around the front of the toe is peeling off though.

Then I was involved in an interesting call on Friday night. My friend Heather was working an assignment in the ER so I had gone up to see how she was doing and if she needed dinner or anything. About 5 minutes after I got there, one of the hospital security officers ran up to us and reported that a female had just stolen a pizza from the hospital cafeteria and she was now in the waiting room for the ER trying to check in for a broken finger.

So Heather and I walk up to the front of the ER to the check-in desk where she is sitting in a wheelchair, SHOVELING pizza into her mouth. She's already being loud and obnoxious and we hadn't even confronted her about the pizza yet. I decide to go down to the cafeteria with one security officer to verify that a theft had actually occurred while Heather and another security officer stayed with the suspect. I got to the cafeteria, confirmed the theft and was instructing the witnesses to write statements for a theft report. I tried calling Heather on my police radio, but unfortunately the hospital was a dead-zone for our radios. I hear her calling me on it a minute later, but she apparently couldn't hear me responding. Then I hear over the security officer's radio that there is a knock-down drag-out fight going on in the bathroom at the front of the ER. I knew immediately that it was Heather and the suspect and took off at a dead sprint for the ER. When I got there, Heather had the female in cuffs, laying on the floor in the ER waiting room.

Heather had apparently run her for warrants and she had one for theft from UTA. The suspect had gotten up and went to the bathroom, and Heather followed her to put her under arrest. When she attempted to arrest her, the suspect had tried to knee her and then landed an elbow in Heather's face. So Heather had grabbed her by the hair and shoved her up against the wall, pulled her taser and told her if she kept resisting, she was getting tased. The suspect had stopped long enough for Heather to get her cuffed and out of the bathroom. Then she pulled her arm out of Heather's grasp and got tackled by the security officer who had gone in to back Heather up. That was when I had shown up.

We stood the suspect up, each took an arm and escort her through the ER, out into the ambulance bay where the police cars were parked. She cussed and screamed the whole way out. We started out by putting her in the back of Heather's car. She has a full cage, so the suspect laid down on her back and immediately started kicking the windows and cage. We called another officer to bring us his leg irons so we could restrain her feet to save the car too much damage. I convinced one of the ER doctors to come out and look at the suspect's finger because we knew jail wouldn't take her without some kind of medical clearance from the hospital. He pulled up some information from her ER visit a week before when she had that finger xrayed for the same injury. He said it wasn't broken, just hyper-extended and that she had a follow-up appointment with the hand clinic scheduled so he would give her a finger splint and give us paperwork to give the jail.

We finally took her to jail in my car because I only have a half cage so she couldn't move around as much, her alternating between singing along with the radio (which I had turned way up to drown out her constant talking), talking about how "Heaven" had given her heavenly curls and all she was trying to do was wet them down when "Helen" (that's what she kept calling Heather) attacked her, talking about how she knew all the right things to say when we got to the jail to keep them from accepting her, and kissing my windows and writing help in the steam on it with her tongue. It was gross. I think she was trying to convince us she was having some kind of psychotic episode, but she got all serious the closer we got to the jail and would ask, "you're not going to tell them I'm being uncooperative when we get to the jail are you?" Apparently she's had the welcoming committee come out and extract her from police cars before.

Once we got to jail, I cuffed her to the bench inside with all the other prisoners. Heather and I then started filling out the booking paperwork and we could hear her screaming about how we had arrested her for some bogus warrant and that she had kicked that little officer's butt. The jailers were all familiar with her and when she got searched, they had 8 jailers on hand in case she decided to fight, one had a video camera to tape the whole search and amazingly she cooperated. She bled all over the floor though because when they pulled off her socks, she had a blister open up on her foot. Heather and I have been sore all weekend, her from fighting with her and me from my sprint to go back her.

So that's really all I have to mention for now. Maybe it won't take me so long to blog again, but I wouldn't hold your breath...

December Rant

2009-12-16T00:54:00.004-06:00

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

2009-10-23T17:01:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-28T10:04:00.003-05:00

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...

2009-08-30T05:04:00.005-05:00

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...

2009-08-26T16:24:00.001-05:00

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

2009-08-21T20:37:00.002-05:00

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...

2009-08-15T11:39:00.009-05:00

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...

The most fun awesome adventure I never want to do again...

2009-07-05T22:09:00.008-05:00

...at least not until my blisters go away and every muscle in my body stops being sore.

For 4th of July weekend, I got invited to go with my cousin Nicki and some of her friends on a backpacking trip to Buckskin Gulch down in southern Utah, almost to Arizona. It's the longest, and maybe deepest (?) slot canyon in the world. There were 7 of us (6 women and 1 man) backpacking 22 miles in two days. It was challenging but a blast. Let me relive the weekend for you...

On Thursday, July 2nd, 5 of us (Nicki, Megan, Kelsey, Julie and me) met at Nicki's duplex in Provo with all of our backpacks and equipment ready to go at 5pm. We loaded all of said backpacks and equipment into Nicki's truck and my car and were on the road by 6ish. It was a more eventful drive than I was expecting. What should have been a 5-6 hour drive turned into like 8-9 because we missed a turn and drove over 100 miles more than we should have. We ended up off-roading for a couple miles which was fun, but it got us to the White House trailhead after 2am instead of around 11:30 like we thought. The two from Arizona (John and Erin) were supposed to get there after us, but beat us there. We pitched a tent and tried to get as much sleep as possible before starting our hike into the canyons in the morning.

We woke up a few hours later, ate some granola bars and oranges, broke down the tent, and took one last potty break in the latrines at the trailhead. John and I left our vehicles at the trailhead and everyone piled in the back of Nicki's truck with our backpacks (I'm guessing most of the packs weighed around 60 pounds). We stopped at the ranger station to pick up our overnight permits and our "human waste" bags (Yeah, you read that right, we had to pack out our poo and TP), then headed to the Wire Pass trailhead to start our adventure.

I was feeling pretty good at the start of the hike and it was probably because I had definitely underestimated how challenging some parts of this trip were going to be. I was in complete awe at how amazing the slot canyons were and how beautiful it all was. The first few drops in the canyon where we had to take off our packs and lower them down before climbing down ourselves was about as difficult as I really expected the hike to be. I was wrong, very wrong. I had done some research, but probably not enough. I was expecting there to be some areas that I might have to walk through water pools, but I underestimated how many and how deep they would be.

John, Julie and I tried to save our socks from getting muddy and wet for the first few pools by taking them off and wading through them barefoot, then putting them back on after we crossed them. We soon fell behind the other 4 and got separated from them for several miles. While walking barefoot across some rocks between pools, I got attacked by a bear! Ok, not really. I slipped and did a face-plant onto the rocks and amazingly only scraped up my leg. That's when I decided to give up on the no-shoes idea, and decided just to get my shoes nasty muddy (I thought I'd try the shoes without socks, which also didn't last long cause I got some nickel-sized blisters on the bottom of my feet). John and Julie lasted a little longer before they too gave up and just wore their shoes and socks through the pools.

The other four eventually started wondering where we were and stopped to wait for us to catch up. We weren't moving too fast because we were starting to get tired, John's shoes were cutting into his ankles and I was limping from falling on the rocks and the blistered feet. I guess they waited for about 45 minutes before we caught up.

We had thought that we would be hiking about 10-12 miles on day one, but it was a lot longer. About 13 or 14 miles into day one, we reached an area in the canyons called the "rock falls" which was a 20-25 ft. drop down the side of this huge boulder that you have to climb down with a rope. That was probably my least favorite thing to do on the whole hike because it's hard to grab onto a rope without your thumb. I was relieved that when I went to the hand surgeon on Wednesday to follow up about my broken thumb, that they took the big splint off and gave me a much smaller thumb splint. So at least I was able to use my wrist again. That 20-25 foot drop would have been impossible for me to do without being able to use my wrist.

Anyway, after about 15 miles, we finally reached the "Confluence" which is where we were camping for the night. It's the area where the canyons we had been hiking through meets up with the Paria River. It's important to camp on high ground in this area because about 12 times a year they get flash floods and there's no warning. When we got there, there was a really creepy group of Asians already camping there. One of them was this guy with a big beer belly who wasn't wearing a shirt and kept taking pictures of us. So we decided instead of camping in that same area, we were going to go a little further up the river and try to find another elevated area to camp. We found one just a few bends down the river that had a big enough area for us to pitch our three little tents and set up camp for the night.

About 1:30 in the morning, we woke up to the sound of water. We all jumped up out of our tents and discovered that the river that was practically 2 inches deep and about 4 feet wide when we went to sleep was now at least 25 feet wide and now looked like a raging river. Luckily our camp ground was elevated enough we were safe from the flooding, but it had us pretty worried for a little while until we could see that it was slowly going back down. I probably got 4 or so hours of sleep total cause it was so hot.

We got a late start Saturday morning because we wanted to give the river as much time as possible to go back down before we started. It was still pretty deep, but we were feeling like we needed to get out of the canyons that day cause there had been weather forecasts predicting more rain that night and we weren't comfortable with the idea of maybe having to camp there another night. So we packed up camp and were headed up river at about 11:30 or 12. The first couple miles were EXTREMELY slow because we were having to zig zag back and forth through the river from one riverbank to the other. Some areas where we crossed were between ankle and knee deep, but a lot of the areas were almost waist deep.

I seemed to have some sort of super-power for finding the holes between the rocks on the river bottom or the rocks that would move the second I put my feet on them, so I fell a lot. My shins and knees definitely took a beating on the rocks and I ended up with mud up to my chest. It was pretty miserable, especially cause I was already limping on my nickel-sized blisters. After a couple of really slow miles, we finally got to some longer stretches of dry land in between river-crossings and the water got shallower, so we were able to pick up the pace. It was so hot I started looking forward to the times that I got to cross the river again just cause the water up to my knees felt good even though it was the muddiest, most disgusting water ever.About 7 miles later, we saw the most wonderful thing. That was when we caught sight of those beautiful, wonderful latrines at the White House trailhead. We were soooo excited that we had completed our mission. We were all so tired, sore and sleep deprived that we were overjoyed to finally reach the end.

We loaded packs and people into the bed of John's truck and I laid out a towel on my car seat, then we drove down to the ranger station to catch the rangers before they closed at 4:15pm. We got there with like 2 minutes to spare. The ranger had told us the day before he'd like to hear how the trip went if we got done before they closed, so we shared the details of our trip and disposed of our "human waste" bags in the dumpsters there. I'm pretty sure there was only one person who didn't have to carry around her "human waste" because she never went. It was pretty disgusting, but at least the bags had deodorizers in them and really good seals so I never had to smell it. Just knowing I was carrying it in my pack was kind of gross though.

Anyway, luckily we had a room at the Treasure Trail Motel in Kanab, Utah reserved for the night, so we headed there to shower up and ditch our packs. Once we cleaned up and changed into non-stinky, mud-free clothes, we headed to Mexican Fiesta for dinner. It was soooo good. As we finished dinner, we started hearing fireworks. So we headed out to the parking lot where we could see the firework show that the city of Kanab put on. We watched for a few minutes (cause it only lasted about that long) and headed back to the motel.

I got more sleep that night than either of the two nights before, but I still didn't get very much. Erin and John left at like 4:30am this morning to try to get back to Mesa before their church started and so most of us woke up to say goodbye and wish them a safe drive home. I had a hard time getting back to sleep after that. We woke up around 8 and got our stuff packed up. We hobbled like 80 year old women a block down the street to catch the first hour of church, hobbled back, finished packing everything back up and got on the road around 11am. We didn't take any detours on the drive home so it took 5 hours to get home instead of 8.

So I'm proud of all of us for finishing such a challenging adventure with no major injuries or accidents. I made 5 new friends that I hope I can keep in touch with and got to know my cousin Nicki a lot better. I got to see amazingly beautiful canyons and got to carry around poop in a bag. What more could I ask for?

Ultimate Prime & Backpacking

2009-06-27T01:29:00.004-05:00

After breaking my thumb, I came to several realizations:

1. I use my thumb a LOT on a daily basis for really basic things, things that are nearly impossible for me to do with my arm splinted from my thumb to my elbow... for example- tying my shoes, holding a fork, buttoning my clothes, brushing my teeth, shaving, opening jars/bottles, starting my car, locking/unlocking the front door, writing, etc... etc...

2. I will be missing half of my softball season and likely all of my ultimate frisbee season (except for the game I played the Thursday before jacking up my thumb)

3. My work is forcing me to take all my sick, comp and vacation time and not letting me work on light duty, so I will probably be completely out of any kind of paid time off by the time I heal and get to go back to work, so the trips I would like to make this fall probably won't happen. :(

4. Broken bones hurt a lot, and they hurt even more when the broken part of your thumb sticks out of your splint and you hit it on everything.

So I got to go watch my little brother play ultimate with the rest of our team yesterday. He did really good. He had some really good throws, catches and played some good defense. I wanted nothing more than to be on the field with him. I enjoyed watching him play so well, but was hating the being on the sidelines part...

Anyway, I got an email this morning from my cousin Nicki inviting me to go backpacking with her and some of her friends up the backside of Mt. Timpanogos. I was glad to get out of my house since today I would normally have been working and figured it would be a good practice for our backpacking trip next weekend to Buckskin Gulch, down in southern Utah. We took off from the trailhead about 6 or 7 I think... (I don't really know cause I can't buckle my watch without my thumb so I stopped wearing one). We hiked up a couple miles only too find out there was too much snow on the trail to get to where we had planned on camping for the night without crampons, so we turned around and headed back down. We got to the trailhead just as it started raining, so instead of trying to find another place to camp up one of the other trails, we opted just to load up and head home.

It was a little harder and the trail was steeper than I had expected. It just made me realize I'm still not acclimated to the higher altitude out here yet. I fully expect to be very sore tomorrow. I'm glad the trip next weekend is pretty flat and is at a much lower altitude. I expect I'll do a little better. Anyway, not much else to say, I'll include a few pictures of the hike today. It was really pretty.

I'm broken

2009-06-23T10:00:00.004-05:00

So last night I had a little incident. I was playing second base at my softball game tonight when this guy hit a hard bouncing grounder straight to me. The ball took a wierd bounce just before it got to me and hit me in the knee (I've included a picture of the softball stitching imprint it left on my knee). It then hit my right thumb straight on the tip of it and I cried like a little girl for about 30 seconds. There's a rule in my league that there has to be 3 females on the field or your team gets an automatic out every time they reach that spot in the batting order. Since I could bend my thumb at first, I kept playing and would ice my thumb when I was waiting for my turn to bat. I got a couple hits after that but got out every time. I also threw a couple people out, but we still lost.

By the end of the game, my thumb was swollen up to twice the size and I could no longer bend my thumb (It's hard to tell how swollen it was in the picture but it was really obvious when I put it next to my other thumb). Since it was my gun hand, I decided I better go get it xrayed right away, so I got my coworker to give me a ride up to the Emergency Room. After a couple hours and three xrays, the doctor showed me the two fractures in my thumb and got the nurse to splint my hand.

I have an appointment with the hand surgeon on July 1st to see how long I'll be out of commission. I will probably be on light duty for a while and I'll have to learn how to do a lot of things with my left hand. It's amazing to figure out how much I use my right hand for. I couldn't even pull my hair back this morning. It's also amazing how much a thumb can hurt. Even on the Lortab I couldn 't sleep very good last night.

Yes, I have a full forearm splint for a broken thumb. Sad huh?

Busy Busy Busy

2009-06-16T16:16:00.005-05:00

So I've gotten to be pretty bad about updating this thing, but I've got good reason. I've been staying pretty busy. I've been working all the overtime I can get my hands on. On the days I do have off, I've been filling the down time with lots of fun stuff.

On May 27th, I ran with two other officers and the Chief of my police department in the Law Enforcement Torch Run for the special olympics. There were a couple of news clips where you could see me for a second here and there, but not long enough that I think it's worth looking for the links now. Then on May 30th, after working all day I went to a family dinner thing for my cousin Shiloh. She got sealed to her husband and her two kids that afternoon in the Salt Lake temple. It was really good to get to visit with her and some of my Little cousins from Texas. This is a picture of us at the dinner (L to R: Tabetha, Amanda, Shiloh, Jessica and me).

On June 7th I had kind of a "fun" day at work, and by fun I mean I was sick and didn't want to do anything, but of course had to chase and fight with a guy. It was less than two hours from the end of my shift, and I got sent on a call that this guy was threatening other students in the library. Another female officer went on the call with me. When we got there, library security was trying to convince this guy, we'll call him "Moron", to go study in another area of the library and stop yelling at this group that was in the group study area. Apparently Moron had been sitting in this area studying for a test when this group of students came and sat across from him. They were talking. Moron was mad because he felt like they were too loud. So Moron makes a couple cracks about getting the National Guard called out too when he sees us and says he's moving.

As soon as he gets in the elevator, I go to talk to the students to find out what kind of threats he had been making. They told me he had been reading stuff off of his phone really loud and playing his music really loud to try to get back at them for talking, and when they didn't react, he came over and started telling them that they didn't want to f*** with him and that they better not run into him outside the library or they would be sorry, etc. etc... So while they're telling me this, Moron comes back and starts yelling to me about how outrageous it is that they wouldn't move and how there were six of them and he didn't have anyone on his side. So I tell him to go back upstairs and as soon as I'm done talking to them I would come and get his side of the story from him. He refuses. I gave him a couple chances to leave the area peacefully and he refused repeatedly. So then I tell him I'm going to cite him for disorderly conduct and I need his identification. He refuses to give it to me and steps back into the elevator. We follow him into the elevator. I give him one last chance to give me his ID or he gets to go to jail. He refuses so I pulled my cuffs and grabbed his wrist. Moron tries to pull his hand away and we start fighting with him in the elevator trying to get him into handcuffs. All the while he's yelling about how outrageous this is and how he knows this guy who is the son of a major donor for the university and how he's going to sue...

Anyway, we get tired of fighting with him, so the other officer pulls her taser, presses it against the moron's chest and tells him if he doesn't stop fighting, she's going to tase him. He refuses and gets tased. The sucky thing is I have the handcuffs in my hand and my hand pressed against his back, so I feel the shock up to about my elbow of my left hand. So I let go of him to prevent getting shocked further. Unfortunately, the elevator doors open and Moron makes a run for it the minute the shock stops. So then I have to chase him through the second floor of the library and there's people sitting at tables on either side of me. (Side note: I had been really sick and very congested so I'm coughing and wheezing the whole time this is going on)

The other officer and I trap him in one of the rows of bookshelves and we begin the fight to get him into custody again. The other officer rams him but isn't able to get him to the ground, so I grab his left arm, throw my leg out in front of his legs and used a technique I learned during a jiu jitsu class in the police academy and throw him, that's right, I lifted him off the ground and threw him on his face, jumped on top of him, placed my knee in his back and proceeded to cuff him. Moron starts crying and yelling stuff about having systemic lupus and how he was going to sue us both. I kept him on the ground until we got another officer there to help us get him and his stuff back upstairs to where my patrol car was parked. I ended up taking him to jail on 4 charges instead of just the disorderly conduct that he would've gotten if he'd just listened to me from the beginning.

After I got to jail I started realizing that though I hadn't gotten hurt in the fight, I had sustained a couple casualties. Moron somehow ripped the flap of my shirt pocket half off and broke my sunglasses. He also gave the other officer a fat lip. He has since been asked to leave the University by the Dean's office. I guess he was a mouthy jerk to the officers working when he came by the police station to pick up his backpack and stuff when he got released from jail and to the dean of students, so the dean decided he just needed to go elsewhere for his education. Good riddance!

Anyway, on June 11th, I went up to Clearfield to help my cousins load up thier moving truck so they could move to Kansas the next day. One of them, Holden's 7th birthday is on June 15th, so I took him his presents a little early since they would be gone by then. Here's a picture of him with the present. I took a few more of him opening it, but you can't see his way cute dimples.

I'm really going to miss their family a lot, especially this little nugget of cuteness, David. I tried to pack him in a box to take back to my house, but he only liked being in the box for a minute, then he got angry with me and made me take him back out.

I joined a softball team made up of people at work. The team is made up of police officers, dispatchers, security officers and a couple of their wives. The season started back when I was in Louisiana on vacation, so I missed the first game, which I think we lost. Then we won my first game the next week. The next 3 games all got rained out and we finally got to make one of them up yesterday. We won that game in extra innings after coming back from a 4 run deficit. Tonight we had our normally scheduled game.I thought we were going to have another comeback game because we were only down by one at the beginning of the last inning, but the other team scored like 5 or 6 runs and we lost. I had a lot of fun anyway and the next few pictures were from the game tonight.

This me playing second base as I was about to catch a throw from the left fielder to get the runner out.
This is me batting. Durh.

And this is me running to second base which was as far as I got the whole game. Good times. I'll try not to wait so long before I update again, although it may be July before I have anything of note to blog about. I'm stoked for my backpacking trip with my cousin Nicki to Buckskin Gulch 4th of July weekend. It's gonna be awesome!

My Return to the Humid South, Dog-sitting and Building Swingsets

2009-05-21T17:08:00.007-05:00

So it's been a couple weeks since my last update and I've stayed quite busy. After graduation/race weekend, I flew down to Louisiana to spend 5ish days with my best friend from high school Crystal and her 6 month old daughter Marlie. We had a great time sitting around reminiscing and spent every day I was there at the pool. I ended up with a pretty decent (for me) tan and was able to relax and not think about work. I was sad to have to return to the real world and leave such a good friend behind.

When I got back, I had two days of work and then Tuesday I started housesitting for a Sergeant at work. Her husband is a Sheriff's Deputy with the county and is a K9 handler. They were going to go on vacation and couldn't take the K9 with them. So they asked if I would come stay at their really really nice house that is like 10-15 minutes from my work and take care of him while they're gone. The K9's name is Oliver and he's a bloodhound, which is cool except when he finishes eating his food, he sticks his head in his water bowl, then puts it in his food bowl and wipes it out to get every bit of food out of it. Then he comes out to the living room and shakes his jowls covering me with slobber and bits of food. So I've taken a lot of showers in the 3 days I've been watching him.

Yesterday my friend Heather from work had bought a swingset for her kids, so a couple other officers (Smalls and Don) went over to her house to help her put it together. Turns out all the bolts and stuff to assemble it were missing from the box. So we had to go exchange it for a bigger, better swingset. Once we finally got one with all the necessary hardware, we took it back to Heather's to start putting it together. It was a long process even with 4 of us working on it. I think it took a little over 2 hours. We had a lot of fun and I rediscovered my love for building things...

Anyway, that's the short and sweet version of my last couple weeks for those of you who get distracted easy. :)

U Graduation and Race for the Cure...

2009-05-09T15:22:00.004-05:00

The weather here has been gorgeous the last few days and I've spent a lot of time outside. These two things together have resulted in my arms and face turning a lovely shade of pink. Unfortunately, that shade of pink is very painful and isn't all that cute...

Yesterday I spent 9 hours standing out in the sun directing traffic for the graduations at the U. This is where the majority of my sun burn came from. I took a picture so that you can see how red my face is...

All that time in the sun wore me out and it hurt to move, so I laid down to watch a few episodes of House and ended up crashing pretty early. That was probably good because I had to wake up early this morning to run the in Race for the Cure 5k in downtown Salt Lake. It went pretty well. I was still extremely sore because of my sunburn so I stopped at the store and bought some SPF 85 sunblock and lathered up because the sky wasn't looking all that cloudy...

I was relieved that I was able to run the whole 5k without stopping to walk but my knees are killing me now. I got my orthotics on Wednesday and my feet have felt pretty good. Since I haven't gotten used to them yet, I haven't been wearing them when I run. As a result I have had really sharp pains right under my knees since about mile 2 of my run today and it hasn't let up. I guess I will have to wear them when I run now too.

The first group picture was the U Public Safety team before the run. This second one was us after we finished.

Dabbling in the Photography World

2009-05-03T17:37:00.004-05:00

My cousin's daughter had an audition today with Disney/Nick and needed to take a couple recent pictures with her to the audition, so her mom asked if I would come over and try to get a couple good pictures. I've never done any headshot poses or anything and we didn't have much time to work with, but I think we got a couple that turned out pretty good. Here's a couple of my favorites:

Anyway, I had fun and hopefully I'll get to do more photography soon. I miss it.

YAY!

2009-04-30T22:22:00.002-05:00

I paid off ALL my credit card debt today. It's such a weight off my back!!!!!! I still have a lot of debt left to go, but at least I'm done with the high intrest stuff!

100th Post

2009-04-13T16:24:00.004-05:00

In honor of my 100th post, I've decided to make it a fun one. Sunday nights at work are usually pretty slow and often boring. We decided to have a little fun last night. The fun started with a photo shoot in the ambulance bay at the hospital at like 1:30am. After a bunch of group shots we had a fun idea. My co-worker Heather is a little over 5' tall. Then we have a security officer at the hospital that is over 7' tall. We call him "Stretch." We decided to get a picture of Heather and Stretch together because it's really funny to see her standing next to him. Here's a couple of the pics I took on my phone. There's better quality pics floating around out there somewhere but nobody has sent them to me yet.

In this one, Heather's putting pink handcuffs on him.And finally, later on in the night while we were waiting for dayshift to get to work to relieve us, we had the most fun. Heather brought in a couple of the mini-motorcycles that she got her kids for Christmas. We had fun driving them around the parking lot. I think we need to start up the UPD Motor Unit again!

Oh, and as a side note, I'm still $50 short of my goal for the Race for the Cure that I'm in next month, so please donate if you can! Go here to donate! Thanks!

Near Death Experiences, Being Defective and Good Causes

2009-04-01T13:22:00.002-05:00

Today was kind of a busy day... I committed to a good cause, had a near-death experience, and found out I was defective all in a few short hours. I'll start out with the good cause first because I know the other two parts of my morning are probably why you even read this far... anyway, keep reading...

As many of you know, the past two years I have participated in the Police Unity Tour to raise money for the Memorial for police killed in the line of duty. This year I wasn't able to make the commitment due to the economy and my empty wallet. So this year, while my brothers and sisters in the Police Unity Tour are riding their bikes, I'll be taking on another cause. On May 9, 2008, I will be participating in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. It's a 5k run/walk to raise money and awareness for breast cancer. I'm part of a team consisting of members of my police department and I have set a goal to raise $125 for the cause. I'm hoping that some of you can make donations, however small, to help me reach my goal. Donating can be done very easily online HERE.

Ok, now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'll move on to my near death experience. I'll start by saying that I HATE snow. Even more than that, I HATE driving in the snow. When I left work this morning, I had to brush about 2 inches of snow off of my car and stop at the chiropractor on my way home. Before I even made it to the chiropractor, I hit a particularly icy part of the highway in fairly heavy traffic and started sliding SIDEWAYS. I have been throw Emergency Vehicle Operations training through work and was able to straighten it out without too much trouble, only to start sliding sideways again, only with the passenger side of my car heading straight toward the rear of the semi in front of me. I'm not sure what words may or may not have been coming out of my mouth as I got closer and closer to smashing into the back of this truck, but my butt definitely puckered until I came to a stop... about 2 feet from the back of the truck! Did I mention how much I hate driving in the snow!!!! What's up with this snow in April anyway!?!

So when I finally got to my chiropractor's office, I was relieved to escape from the snow for half an hour. I wasn't however expecting to find out that I'm defective. I've been going to the chiropractor every other week since probably November or December because wearing 30-40 extra pounds of body armor and gun belt stuff tends to reak havok on my back and shoulders. Well I happened to be wearing slip on shoes that I kicked off when the chiropractor adjusted me cause they weren't going to stay on my feet anyway. My chiropractor then noticed that my left foot angles in a lot more than it should (it's been that way since I was born). So he had me walk back and forth across the room while he watch my feet. Turns out that not only are my back and shoulders jacked up, but my feet are too. The way my weight is distributed on my feet is causing knee problems and making my back problems worse. I need orthotic inserts for my shoes to help correct how my weight is distributed. The really sucky part is the orthotics aren't covered by my insurance, they're $200 a pair AND they only last about a year!

SUCKY DAY!

Snowboarding

2009-03-28T10:48:00.006-05:00

Yesterday, I finally made it out of the house for something other than work or errands. Bilbo and I went night-boarding at Brighton. It was a lot of fun. I was really pleased that I made it all the way down my first run without biffing it, until I was right in front of the lift and I face planted. Oh well... I only fell a few more times the rest of the night, so I did better than the last time I went.

The resort wasn't very busy, so we found that we didn't have to wait in lines for the lifts and so we ended up making a lot of runs in a short amount of time. On the last couple runs we decided to try to get some video. It's by no means professional, but enjoy anyway... This first one is of Bilbo coming off a jump.

This next one is a video Bilbo took of me just coming down the hill. He follows the wrong person at first, but eventually you can see me. I almost biff it when I catch some of the powder the wrong way, but I save myself from another tumble.

Well, that's all. I know it's not much, but it's big news in my boring, redundant life...

Oh yeah, P. S. I've lost 11 pounds, but I've been stuck there for a couple weeks... not sure how to start losing again...

A Day in the Life

2009-03-24T18:44:00.003-05:00

I realize it's been a while since I have updated this thing, but trust me when I say you'll thank me if you know how boring my life has been lately....

To demonstrate how boring it has really been, I'll go through my past 24 hours for you. Try to stay awake, although I won't blame you if you do.

4pm - woke up
6pm - ate dinner
7pm -got ready for work
8pm - drove to work
9pm - started patroling
10pm - still patroling
11pm - ate "lunch"
12am - did some stuff on the computer
1am - patrolled some more
2am - more patrolling
3am - still patrolling
4am - responded on an intrusion alarm and accidentally used Vanderbilt radio codes on the radio, felt like a moron
5am - more patrolling
6am - went back to the station to play solitaire and text twist until day shift called on duty
7am - drove home
8am - laid in bed trying to fall asleep
9am - finally fell asleep
10am - slept
11am - slept
12pm - phone rang, woke me up, took forever to fall back asleep
1pm - slept
2pm - slept
3pm - phone rang, woke me up again, the University has a gas leak so a bunch of buildings were evacuated... tried to go back to sleep
3:30pm - phone rang again, the whole U has been closed, gave up on trying to sleep
4pm - laid around my room
5pm - got a message not to come in to work till midnight, decided I should probably go running....

So that's where I'm at... exciting huh? NOT! Luckily in mid-May I go back to working dayshift so hopefully I'll have a life again... we'll see!

Senior Pictures

2009-02-22T15:48:00.006-06:00

Since Jacqui asked about my senior picture, which was missing from my last post, I decided to try to find them and get them posted as well. I was successful. Here they are in all their glory. Enjoy.

(The jacket says, "WRHS Swimming" because I was a diver in High School)

And finally, this is my favorite. i think it turned out the best.

Grade School Me

2009-02-13T17:51:00.004-06:00

So I was scanning all of my grade school pictures into my computer today and thought it would be fun to post them on here as well. I don't think I would have all of my grade school pictures if it weren't for my mom's organizational skills and the fact that she kept all our pictures in a file and didn't let us keep them in our rooms. Be sure to thank her when you get up off the floor and stop laughing.

So here they are:

Kindergarten

1st Grade

2nd Grade

3rd Grade

Fourth Grade

5th Grade

6th Grade

7th Grade

8th Grade

9th Grade

10th Grade

11th Grade

Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield...

2009-02-12T04:44:00.008-06:00

So I have been wanting to blog again, but haven't really had anything worth blogging about happen lately. Absolutely NOTHING ever happens at work now that I work the night shift and nobody is out on weekday nights, so I don't have any new funny work stories. I continue to count deer and one night I saw 5 coyotes. One of the other officers told me she saw a few sheep running around with a group of about 10 deer, but I never got to see them. Sometimes I see rabbits but I don't usually count them cause they're boring.

Here's a couple pictures of a 5 point buck I saw standing on the side of one of the main streets by the campus. I took the first picture from across the street when I first saw him, and then we flipped a U-ey and I took the second one from about 8 feet away. He wasn't really fond of having me that close and took off before I could get a better shot. I took these on my phone which is why the lighting sucks. You get the idea though...
I was trying to use the spotlight on the car to give me more light and it ended up just washing his head out, you can see the antlers though...

I finished the second baby blanket I was working on and started a big blanket. It's taking me a LOT longer to do the big blanket. I can only get 4-6 rows done when I work on it in the ER and soon it'll be too big to try to keep off the ER floor so I'll have to find something else to keep me busy on the nights I'm stuck in there.

In other news, I gained 30 pounds in 2008 due to my migraine treatment and I no longer fit in most of my clothes, so I've given up soda and have been trying to cut back on the sweets and watch my portions. In about a week and a half, I've lost 4 pounds and it seems to be going well. It's been hard because I was drinking a Pepsi or two every night to keep myself awake and now I've been having to try to push through without the caffeine to help me. Plus there's a table in the patrol room at work where people bring candy and treats and stuff for everyone to pick at through their shifts and so I have to avoid that room as much as possible so that I'm not tempted to eat my weight in goodies. I haven't started working out to help with this whole weight loss thing mostly because I'm always exhausted from working all night and not getting enough sleep. I don't anticipate that diet alone will get me back to my target weight though, so I guess I'll have to figure out a way to get some exercise soon.

I'm also really excited about the fact that I got a good chunk of money back from my taxes and I put it all toward debt, so I'm getting closer and closer to moving back out of my parents house. I just hope I can keep from going crazy until then. It's been really hard living back at home again after like 7 years or so on my own. If you can avoid getting kidney stones when you have crappy medical insurance, I would. It's so not worth all the stupid debt that results...

Oh, and P.S. I am SOOOOO sick of the snow and cold weather. At least in Nashville when it was this cold, there wasn't stupid snow. I don't think I've seen our front yard without some snow in it since like November.

Bye Bye Bambi

2009-01-15T06:31:00.004-06:00

So it's been a few weeks since I last posted because I changed shifts at work at the beginning of this month and now I never get enough sleep. I had been working day shift from 7am to 5pm Thursday through Sunday, but I got bumped off day shift during the last shift bid. So now I'm on the graveyard shift, 9pm to 7am Sunday night through Wednesday night, so at least I have good days off. I hate the hours though. I tried last weekend to stay awake when I got off work Thursday morning. That lasted till about noon maybe and I crashed hard on my cousin's couch. I think I slept for a couple hours and then had a hard time falling asleep that night, so I basically just stayed up all night on my days off too which is boring cause everyone else was sleeping.

Another one of the downers about my new shift is that I've been waking up every day with a headache. So far I've only had two full blown migraines, one that was bad enough I was horfing. Hopefully I'll be able to get back on days in May when we have our next shift bid....

So you may be wondering what I do with all my spare time at work now that I work during the hours that NOTHING happens. I'll tell you. I spend at least one night a week taking my rotation on ER duty. ER duty is usually pretty boring though too. I sit there for about 5 hours watching the security officers watch the psych patients. I've recently been spending a lot of my time in the ER crocheting baby blankets. I finished on for my cousin's son David that was blue stripes and I'm working on another one right now that is for my friend Crystal's daughter Marlie. It's green and yellow cause Marlie has way too much pink stuff. I'm pretty close to finishing it too so maybe when it's done I'll take on a little bigger project like a... big blanket.

Another thing I do to pass the time is count deer. I count all the deer I see during the shift, and it's usually been between 30-40 per night since we're up on the mountain. There's a possibility that some of the deer I see may be the same ones I saw earlier, but they're all over the place so I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than 40, and I just didn't see them all. The downside to all the deer is that they tend to get hit by cars a lot. Unfortunately most of the time, the deer don't die when they get hit, they just get broken legs or other injuries. So we often get calls to go put the injured deer down after they've been hit. Monday I got my first call to go put down one such deer. The deer's front legs were both broken was laying along side the road, but was clearly still alive. When I arrived, there were two women standing there feeling sorry for him. I told them I would put him down so that he wouldn't be suffering anymore. Their eyes got real big when they realized I was going to shoot him. I guess they thought police carried around supplies to euthanize hurt deer or something. But anyway, I waited till they were gone and shot Bambi.

But anyway, on to happier things. Yesterday I stayed after work and ate breakfast with the officers on day shift. They miss me. After breakfast, I went home and to my delight, there was a UPS truck in front of my house. That beautiful man in brown brought me my new phone. It's a Blackberry Curve 8350i. I LOVE it. I'm still figuring out how to use it, but I love it.

I Don't Want This Doctor Treating Me....

2008-12-28T22:01:00.005-06:00

I had an interesting call on Friday. It was dispatched to me and another officer as a "slide off" which typically indicates that a car has slid off the road and is stuck in a ditch or snow drift... When we arrived on the call, we discovered a much different scene. First of all, this "slide off" was on the sidewalk in front of the school of medicine. The vehicle's driver is a doctor who is in her residency at the University Hospital. I'll call her "Ling Lang" to protect her real identity.
Now our first question for Ling Lang when we observe the situation was why she was driving on the sidewalk in the first place. Her excuse was that she can park along that sidewalk for 5-10 minutes on the weekends. We told her that was not actually true and pointed out about 5 or 6 signs that said, "No Parking Anytime."

As you can see, this was not merely a "slide off." We were able to gather that she had been parked on the sidewalk and when she tried to drive up the sidewalk back toward the road, she wasn't able to get all the way up the hill because of the ice, and had backed all the way down the sidewalk so that she could try to get a running start at the hill. Apparently she forgot to shift from REVERSE to DRIVE before stomping on the gas. Lucky for her the plows had pushed a lot of the snow from the sidewalk to the edge of the sidewalk dropoff before the stairs and the snow pile stopped the car in the knick of time. Unfortunately her rear passenger side wheel was no longer on the sidewalk and was hanging off the edge so she was unable to drive it off the edge of the wall. It could have been really bad if she had gone back just a little further. Her car would've landed in the stairwell and probably flipped over.We ended up having to call a tow truck out to pull her back up onto the sidewalk. We thought she might have damaged the underside of her car, but once again she lucked out and the snow pile cushioned her car against the cement ledge that she would've hit if there had been no snow. The other officer I was working with ended up driving her car up the hill to the street for her once the tow truck dropped her back on the sidewalk. Interestingly enough, he had no problem driving her car up the hill.

Snowboarding and a Wedding

2008-12-16T15:49:00.005-06:00

So this past week has been pretty crazy. I was already off Monday through Wednesday, but since my brother Jesse and his girlfriend Amanda came into town Wednesday night I took Thursday and Friday off to spend time with them and go snowboarding. On Thursday the three of us and my dad went sight-seeing. Dad played the role of "Tour Guide" because he had some long historical explanation for everything we went to see. It was fun. That night we went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Leonardo museum. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's an exhibit that uses real cadavers that have been plasticated to show you how the body works and what the body looks like when you peel away skin and fats... It's pretty cool, but I don't know that it's worth the cost of the tickets, which were pretty expensive.

Friday was a fun day for me. Jesse, Amanda, Bilbo and I went snowboarding at Snowbird Ski Resort. I had bought a snowboard on Monday and was really excited to get to try it out. It turned out to be a great board. I went down the runs until I was exhausted, and we headed back to my parents house to change. Bilbo stayed home and the rest of us met up with my other brother Tyler for dinner at Tucano's in the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City. The food was awesome, but parking there was a nightmare. We drove around the underground parking garage for like half an hour before we found a parking spot.On Saturday, it was a wedding marathon. My sister Ingrid, got married in the Salt Lake temple at noon. Of course it was snowing like crazy and my bridesmaid dress would have been better suited for a summer wedding. I froze during pictures, and I discovered that my cute heels that I had only worn once before were too small for my feet because I now have scabby feet from the blisters... My sister was absolutely beautiful in her wedding dress. I was happy everything seemed to fall in place and went smoothly for her. My cousin Kathryn was the photographer and took some AMAZING pictures. You can see those here. It was a long day and I was exhausted after the reception that night.

Anyway here's a few more pictures from my crazy week. Enjoy!

Elf Yourself

2008-12-05T14:39:00.001-06:00

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Weekend With Marlie

2008-11-26T20:48:00.004-06:00

I had a pretty fun weekend. On Friday, after work, I took my cousin's daughter Tara to see the movie Twilight. I thought it was good but we had to sit in the very front row so my neck hurt a lot by the end of the movie. I'll probably have to go see it again from a more comfortable angle to really enjoy it.

Saturday I worked until 5pm, and then took off for St. George for the rest of the weekend to visit my best friends from high school Miranda and Crystal. My friend Crystal lives in St. George and had her baby girl Marlie Dee on November 14th. She was in the NICU for a week because she had a really bad lung infection that made it hard for her to breathe. She improved quickly and got released from the NICU on Thursday, the 20th. On Friday, Miranda flew in to visit. So I got to see both of them, Crystal's husband Chad and their new baby when I got to Crystal's house Saturday night.

It was so fun getting to hang out with Crys and Mir again. I can't even remember the last time the 3 of us were in the same place at the same time. We spent hours catching up and oohing and aahing over adorable baby Marlie. We played about a million games on the Wii, which was so much fun but I'm still sore. My favorite game was the one that's a shooting game like Duck Hunt. I kicked major butt at that game.

Miranda left on Monday, but I stayed until this morning. I'm a picture-taking fool, so I ended up with a boat-load of pictures from my weekend, so here's a couple more pics of Marlie. Enjoy!

Numbface

2008-11-14T23:11:00.003-06:00

So in my last post, I hadn't really had too bad of a time with the recovery from my surgery. I didn't know then that it was going to trick me into thinking it was going to be an easy recovery, but it just waited till Wednesday to start hurting like a mother trucker. I had a training class Wednesday afternoon for work, which I barely made it through without crying like a little girl. I rushed home and immediately took 2 pain killers afterwards. I went to work on Thursday and ended up heading home about half an hour early when the swing shift came in so I could take my pain killers. It was miserable. I took today and tomorrow off so that I can take my pain killers and just relax and heal. The most annoying part of this whole healing process, and most concerning to me at the moment, is that part of my face is still numb. I'm pretty sure by Monday night I could feel all of my face, but then by Tuesday night/Wednesday morning my bottom lip, most of my chin and a little bit of my left cheek are completely numb again. I called the oral surgeon to make sure that was normal. He said I should keep an eye on it and call him if I don't have the feeling back in it in a month! I don't want to have numbface for a month!

Tickets, Domestics, Stinky Feet and Surgery

2008-11-10T14:53:00.008-06:00

On Saturday I spent the first 3 hours of my shift babysitting all of the U students who were waiting in line for tickets to the BYU/Utah game that went on sale at 8am that day. It was interesting. We only had one real problem. He had gotten really drunk the night before and thrown a glass beer bottle and broke some one's tent pole. When the other officer and I got down there to keep the peace, this intoxicated individual came up to me and said, "I need a smoke. Do you have a smoke." I told him no and asked him to move along, get in line if he wanted tickets or leave if he wasn't. He said he was going to get in line. A short while later, he reappeared outside of the line area, and came up to us while we were standing near the front of the line. He kept babbling drunkenly and we shooed him off again.
Around 8:30am, we got a call from the dispatcher that there was a guy who looked dead laying at the bottom of the flagpole around the south side of the stadium. I looked at the other officer and we both knew who our "dead" person was. We went and woke him up, told him he definitely needed to go home and sleep off the alcohol. He started to argue but headed down the street toward the Trax station. I watched for a while to see if he made it off the property, and a short distance down, he turned around and walked back to me, tried to walk past me toward the ticket line again, but I stopped him. We told him he was not allowed to come back on campus while he was intoxicated, and that if he didn't leave immediately, he was going to jail. He got really mad and started yelling stuff like, "Don't you understand? This is the big game!" and "What are you, Mormon or something??" That made me laugh a little, because who else would make him leave because he was drunk and making a total turd of himself? Only a Mormon of course. After my partner grabbed him by the wrist, twisted his arm and started pushing him down the sidewalk, he finally decided to leave. Fun times. You can see me in the background of this clip on KSL. I'm facing the opposite direction, so really all you see is my back, but you can see my partner Gabe.
Later that day, the same officer and I answered a domestic call in one of the apartments near campus. A young Chinese couple with a small baby, had the wife's parents in town visiting from China and the couple and her parents got into an argument and did a lot of yelling. So the neighbors complained about it and were scared the young couple would be hurt. We showed up, established that the parents had left already, no one had been injured, and the young couple was packing to go stay with a friend until the parents went back to China. Problem solved. Or so we thought.

We went back the very next day. Only this time the husband had gone to Vegas for a conference or something, so it was just the daughter and her baby and her parents. The daughter apparently had called her friend cause she was fighting with her parents and said something about a knife. The friend got scared for her and called us. When we showed up, the friend said the mother supposedly had a knife. So we went in ready to jump up to deadly force if a small Chinese woman came running at us with the knife. When we walked in, the parents were laying on the floor in the living room crying. They of course only spoke Chinese, so we asked the daughter. She said they were heart broken because they thought she and her husband were bad children because they wanted them to go back to China. Anyway, we eventually got someone other than her to translate because she would only translate select few parts. We finally established that there was no knife threat. The only time a knife was involved was when they were cutting pears. We made sure both daughter and parents understood if we got any more calls there, someone was going to jail. They agreed to keep it down, and we left. As far as I know, they were good the rest of the night and the parents got on a plane at 6am this morning back to China.

After lunch that day, we got called up to the hospital ER to assist an ambulance that was on the way there with a violent patient. When the guy arrived and the back doors of the ambulance opened, I was immediately hit by a wave of foot stench. The guy was on some kind of drugs and was having major hallucinations and delusions. He also had the most disgusting feet ever. When he saw all of the security and police there, he didn't really fight being transferred to the hospital bed. Right before we had him in the restraints he started fighting us. After he was in the restraints, they decided they wanted him in a gown, so by releasing one restraint at a time, he was changed into nothing but the hospital gown. Unfortunately that meant when he started fighting the doctor a few minutes later and we had to go back in to tightening the restraints and get him back on his back, I somehow got stuck at his feet, which was bad for two reasons. 1-As I mentioned before, his feet reeked and 2- He couldn't seem to keep his legs together so I was looking straight down the barrel. *PUKE* Since I was already gagging from the smell, I almost puked. So this morning I had surgery to have my 3 remaining wisdom teeth removed. I was asleep within 5 minutes of being in the surgeon's chair. Next thing I knew I was awake with a mouth full of bloody gauze, which made me want to gag a lot. I felt like crap, but was determined to get the last couple things for my the invitations I wanted to get sent out today for my sister's bridal shower. Oh yeah, she's engaged in case you hadn't heard yet. I was going to let her blog about it first, but she's taking too long and she's already announced it on Myspace and Facebook. So anyway, mom drove me around to 3 or 4 stores looking for the last thing I needed to get the invitations sent out before going home. I had to grab a cart to keep from falling over since I was still coming out of the anesthesia in a couple of the stores. I probably looked like a hamster with the gauze all stuck in my mouth. Oh well. The invitations are now out and I have almost 3 weeks to pull the rest of it together. Luckily Ingrid's friend Kelsey is helping me throw the shower so it's not just me trying to get it done. Anyway, after I took the gauze out, I took a picture for those who were convinced I would have a hamster face. No swelling yet. I just look like crap.
So anyway, I'm going to go eat some more pudding and take some more meds. I'll post again soon. Oh and by the way, the Utah Utes are 10-0!

Baby Photo Shoot

2008-11-04T16:07:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I spent a couple hours in the morning doing a baby photo shoot. Some of you may know that I've dabbled in photography here and there including a short stint as a photographer for the Picture People. I really enjoy taking pictures, but lack the money to buy the really snazzy equipment that would be helpful in making really good pictures. So anyway, I did a photo shoot yesterday and I think the pictures turned out really good. Here's a few of my favorites:

Carving My Pumpkin

2008-10-30T21:58:00.004-05:00

I had put off carving my Halloween pumpkin until today because I didn't want it to be all nasty and gross on Halloween. Every year I forget how disgusting it is to pull all that nasty stuff out of the pumpkin... blech... I couldn't wait till I could wash my hands, and I washed them 4 times while I was carving cause it really grossed me out. It took me a while to figure out what picture to carve on my pumpkin this year. I was really proud of my Captain Jack Sparrow pumpkin last year and wanted to be equally proud of my pumpkin this year. Here it is:

Yes, that's right, I carved a picture of Steve Irwin's face. If you don't know who that is, you're misisng out. He was the Crocodile Hunter and probably the most enthusiastic host of an animal show EVER. It's too bad he had to die so young. Let me know if you think it looks like him or not. I'd love to hear from you!

Baby Davy

2008-10-29T14:37:00.007-05:00

So i spent Monday and Tuesday visiting my cousins and their new little brother David. His full name is David La'amea Kalakaua Nunies. Poor David has jaundice, so he gets fed every hour to flush the jaundice out of his system. So I spent 2 days helping his mom out with little things. Over those two days, I took a TON of pictures. Here are a few of them...

He's such a cutie, don't you think?

Nashville Trip, Work and a New Baby

2008-10-24T11:21:00.006-05:00

A lot has happened since I last posted. I'll try to recap without being too boring....

On Saturday, October 18th, I got up bright and early and headed to the airport for a 7am flight to Nashville. Everything went pretty smooth until I got to Nashville around 2pm. I had reserved a rental car through Enterprise for the 3 days I would be in town only I made the reservation with a location at a hotel near the airport because I had checked the price at the airport location and they rape you in "convenience fees." The hotel that the Enterprise office was at had a shuttle service to/from the airport so I called to get a ride over. I called the Holiday Inn Select because I was pretty sure that was the right one, but they told me when I called that they thought I was needing the Holiday Inn Express. So I hung up and called the Holiday Inn Express and they said they'd sent someone to pick me up right away.

A nice shuttle driver came to pick me up from the Holiday Inn Express and it didn't take me long to realize we were headed the wrong direction, so I asked him if the Enterprise was in that hotel, and he tells me it's at the Holiday Inn Select, but that he'll go ahead and take me over there, which he does. He drops me off at the front doors of the hotel, I drag all my luggage into the lobby only to find out that the Enterprise counter is vacant and doesn't seem to be operating anymore. I ask the girl at the hotel check-in desk and she confirms my suspicions. The Enterprise moved locations recently and hadn't updated the address on the website. She tells me where they moved to, which is less than 5 minutes away. I have her call me a cab even though I despise cabs and cab drivers. The cab driver takes me to the new location and it costs me $8.00.

I unload my luggage from the cab and he drives away. I walk up to the front door of the Enterprise office only to discover that it had closed at noon. How they can let you confirm a car pickup at 3pm and not even be open at that time is beyond me, but whatever... So I sit in front of the Enterprise for over an hour until my friend Kristen can get there to pick me up. I had tried calling the 1-800 number for Enterprise and they told me to call back during business hours. So I had Kristen take me to her house so I could get on the internet and figure out what to do about a car. She then had to go to work.

Later that night I realized that the airport location was the only location that would be open until Monday morning and by then my trip would be almost over. So I tried to figure out how to get back to the airport to get a car since the airport location is the only one that won't come get customers but didn't have any luck. I was so stressed out about it, I ended up going to bed kinda early with a mild headache and woke up at 3am with a full blown migraine. I didn't have any of my heavy duty migraine meds with me, just the weak stuff, so I took a couple of those and some ibuprofen. I laid there in pain for a couple hours and finally fell asleep.

Sunday afternoon I was finally able to get a car from the airport after several stumbling blocks at the stupid airport Enterprise desk. After jumping through hoops and getting help from a friend, I got raped financially on the car, but I did get a Chevy Cobalt which they refer to as an "intermediate" sized vehicle. HA!

My Nashville trip got better after I finally got the car. I was able to see some really good friends, got to see a band I really like twice, and I got buy a cowgirl hat. It all made up for the crappy start to my vacation.

I flew back to Salt Lake on Tuesday, the 21st. I spent all day Wednesday in training for work and went back to patrolling the mean streets of east SLC on Thursday. It was definitely a busy day. I had several traffic accidents back to back in the morning and in the afternoon I had a crazy theft case and my first dead student call. We think he died of diabetic complications, but it won't be for sure till they finish the autopsy. That took a few hours to deal with. It was pretty uncomfortable when his mom showed up at the dorm looking for him and my Sgt. had to tell her that her son had died.

After work, I drove up to Ogden Regional Medical Center in Ogden, UT to visit my cousin Serina because she had been induced that morning. When I got there, I discovered she was still in labor and hadn't had the baby yet. That didn't last long. I wasn't expecting to see the delivery, but within a couple minutes of me getting there, she delivered. It all happened so fast, I didn't have enough warning to remove myself from the room. It wasn't the first baby I had seen delivered, but it was the first time I saw someone I knew have a baby. The baby was 7 lbs, 4 oz. and 21 inches long, which is the smallest baby she's had. His name is David Nunies. He's got a really long beautiful middle name, but it's Hawaiian and I have no idea how it's spelled. I spent a few hours visiting her and the baby. Her other 5 kids, her step-son, and two nephews came up after a little while to visit, so I stuck around to take pictures and to hold him some. He was just so little!

Anyway, it was back to business early this morning. It was just as busy as yesterday, but I started out tired, so now I'm pretty much to the point of exhaustion. So I'll leave my update at that. I hope it wasn't too boring...

My first snow in Utah

2008-10-14T17:05:00.003-05:00

Sunday morning I woke up at 5am to get ready for the day ahead. I looked out my window to discover that the world was white, at least my neighborhood was completely white. When I left the house that morning at 6am, my front yard looked like this:

When I got to work at 6:45, I discovered this:

At about 9am, right after our snowball fight, I took these:

Luckily the snow has since melted and I was able to run out to the mailbox today to check it in shorts and a tshirt. I'm afraid I'm in for a long, cold winter. Those of you who know me well, know that I HATE being cold. The snow is not my friend either. It falls and all of the sudden people don't know how to drive, or they think they know how to drive in snow and so they drive like idiots and cause accidents. I'm more afraid of someone running into me in the snow than me sliding on ice and hitting someone/something else.

Anyway, I'm heading to Nashville this weekend and it's been in the 70s there all week, so that'll be a nice break. Yay!

WEEZER HEAVEN

2008-10-09T20:25:00.011-05:00

On Tuesday, I woke up more excited than a 5 year old on Christmas morning. It might as well have been Christmas for me and 3 of my siblings. Tyler, Ingrid, Bilbo and I went to the Weezer concert in West Valley that night. It was probably the most amazing concert I have ever seen and I've been to a lot. It was even the best Weezer concert I've been to. I've been to 3 of those. Tyler also thought it was the best Weezer concert he's been to and that was his 11th. I can safely say it was the best Weezer concert Ingrid and Bilbo had been to since it was their first. Anyway...So Tyler, his roommate Luke and I went to the E Center at 1pm to wait in line for the show. The doors didn't open until 6:30 and the show didn't start until 7:30, but we've learned that it's totally worth sitting outside waiting for 6 or 7 hours to get a spot on the front row in the center. We sat in front of the doors on Tyler's Weezer blanket that my mom made him like 10-11 years ago. Tyler and Luke had several igolf and isoccer contests on Luke's iphone while we waited. It was pretty entertaining.

Ingrid and Bilbo came around 6pm after she got off work and he got out of school. They joined us in line for a while, but when there was only a few minutes left before the doors opened, Ingrid and Luke had to go to another line because of the tickets that they had. We were reunited inside on the front row, right in the middle as we had hoped.
The concert started off sucky because the band that opened SUCKED. Tolchock Trio was the name of the band. Most of the time we couldn't even hear them singing over the music. And the stupid drummer's girlfriend tried talking me into letting her in front of me so she could take pictures. I told her she could take the pictures over my shoulder and that if she wanted to stand in the front to take pictures, she should have shown up at 1pm. She didn't like that and talked Bilbo into letting her in front of him. Sucker...After Tolchock Trio, Angels and Airwaves took the stage. I enjoyed them but we're pretty sure they played the same song over and over. At least, that's what it sounded like. If you're not familiar with them, the lead singer, Tom Delong, used to be in Blink182. If you haven't heard of them, I'll forgive you.Finally after much anticipation and not so fantastic music, Weezer took the stage. Like I said before, they were AMAZING. I can't really put how fantastic their show was into words, so I'll just post a bunch of pictures that I took so you can imagine you were on the front row with us. Enjoy: The band's opening number, "My name is Jonas."
Weezer's bassist Scott Shriner
Lead singer, guitarist Rivers Cuomo.

Rockin' our socks off.

Playin' the sweetest sounds on earth...Guitarist Brian Bell (He was the furthest away from me on the stage so the picture's not real good)The band had a bunch of fans who could play instruments join them on stage to play "Island in the Sun" and "Beverly Hills"Rivers Cuomo again.Pat Wilson, drums and some guitarThe band taking a bow at the end of the show. Yes, Scott is wearing a Weezer boxing robe. It was sweet!After the concert, we got to meet Karl Koch. He's basically the fifth member of the band. He's their photographer, webmaster, and played on some of the songs with them. He told Tyler he liked his shirt. Tyler drew the picture on Adobe Illustrator using the cover of Weezer's most recent album, the red album as a reference. So that was really cool too.

Oh, P.S. I have a new favorite Weezer song. It's called King. Scott sings it on the Deluxe Version of the red album. It's awesome. Check it out! I have a video of him singing it at the concert posted on Facebook if you want to watch it there. It was being dumb when I tried to post it here. It's worth watching just for the conversation between Ingrid and one of the dumb security guards that were standing in front of the stage.

Fighting Crazies and Arresting Thieves

2008-10-03T15:28:00.006-05:00

Yesterday was the most eventful and rewarding day of my job since I started working at my new department in July. The day started off early when I had to go take a report of 1o stolen laptops (worth over $20000) total. I spent almost an hour collecting statements, serial numbers and camera footage. After gathering all the information, I went back to the police station to get started on the paperwork. I had to fill out a form for each of the stolen laptops so that the serial numbers could be entered into the NCIC database. Then I started to type all of the information into the report database when I got sent to a 911 hang-up call. I drove around the area where the call came in from but didn't find anyone who appeared to be in an emergency situation, so I tried to head back to finish the report cause in law enforcement you never put off writing reports until the end of the shift cause you'll end up being stuck at work hours overtime catching up.

Anyway, I had just gotten back to my desk at the station and was sitting down when I got called to go deal with a female who had made suicidal threats to an administrator at one of the orthopedic clinics on campus. When I arrived I talked to the administrator who told me what this lady had told him, that she had a plan to kill herself and the means to do it at home. She repeated that part to me when I talked to her. So the doctor who had seen her for her pre-surgery consultation was concerned about the suicidal comments and signed paperwork over-riding her rights and requiring her to be admitted for a psychiatric evaluation. So we were there to make her go to the hospital for that evaluation. Needless to say the lady was not happy that her doctor thought she needed mental help and she refused to go. Long story short, we had a scuffle with her in the patient room at the clinic before finally convincing her to walk to the ambulance with the medic (who she liked way better than me or the other officer). She was lucky she didn't get tased during this scuffle cause she grabbed a chair which I could see may become a object in motion... At one point she made a not-so-nice comment about the size of the male officer's nether-regions because she was mad at him. As we were walking out to the ambulance, she stopped at one of the doorways and said she wasn't going through the door unless we went first. I told her she could either walk with the medic right in front of me, or I'd put her in cuffs and drag her out. She yelled, "F*** You!", stuck her middle finger in my face and turned around and stomped the rest of the way to the ambulance.

We followed the ambulance to the Emergency Room and escorted her inside, where she very quickly showed her colors for the medical staff. She stayed on the phone with her daughter and refused to talk to the nurse or change into the hospital gown like they told her too, so we ended up in another scuffle when security tried to get her into the patient room. She refused to hang up the phone or let go of it even after we had her on the ground. I finally got it out of her hands after about a minute. Me and 3 security officers were trying to get her onto the hospital bed so that we could get her into the 4-point restraints, but she was flailing so much that it wasn't until 2 other security officers showed up that we were successful. All the while, my fellow officer was standing at the foot of the bed looking confused about what he should be doing... Anyway, during the fight, the crazy lady bit one security officer 3 times, another security officer once, dug her fingernails into my wrist, and bent back another security officers fingers. Her daughter showed up at the hospital and caused another scene. She'd also called her dad and the media about the whole thing. It was interesting, but we're charging crazy lady with 4 counts of assault.As soon as I was finished with that I call, I went to Starbucks to pick up a soy latte for another officer who was stuck working a hearing and couldn't leave. As I was leaving the Starbucks, I got a call of a vehicle burglary in progress in the lot of the Engineering building. On my way there, two other officers in an unmarked car saw the two vehicles involved in the burglary, which ended up being a vehicle theft and chased them for about 10 minutes before they lost them in traffic and the suspect ditched the stolen vehicle. I found the other car involved and as I was pulling around to head back to it, I had witnesses who had seen the chase and saw the suspect ditch the car and followed him. They lead me around the corner and pointed out the suspect who was walking down the street trying not to look suspicious. He was with two other guys and initially I wasn't sure which one he was, but I got all 3 of them on the ground and held them there for almost 5 minutes until a SLC officer finally got to me to back me up. Then I could talk to the witnesses again to find out which of the 3 guys they had seen ditch the car. As I was putting the suspect in custody, the guy from the second car involved drove past me and I was able to radio the description to other officers in the area who were able to stop the car and get the second suspect into custody. The officers who had chased the vehicle were able to identify both suspects as the ones they had chased. So it felt good to be able to catch the bad guys, get the car back undamaged before the owner even knew it had been stolen and nobody got hurt. The media showed up and taped for at least 30 minutes and interview the Public Information Officer, but I guess it didn't make the news cause the old woman who got her tricycle stolen was more exciting.

Anyway, I just finished all the paperwork for yesterday at about noon today because I worked the Oregon State/Utah game last night after work. The game was pretty eventful too. I had my hands full for a good portion of the time I was at the game. Plus there was a really crazy guy that we had to have transported for a psychiatric evaluation as well. I think evening shift had one transported for psych issues from one of the campus buildings while I was at the game too. There must be crazy in the air up here or something....

The Training Wheels Are OFF!!!

2008-09-17T21:46:00.004-05:00

So I got some good news today. All the paperwork went through and all of the people involved had their say, and today I was released from the training program at work. This means that I no longer have to patrol with a babysitter at all times. I am free to do my job by myself if I so wish. I no longer have everything I do at work rated on a scale from "satisfactory" to "needs improvement" to "not responding to training." I'll still probably be under an extra critical sergeant's eye for a while until he's completely convinced that I'm not going to be a risk on his shift, but I can live with that for now. So YAY! *happy dance*

The Big 9-0!

2008-09-15T21:29:00.004-05:00

Today my grandmother turned 90 and last night the family gathered to celebrate it in style, against my grandmother's will. She may want to kill me for posting this, but I'm willing to risk it. I'm so excited about actually getting to know my mom's mom, who I haven't lived in the same state with for like 22 years. She really is a fascinating lady. I just hope I stay as sharp as she is if I live to be 90.
Here she is opening the presents she told everyone they didn't have to get her. We don't listen very well.
Opening more presents.
Grandma was a baby magnet. This is her holding my cousin Alan and his wife Jacqui's 5 month old baby Chloe. Unfortunately it wasn't the best angle, but I still thought it was adorable.
Here's another one of her holding yet another one of her great-grand-daughters. This is my cousin Tarin and her husband Danny's little girl Caydence. I think she's also about 5 months old. (I hope I spelled everyone's names right, and if I didn't, Sorry!) Anyway, if you didn't make it to the party, you missed out. It was pretty great!

Ingrid Mundy: Superstar

2008-09-13T12:46:00.005-05:00

Last night was Ingrid's performance at our cousin's Gelatto shop Bella Dolci. After a few technical difficulties, she started singing around 8pm and did really well. It was also the first time she's ever had her picture on a napkin holder.
She drew a pretty good crowd. She sang some songs that she had written, some that my dad had written and some covers. It was pretty cool. I just hope she keeps performing. Shiloh says she wants to have her come back to do it again sometime, so if you missed out this time, you may get another chance.

Ingrid's Performance

2008-09-08T20:59:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to pass this on to everyone in case any of you would like to come see Ingrid perform at our cousin Shiloh's gelatto shop in West Jordan. I know she'd love to see you all there!

St. George Weekend

2008-09-08T13:22:00.005-05:00

On Friday, Ingrid, Tara and I took a roadtrip to St. George, Utah for my best friend Crystal's baby shower. I hadn't seen her since January 2007 and I'd never met her husband. After picking Tara up in Clearfield and Ingrid in Provo, we headed to St. George and arrived at Crystal's sister Angela's house around 5:30pm. We helped Angela finish decorating for the shower and at 6pm the shower began.
It was one of the most fun baby showers I've ever been to. Crystal's mom and step mom each had a bunch of games planned. One of them was that we all blew up balloons and put them under our shirts so that Crystal didn't feel so alone in her large belly-ness. Then as the shower went on, we "gave birth" and then would draw pieces of paper that had characteristics that you had to add to your baby (i.e. my baby had unusually large ears and liked the pacifier). We also played a getting to know everyone game where we had to play a children's song on a kazoo and everyone else had to guess what it was, and then give Crystal advice on motherhood. There was a guessing game were there was a bunch of baby stuff in a jar and we all made guesses on how many things were in there. Tara won that game. The final game was baby bottle bowling. Tara won that game too.
Crystal got a lot of really cute outfits and stuff for her baby girl. One of her friends gave her a really really cute pair of pink boots for the baby. She's just sad she can't use any of it yet!
This was my balloon "baby" at the end of the shower before it got popped. After the shower we hung around Angela's house and Crystal's husband came over and played guitar and sung a couple songs for us. It was fun.
On Saturday we went to the lake with Crystal's mom and several of her siblings. The boat was missing the platform on the back so it made getting back into the boat really difficult. It also made it impossible for us to wake surf. So I learned how to ride the wake skate (basically a wakeboard that your feet aren't locked into), which was fun once I figured out where to put my feet and how to shift my weight on the board.

After several of us took turns on the wake skate, we filled up the tube so that we could go tubing. I got several pictures of Ingrid, Tara and Crystal's 12 year old sister Charity tubing. Charity and Tara were so light that they bounced really high on the tube and after a while were tired of holding on. So they got off the tube and Chad (Crystal's husband) and I got on the tube with Ingird and we got throttled. Once Ingrid lost her grip and started sliding off the side of the tube into the water and Chad grabbed her life-jacket and pulled her back up onto the tube. I got bounced hard a few times and somehow now I have a small bruise just below my eye.

Sunday afternoon we drove back to Salt Lake for Bilbo's birthday party and dinner. We stopped in Provo to pick up Jason Brase, a family friend from Kansas on the way and we got there just as dinner was being put on the table. It was steak. It was delicious.

My cousin Audrey and her husband Mike also came for the dinner and cake eating. It was fun to see her and finally meet her husband.

Since Bilbo never told us what he wanted for his birthday, he ended up getting 5 tshirts and some money. It's so weird that little Bilbo's going to be 17 years old tomorrow. Man I feel old. Anyway, that basically sums up my weekend. I spent this morning at the dentist and I'm just now starting to get the feeling back in my face. So fun times.... :)

If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.

2008-08-17T11:42:00.005-05:00

Well Thursday was a big day for me and it ended up being very eventful. That morning I had to retest on the physical portion of my police certification test. I did really well. I was able to do all of my pushups and I also took 5 1/2 minutes off my time on the mile and a half run. I actually ended up beating the other two guys that took the test with me, which was really nice. It was a huge relief to have that test done with and out of the way. Once I passed the test, I was able to go home, shower and get cleaned up before I went back to work because they had my swearing in ceremony scheduled for that afternoon. I got sworn in with another new officer who started there about 3 weeks after I did. I really like her a lot. These are some pictures from my swearing in ceremony.

Heather and I waiting for the ceremony to start. The guy in the suit is the Captain who swore us in.
This is us taking the oath of office.
My mom pinned my badge on during the ceremony.
Me with my parents after the ceremony.
Me with the family that was able to come see me get sworn in. Try not to look at Bilbo's pants. He's embarassing.

After I got sworn in, I went home to chill with the family. After being home for about an hour or so, the mild headache I had all day took a turn for the worse and developed into a full-blown Pan attack (Migraine). For those of you who are confused about who Pan is, he's the midget that lives inside my head that occasionally throws parties and practices his dance routines inside my skull... Anyway, it got to the point where I had taken my migraine medications and nothing was helping and the migraine just kept getting worse, so my dad drove me to the emergency room and they gave me some injections to knock Pan out. It worked and within a couple hours I was back at home. I went right to bed since the injections made me sleepy and ended up sleeping about 14 hours I think.

When I finally woke up, the migraine was completely gone and the only reminders of the night before was the bruise on my arm from the IV and sore muscles from all the shivering I did after they gave me the bag of fluids that made me really cold. Since the migraine was gone and I had the day off, I spent all afternoon Friday and most of the day Saturday in Ogden with my cousins. These are some pictures from those two days.

On Friday we had a picnic at the park and played on the playground there.
Wynne took this picture of me on the slide. You'll notice I'm wearing my "Team Heidi" tshirt that Ingrid got me for my birthday.
Later that afternoon we went bowling. This picture shows everyone who went. (L to R) Tara, Joe (Serina's nephew), Cal, Jon, Serina, Wynne, Jacob (the other nephew), Holden and Lucy.
Saturday morning we went to the Treehouse Museum. There were all kinds of dress up stations and playhouses. Here the kids were putting on a play for me and Serina.Holden and I built the arch and about 2.5 seconds after this picture was taken, Holden destroyed it.
This was the fire truck station in the museum.

We had another picnic lunch Saturday, but unfortunately after lunch I had to leave to go to work so I snapped a quick picture with my favorite Mundy kids in uniform.

Preece Family Reunion

2008-08-10T12:11:00.004-05:00

Friday morning while all the guys were golfing, my mom, Connie and I went to the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake.

It was raining and even the gorillas were trying to stay dry...

I realize a lot of you were at the Preece reunion so I won't go into detail, I'll just post pictures. Enjoy!

The Preeces after the "adult" dinner.

The Preeces plus spouses after the "adult" dinner.
At Canyonview Park during the Trivia game.
Connie holding Penny.
Tyler and Jared playing volleyball. Ingrid and Kathryn made up the women's team.
Paige and Janette playing with Penny.

More family socializing...

The Birthday Blog

2008-08-05T17:16:00.006-05:00

Not a lot of news in since I last posted, but today is my birthday so I figured I ought to blog about it. The family birthday celebration took place on Sunday since Ingrid and Tyler usually come up for dinner that night anyway. So I also invited my cousin Serina and her kids down for cake and ice cream after dinner. For dinner my mom made chicken broccoli casserole, which is my favorite home-cooked meal. It was very tasty. I probably ate more of it than I should have. After dinner my cousins arrived. We did the singing thing, followed by the blowing out of the candles thing (which was actually the blowing out of the candles and matches thing since Tyler lit a book of matches on fire and put it on top of the cherry pie mom made), the present opening thing, and then the sitting around socializing thing. I made out pretty good I think. From my parents, and some money chipped in by my 3 siblings that were there, I got a 2 bike rack for my car so that I don't have to take my bike apart and put it in my trunk when I go biking somewhere. If there was a prize for most unpredictable gift, Tyler wins it. He got me a hammock that was supposed to look like the Puerto Rican flag and it says "Puerto Rico" on it. I'm not sure where he got it or what prompted him to give it to me, but I like hammocks and I'm excited to get to lay around in it. I just have to figure out where to put it. Ingrid gave me a pretty neat gift as well. It's a grey tshirt that says "Team Heidi" on it in pink. I did some research and I guess it was made for some fued that a couple of the girls on the show "The Hills" to show support for whichever character you side with. I've never seen the show, I don't know really anything about it, but I love the shirt. I got cards with a money from my aunt and grandmother, which is always nice. My cousin Serina has a history of making me blueberry muffins and cherry turnovers for my birthdays when I live close enough to her, but this year since I'm trying not too eat many sweets and stuff, she just made me the muffins. They were sooooo yummy. Her kids didn't have money to get me gifts, so they raided their toyboxes and came up with gifts. I got 4 stuffed animals and the children's book, "Dwaudle Duckling" (I think that's what it's called). None of them were gifts I would have asked for, but it was so sweet of them that I loved it. It really made my day.

I think most people would like to have the day off for their birthdays, but unfortunately I had to go to work. Not only did I have to go to work, but I had to spend the whole day at the gun range attempting to complete the qualification test. Some of you may already be familiar with the fact that I like guns and I like to shoot, but I hate qualification tests because the time limits stress me out and I never shoot as good as when I'm shooting for fun with no pressure. I'm usually so stressed out about passing, that I don't shoot as well and I end up having to try several times before I pass. Luckily today that was not the case. We did some shooting drills and exercises to warm up, and I scored a 90% the first time I tried to qualify. I was SOOO excited. I shot the qualification course 2 more times after that to provide moral support for the other new female officer who was also trying to qualify and failed it the first couple times. She just started with my department yesterday and I really get along good with her. The two of us and the 3 training officers that we were at the range with went to lunch at Mimi's Cafe. It was yummy and they got me a piece of Chocolate Mousse Cake that was sooooooo good but I couldn't finish it. The best part of the work day was getting done early at the range and getting to go home. I don't plan on doing anything else until 9pm when I go for my nightly mile and a half run. Last night was my best time so far. I ran it in 13:45 which is a minute under the time I have to run it for my POST certification test. So I'm feeling better and better about passing it this time around. That's really all the update I have. I don't lead a very exciting life these days.... I did get a lot of pictures that Tyler took of my little birthday celebration, so here they are with a few little explanations...

This is a card that my cousin Tara made for me. Read it. I thought it was funny.

This is me behind my stack of presents.

The "Team Heidi" shirt Ingrid got me.

This is the Puerto Rico hammock that Tyler got me.

Here I am opening my bike rack.

Tyler got really artsy fartsy with the photography and took this picture of me through a piece of wrapping paper.

Either Ingrid or Tyler took this picture of Bilbo. He thinks he's hot stuff. He's mostly right.

Ingrid can't come over without sitting down at the baby grand. This is her playing and singing with Lucy.
I think this was my favorite picture when I uploaded all the pictures from my camera after the birthday thing. This is Holden being silly. He's normally very cute, like a mini-Mario Lopez, dimples and all... Anyway, there were like 100 pictures from that night, but I'll spare you the rest!

Pioneer Day

2008-07-25T10:30:00.008-05:00

This was my first Pioneer Day in Utah and I don't think I realized what a big deal it is here. I remember how Pioneer Day was celebrated in Kansas and thought it'd be similiar here. It's not. It's a major holiday here. The banks were closed, mail didn't run, etc etc... So how did I spend my Pioneer Day? Don't care? Well I'm going to tell you anyway...I went to Walmart with my mom. I narrowed my birthday wish list down to 2 things I really want. Unfortunately both of them cost more than my parents allott for birthday presents. So I went with her to Walmart to price one of the items. Unfortunately, I'll probably be buying that item myself. While I was at Walmart, Ingrid called me. We decided to go for a bike ride later in the day.So I went home, dug out all my bike clothes and accessories. I'm kind of a bike junky so I've got a lot. Ingrid got to my parents house at about 1:30. We drove the bikes to a Jordan River Parkway trailhead here in Riverton. We started north on the trail thinking maybe we'd be able to follow it all the way to the Jordan River Temple. We rode until we hit a point where the paved trail ended. We turned around and rode back to the trailhead and crossed the river and headed north on the trail on that side of the river. Unfortunately that part of the trail was even shorter than it had been on the first side. The trail on that side ended in a neighborhood so we rode West up through the neighborhood until we got to 1300 W./Temple Dr. and we rode several miles north on it until we got to the Jordan River Temple. Unfortunately since it was Pioneer Day, the temple was closed and they had all of the gates locked so we couldn't even go on the grounds to take pictures of it. So we took them outside of the gates.

After spending a few minutes taking pictures, we headed back the way we had come. By this point our water was either gone or had gotten really hot in the water bottles so we were ready to get back to the car. We had to stop at this cute little gazebo that we saw along the trail though and took some pictures there.

When we got back to the trailhead, I videotaped Ingrid performing her bike trick. It was pretty funny and I believe she said it was inspired by the movie Hot Rod, which if you haven't seen it is both really stupid and really funny.

After biking, we went back to the folk's house for hotdogs off the grill. It was pretty tasty. After dinner, Ingrid and I went to West Jordan to take my Ipod to Best Buy cause it's been acting retarded since I got it. I thought they were going to have to ship it off to be serviced, but it turns out it just has a bad cord. Unfortunately the cord isn't covered by the extended warranty so I have to check with Apple to see if it's covered by the manufacturers warranty before I spend money on a new cord.

Since we were in the neighborhood, we went by our cousin Shiloh's gelatto shop, Bella Dolci. Ingrid had never been there and wanted to check it out. Shiloh wasn't working, but fortunately Shiloh's brother in law was working and gave us directions to Shiloh's house, which was right down the street from the shop. So we dropped by to visit with her and her almost 2 year old daughter since neither of us had seen her in like 3 years. It was really fun to catch up with her. We were probably there for at least an hour talking about what was going on with all her siblings and stuff. Fun times.

Around 8pm, we headed back to our parents house so that I could run and Ingrid could get her stuff together to head back to Provo. After my run, I watched Ingrid and my mom hit tennis balls at this backboard thing my dad built for my little brother to hit tennis balls at. They kept hitting them over the fence behind the backboard which was pretty funny. Eventually Ingrid left and my parents and I sat in the backyard watching the neighbors shoot off fireworks. I tried to take some pictures of the fireworks but none of them turned out very good.

Success!!!

2008-07-23T23:09:00.003-05:00

So I mentioned before how I failed 2/5 parts of the physical test for my police certification and I have to retest on August 14th. Well I've been trying to run every night to get used to the altitude up here. When I took the test on the 10th, it took me almost 19 minutes to finish the mile and a half run because about a quarter of the way through it I couldn't breathe anymore. I was up to a mile in 9 minutes a couple of days ago. Tonight I did the whole mile and a half in 14:02! So I figure as long as I keep running for the next three weeks until my retest, I shouldn't have a problem finishing in time even after doing the other four tests first. Now I just need to get to where I can do more pushups without stopping. I didn't seem to be making any progress on the pushups by doing a set in the morning and a set at night. My dad suggested that I try doing 3 sets in the morning, then 3 sets at night. Yesterday I was able to do 19 in my first set which is the most I've been able to do at one time so far. So hopefully I'll continue to improve there too.

Work has been going as well as can be expected. I have to wait until I pass the physical test for my certification before I can be sworn in so in the meantime I'll be riding along with the training officers in plain clothes, not being able to do any arrests or handling calls. I should at least get to learn the campus and see how the officers here handle different situations. I have a feeling that after the next three weeks of ridealongs, I'll be more than ready to get back in uniform.

Three Day Weekend

2008-07-21T18:50:00.005-05:00

I just went back to work today after being off for a 3 day weekend. I got invited by my cousins in Ogden to come up for swimming and a BBQ on Friday, which I had a lot of fun doing. It was really hot and really bright outside, so the swimming was nice except that I could barely open my eyes the whole time I was out there which started to give me a headache. But I got to spend time with my favorite kids on the planet. Here are some pictures from my day with them.
This is Holden showing me how good he could rollerblade in a pair of rollerblades that were way too big for him.
This is my cousin Serina's step-son Jon. He's got epilepsy so he doesn't talk much but he is pretty cute when you can get him to smile.
This is Wynne and me chilling on the couch.

This has nothing to do with my day in Ogden, but thought I'd share it anyhow. You may recall a few posts ago when I posted the pictures of me and Bilbo digging up grass in the back yard. We were digging it up so that we could extend the concrete platform that was already there. I was going to try to take a picture when we had gotten all the grass dug up before the concrete was poured but never got a chance because the concrete guy did the job so fast. The new part is the whiter part on the right. You can also see in this picture the basketball goal that my dad bought. Tyler, Bilbo and I put it together while my parents went out on a date. It had the WORST directions for assembling it that I have ever seen. We hope we did it right. It seems to work ok, so even if we didn't, oh well!

Don't Tase Me Bro

2008-07-15T22:28:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was my first day at work. It was pretty unexciting. We mostly did paperwork, getting IDs made, getting set up for all of the computer-related things that I have to have access to. That was mostly the morning. After lunch we spent all afternoon at the Uniform shop being fitting for uniforms, to get equipment to go on our duty belts, and get fitted for our Kevlar vests. It shouldn't have taken more than an hour, two at the most, but it took 4 because the guy who was taking care of us kept disappearing. He'd bring us one size, disappear, then it would take us 10-15 minutes to find him again to have him find another size or to get him to make markings for alterations. They were also out of a lot of their nylon stuff for duty belts so my handcuff cases aren't the right ones for the handcuffs I have and they didn't have the holster I'm used to, so I had to get one with an entirely different retention system (which makes drawing it really difficult to adjust to). So not exactly a thrilling first day.

Today at work I got shot with the Taser. It's not required that a person be tased to carry or use the taser, only that they be trained but our Chief prefers that we be tased so that we can testify to how it works in court. I can now testify that it hurts like a mother trucker. I screamed "OW" over and over for the whole 5 seconds that I was being shocked. It felt like an eternity. I couldn't move anything because every muscle in my body tightened up and wouldn't relax until the shock was over. Then when they pulled the prongs out of my back, I started bleeding and got blood all over the back of my new Kansas Jayhawks shirt. *sigh* The other new officer tried to videotape me being tased so that I could share it here, but something happened with the camera and it didn't record. And since I refused to ever do it again, there will be no video of me getting tased. It's too bad really, I'm sure you would all find it very funny. Instead you can watch a video of other people being tased here and just imagine that it's me.

Today we also did firearms. The qualification course at this department is a lot harder than the course that I had to do in Nashville, and I stressed about it all day. I'm still stressing about it. I'm not sure what day we go back to the range so I could be stressing about it for days or maybe a week. Like I don't have enough to stress about already. Anyway, I'm going to bed because all the muscles in my lower back are all tightened up and sore from earlier.

Connie's Birthday Party

2008-07-14T21:11:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was my aunt Connie's birthday. She says she is 25 and holding but I suspect that she's a little older than that. After dinner last night, a lot of family came over to help Connie celebrate her birthday. It was great to get to see family I haven't seen in months, years or ever for some of them. There was quite a showing. Connie loved it. Here are a few pictures from the party....

Connie opening her presents.
Connie opening another present.
Connie getting ready to blow out her candles.
A bunch of family that was gathered for the celebration.
Connie's neices and nephews playing on the trampoline in our backyard while the grown-ups sat around and talked inside. The trampoline was pretty popular with the short people.

My cousin Jacob convinced my almost 90 year old grandmother to put on these sunglasses that my aunt Connie had gotten for her at the dollar store. She's a really good sport, and she looks way cool in these sunglasses. Who else has a grandmother who would put on sunglasses just so her grandkids could take pictures. You can see the picture Jacob took on his blog here.

Friday Fun with Family

2008-07-12T13:33:00.009-05:00

Yesterday I decided to spend the day up in Ogden with my cousin's family. I got there at about 10 am, which was right around the time all of the kids were getting out of bed. We started our day together by getting lunch. The kids all got chicken nugget meals from Wendys and the adults all got meals from Panda Express. It was very yummy. After lunch we went to the bowling alley since all of the kids got passes from school to get one free game a day at one of the bowling alleys there in Ogden. We set the 4 kids under the age of 10 up on one lane with bumpers, then the 5 of us over the age of 10 bowled on the lane beside them without bumpers. Gwyneth, who is 9 won on the little kids lane with a score of 102. I won on the big kids/adults lane with a score of 122. I really had a lot of fun watching the little ones bowl. After we bowled, we went next door for 69 cent ice cream cones at Arctic Circle. They were yummy and I got this yummy video of Holden eating his chocolate ice cream.

Next we went back to their apartment to go swimming in the complex pool. It was fun. The weather was perfect and we played for a while in the pool. I know the expression on my face here is pretty freaking amazing, but I couldn't help it. I think this was when Holden was chasing Lucy (with the orange goggles) and I was trying to help her stay away from him.

We swam for a while, then went back to the apartment to change out of swimsuits and have dinner. We had pigs in a blanket and curly fries. It was also very yummy. After dinner, we finished of the night with a trip to the drive in movie theater. We watched Wall-E and Journey to the Center of the Earth. I thought Wall-E was really cute but slept through most of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It started at like 11:30 or so and I'm usually asleep by then most nights. Toward the end of Wall-E I was freezing so I climbed in the back of the van (we had taken all the seats out of the back) and stretched out with Gwyneth and her friend Hope. At the intermission, Holden and Tara jumped in the van with me and Gwyneth and Hope took their turn out of the van. Holden fell asleep before the previews even started and it wasn't long after that before I was out. When the movie ended and I woke up, everyone in the van was asleep. We got back to the apartment around 1:30am. We carried the two little boys in and I got my stuff together to drive back to Riverton. Unfortunately the on-ramps for I-15 in Ogden were all closed because of construction, so it took me a while to find a ramp onto the interstate and it was 3am before I finally pulled into my driveway. It was a great day and I was glad I got to spend some more time with them before I start work on Monday.

Oh, and I didn't do as well as I had hoped on my Police Certification tests. I passed the written test with flying colors, but failed 2/5 parts of the physical test (pushups and the mile and a half run). Those were the two parts of the physical test I knew I was going to struggle with. I don't have a lot of upper-body strength (because durh, I'm a girl) and the altitude here has been hard for me to adjust to. I'm scheduled to retake the physical test on August 14th and I'm hoping to be acclimated to the altitude and buffer in the arms by then.

Hard work never killed anyone, but why chance it?

2008-07-09T20:20:00.008-05:00

Today Bilbo and I spent about an hour trying to dig up the grass in part of the backyard where my parents are planning on extending a concrete slab that is already there so that it's big enough for hitting tennis balls and playing basketball on. It was slow going work and was even slower when Bilbo was posing for Ingrid while she was taking pictures of us working. His poses cracked me up when I was looking back through the pictures later, so I decided to post several of them.
You'll notice in all of the pictures, I'm still working on the ground while Bilbo poses.
This is the last one. I promise....
Ingrid bought a new car today, well, new to her. It's a black Passat. I think it's cute. She likes it a lot, which is what matters.
Tomorrow I have my certification test for the Police Officers Standards and Training commission in Utah. I've been having a hard time adjusting to the elevation here and it's going to make the physical agility portion of the test harder for me. I'll be really glad when it's over. Blah!

4th of July Weekend Festivities

2008-07-05T22:48:00.016-05:00

On Thursday, my brother Bilbo and I went to Huntington, UT (just south of Price) to camp with my best friend Crystal's family and my cousins. Unfortunately Crystal wasn't able to go, but I like her family a lot too, so it was still fun and not awkward. We camped at the campgrounds in Huntington State Park, which were right on the edge of the reservoir. So it was a one minute walk to the swimming beach (it was muddy and gross but my cousins loved it, and I stayed away from it) and the docks. Crystal's dad brought his boat out so I spent quite a bit of time on that. Here's some pictures from the weekend:

This is me with Crystal's sister Angela, who is also a really good friend of mine, on the boat.

This is me, Angela and her friend Troy tubing on the morning of July 4th. The driver of the boat was Angela's step uncle and he did his best to drive crazy so that we'd get throttled. It worked. Both Angela and Troy got thrown off at one point during the ride. I'm not sure how I held on, but I did.

Since several of my cousin's kids are still pretty young, I rode with them on the tube. This picture is of me riding with Lucy, the girl right next to me riding with no hands. I also rode with Holden, who you'll see a picture of later on.

When I went back out in the boat later on that afternoon, I got to ride the tube with my little brother Bilbo. It was fun. We rolled the tube and Bilbo flew off. I managed to hold on until the tube was right side up again, but it knocked the breath out of me in the process.

Later that evening, I had one of Crystal's step-sisters teach me how to surf. This is me on my first attempt. I did really well at first and then after I got tired and let go, I tried again but didn't have the energy to hold on, ended up hurting my hand and called it a night.

This is just another picture of me surfing. I was pretty proud of being able to do it. You can really tell how sunburnt I got in this one.
I finally learned how to do the whole black and white with a little bit of color thing, so now I can be as cool as Jacqui and Kathryn! I went a little crazy and photoshopped several pictures of my cousins kids. This one is of Holden walking back to camp from the dock. Doesn't he have the cutest dimples ever?!
This one was of Lucy playing frisbee. Durh.

This is Gwyneth after getting off of the boat. I think this one is my favorite. I really like the bright pink towel.

And finally, I am including a short video of Bilbo surfing. It took him several tries to finally stay up on the board, but he eventually got the hang of it and stayed up for a while. Unfortunately I took several pictures before I decided to shoot the video and so I only got a little bit of him surfing before he tries to cross the wake and falls. It's still pretty cool to watch I think.

Tyler's Truck Towing Tragedy

2008-07-01T21:37:00.006-05:00

Last night my brother Tyler came to the house to use the tow dolly that I rented from Penske for the move, to tow his truck that needs to be fixed to the shop. The engine wouldn't start so they used my dad's truck and tow rope to pull the truck up onto the tow dolly. Unfortunately they ended up pulling the truck a little too far and the tow dolly ended up being trapped underneath the truck.

In order to get the truck back up on the dolly, Tyler would jack the truck up and we would stack bricks underneath the tires, jack it up some more, add more bricks until the front tires were high enough to roll the truck back onto the dolly.

It worked, but it didn't work exactly as we had hoped. Here in this video, you can see what happened. I had to stop filming to help them but we did eventually get it on the dolly the way it's supposed to be.

Goodbye Nashville, Hello Salt Lake

2008-06-30T11:55:00.009-05:00

Warning: This blog is going to be REALLY long because I didn't have access to the internet on my drive.

Well, I made it. I'm now a resident of the state of Utah. Moving was a long and exhausting process that began a few weeks ago, but I'm glad for it to be over. I spent the last couple weeks before the move packing and preparing to move. My last day of work was Thursday, June 26th and really all I did was turn in all of my equipment and uniforms at work. After I finished up at work that morning, I headed back to the house to load up all the bags I had to get rid of and made a trip to the Goodwill before I went to the airport to pick up my Dad who flew in to help me with the move. We went straight from the airport to pick up the moving truck and tow dolly and parked them at the apartment complex. We jumped in my car and headed to Treasure Isle Recording studio so that my dad could visit with the owner who is a friend of his and used to record for him and stuff.
After spending some time with him, we grabbed some Taco Bell and headed back to the apartment to start loading the truck. My roommate Sarah, her boyfriend Travis and his friend Troy helped us load the truck in the 90 degree heat with a lot of Tennessee humidity thrown in for added discomfort. My dad fell asleep at like 9pm that night and I was up for a couple more hours cleaning and just generally not being able to sleep because my brain wouldn't shut off. We got up at 4am and were gassed up and on the road by 6am. I'll share some photos that may help you visualize our trip.

This was the last sight of Nashville I had. It was a sad moment.About an hour into the drive, we crossed the state line into Kentucky. (Sorry the picture is a little blurry, but it's hard to get a really clear picture when you're in a moving vehicle.)

A while later, we crossed into Illinois.

We stopped in Metropolis, Illinois for lunch and we saw the signs advertising a "Giant Superman Statue" just 2 miles down the road, so we decided to go see it. This is a picture of me standing in front of it. When we first got there, we had to wait for a few minutes while this 400+ pound man was having his 80ish year old mother take his picture with the statue. As he was walking back down from the platform, he told me, "It's a lot bigger when you get up there next to it than it looks from down here," and in my head, I was thinking the same thing about him. Anyway, it was pretty cool I thought, well worth the 2 miles off the route to see it.I snapped this picture of the arch in St. Louis from the Illinois side of the river and I thought it looked pretty good. This picture didn't turn out so well but I had a goal to get pictures of the signs as we moved from state to state, so this will have to do.On our way through St. Louis, I saw this sign for an exit to Adelaide Ave. Good name for a street I thought. It's just too bad they spelled it wrong.

While we were about half way across Missouri, I noticed that there was a trolley driving down the highway ahead of us and thought it was pretty rare to see a trolley on the highway. As we got closer, I realized it was being towed behind a pick-up, but still thought it was neat.
This is a picture of Kansas City, Missouri. If I hadn't been so busy staring at the Royals and Chiefs stadiums as we drove by those, I might have thought to take a picture.
On the other side of Kansas City, we entered the state of Kansas. Shortly after entering the state, we got to drive for a while on a toll road, which was a total rip off because it was the roughest, least kept up road on our whole trip. Around 6pm that night, we arrived at my Uncle Danny's house in Topeka, Kansas, which is where we would spend the night.Since June 25th was my brother Jesse's 27th birthday, and he lives in Topeka, my dad and I went out to a birthday dinner for him with him and his girlfriend Amanda. We went to Kiku Japenese Steakhouse which was really good. In the picture above you will see Jesse's Mt. Dew glass. You may notice that there seems to be an object floating in there that you don't typically see in Mt. Dew. The cook was throwing shrimp at each of us that we were supposed to catch in our mouths. Amanda missed hers, I ducked out of the way when he threw one to me because I don't eat seafood, my dad caught his, and Jesse's bounced off his face and into his Mt. Dew. It was pretty funny.This was a picture of all of us at dinner. It was the first time my dad and I had gotten to meet Amanda, which was really fun. She seems to be really cool and I liked her a lot.After dinner, I went to visit Miranda, one of my best friends from high school, her husband and 2.5 year old twin girls at their house. It was almost the girls bedtime when I got there so this is a picture from their story time before they went to bed. They were so well-behaved and had their routine down. After they fell asleep, I got to sit and talk with Miranda and Brian for a while which was really nice. I don't get to see them enough.Before we went to sleep Friday night, I got a bad migraine which made sleeping that night pretty hard even though I had only gotten about 3 hours of sleep the night before. Luckily we slept in a little later Saturday morning and didn't get on the road until 7am (which is still earlier than I like to be awake). The first 6 or 7 hours of driving across Kansas and eastern Colorado looked a lot like this, flat and boring. There were a lot of signs for a Prairie dog farm with the World's Largest Prairie Dog, pig petting, rattlesnakes, etc, but it didn't seem worth getting off the highway for, so we didn't.Eventually we made it into Colorado although it didn't look any different than Kansas had until we got to Denver. We arrived in Ft. Collins around 4pm at the home of one of my dad's friends from like 30 or so years ago. They had a huge beautiful house and the room I stayed in there had a balcony with an amazing view. The bed was comfortable and we went to sleep around 8:30pm and woke up and were on the road by 4:30am.The sun wasn't even up when we left Ft. Collins, so I was able to get some neat pictures of the sun coming up behind the buttes in the northern part of Colorado.
Stupid cheap Wyoming didn't have a sign at the state line so I had to make my own. Wyoming also apparently is anti-Sprint because I didn't have a signal the whole time I was in the state on my cell phone so I couldn't even get a break from the boringness of the state to make a phone call...Finally a little before noon on Sunday we crossed the Utah state line.Finally at about 1:30pm, we arrived at my parents house in Riverton. We got the stuff I was keeping at the house unloaded and moved upstairs to my room and left all the stuff to go to the storage unit in the truck. Later that afternoon my sister Ingrid and brother Tyler came up for Sunday dinner which was nice. It's great to be around family again and to have home-cooked meals for dinner every night. I think I'm going to adjust to being in Utah quite nicely. Now I've just got to get working and make friends so that I can get out of the house some.

Lasts...

2008-06-25T11:52:00.008-05:00

Yesterday was my last softball game at work. The softball game went pretty well. We were tied most of the game until the other team scored a run in the last inning and beat us 6-5. Oh well, at least I had fun. For some reason the "coach" keeps trying to stick me in positions other than first base. Normally he tries to make me "EP" which is an extra player in the batting order, but doesn't play the field. Batting is probably my least favorite part of the game so naturally I'm not real happy with that. Last night he tried to put me in right field, but luckily with some persuasion, I ended up on first where I like to be. How's he going to try to play me in the outfield in my last game? Not cool. Anyway, here's a few pictures from the game: Obviously this is me playing first. This is me batting.

This is me hitting the ball.

This is me throwing the ball after getting someone out at first.This is our team photo. You can laugh at the name of our team, I don't mind.

After I got off work last night, I went midnight bowling one last time with Don, Nick, Fuzzy and Jessica. I did pretty well. I bowled 113 my first game, 111 my second game and 135 my third game. The third game I started out way behind but ended up beating everyone else thanks to my FIRST TURKEY ever (Three strikes in a row). I didn't take pictures of all of us bowling but I did make sure to get a picture of the scoreboard after I got my turkey so that I would have proof. In the picture below, I'm the second bowler "H". I guess it was a nice way to end my midnight bowling career in Nashville.

I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to post again before the big move but I plan on taking lots of pictures along the drive. If I can find a wireless signal somewhere along the way, I'll try to post as I go. If not, I'll have one really long post when I get to the folks house in Utah.

Last Days in Paradise...

2008-06-23T15:52:00.007-05:00

Ok, so maybe Paradise is a stretch, but I love Nashville. I hate my stupid apartment complex, but I really do love the city and I'm really sad to leave it. I'm still looking forward to the move, but it's finally setting in that I'm going to be leaving Nashville permanently. Nashville's been "home" to me for over half of my life (about 15.5 years). This is a picture I took of the night skyline from on top of one of the parking garages at work. You can't tell me that's not a cool picture. I thought since I will soon no longer be a part of this city, I'd share some random facts about NashVegas...

Nashville aka Music City was founded in 1779 on Christmas Eve. 7th and 11th Presidents of the United States, Andrew Jackson and James Polk, resided in Nashville. Jackson's residence is called the Hermitage and has a driveway shaped like a guitar. In 2006, Nashville Metro Area had a population of 1,486,695 people. Nashville's most well known attractions are: Country Music Hall of Fame, Grand Ole Opry, Music Row, Opryland Hotel, and The Parthenon, which is a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens, Greece.

Also, these are the official symbols of Tennessee:

Bird: Mockingbird

Flower: Iris

Gem: Tennessee Pearl

Insects: Firefly and Honeybee

Tree: Tulip Poplar

Butterfly: Zebra Swallowtail

Folk Dance: Square Dance

Rock: Limestone

Reptile: Eastern Box Turtle

Fruit: Tomato

I bet you didn't know those! Oh and apparently a lot of the Nashville information sites felt that it was important to mention that a resident of Nashville is officially refered to as a "Nashvillian" because they all have it listed on their sites.

Softball

2008-06-20T17:29:00.008-05:00

I'm almost done playing softball this season. The season actually goes into July but I've only got one more game before I move. We had a game last night and we won 9-6. I'm including a few pictures from the game last night. I apologize for the quality of the pictures. It wasn't the photographer's fault that the pictures didn't turn out that great. It's hard to get a good picture at a distance with low light. They're always kind of grainy at night. Anyway, here they are:I'll start with a close up of the back of my head. This is me waiting for my turn to bat. This is me batting and someone else's bat in the upper left corner.This is me doing the walk of shame after the catcher caught the foul I hit.

This is me playing first base. I'm going for the softball which is right next to the runner's foot. I didn't get it in time to get her out. Oh well.

This girl was OUT cause the ball is already in my glove in this one. I'm awesome. Anyway, my last game is Tuesday. Maybe I'll get some better pictures at that game and hopefully we'll win.

Goodbye Stupid Apartment!!!!

2008-06-16T19:30:00.008-05:00

Since I accepted the job at U of U, I've been going crazy. I'm ready to move now, well mentally anyway. I've still got quite a bit of packing to get done so technically it would be really bad for me to try to move now. I've slowly been accumulating boxes in my living room. I've got the whole weekend off so that's probably when most of the packing will take place, but I'm trying to pack up the non-essentials so that I'm not throwing stuff into boxes in a frenzy on the 26th. I've also been busy with my last two weeks of work. It seems to drag on and on when you know you've only got a handful of days left (I'm down to 7 more shifts to go).

One thing I'm really not going to miss is this stupid apartment complex that I live in. I have a physical agility test on July 10th that I have to pass for my Utah Police Officers Standards and Training (POST) certification. The test consists of doing push ups, sit ups, a vertical jump, a 300 meter dash and a mile and a half run. It doesn't sound too difficult, but I haven't done many push ups since the Police Academy 3 years ago and it shows. I did 10 yesterday before I quit. Anyway, back to why I won't miss this apartment complex. Part of the rent I pay here grants me access to the complex gym. The gym isn't anything to sneeze at. It has a treadmill, a stationary bike, an elliptical machine, a stepper, and a universal weight machine (which has been broken the last 10 times I've been in the gym). All I ever want to use in the gym is the treadmill, but somehow I can't seem to use it lately. Every time I walk the two blocks to the gym, I find the gym in one of the following states: 1. full of unaccompanied little Hispanic children who are on ALL of the machines, 2. someone on the treadmill and someone waiting for the next turn, 3. The oh so hygienic people that live in the other apartments have funked up the pool to where tons of chemicals are necessary to return the water to a semi-unpolluted state and they've locked all the entrances to the pool area to keep people out of the pool, but it also keeps people from being able to get to the gym entrance, or 4. some hag-faced heifer stops me on my way through the gate and tells me I have to go back to my apartment to get my "Activities Pass" to use the gym and won't let me look in the gym to see if there's any point in me coming back once I get it. I would've slapped that girl upside her snooty head with my "Activities Pass" if I had come back and found out that the gym was full. Sure they'll enforce the "Activities Pass" rule but they won't enforce parking, so when I get home from work in the middle of the night, I have to park 800 miles away from my apartment building and carry all my police equipment uphill after working all day in the heat. REAL NICE! Of course, I won't have access to a treadmill at the parent's house, so I'll have to join a gym but at least they'll have more than one freakin' treadmill.

Then there's my awful neighbors. They're always sitting on their balconies or in the stairwells, or leaving their kids toys all over the grass in front of the building, all over the sidewalk leading up to my stairwell, all over the stairs and landings. They also have a habit of smoking weed in the stairwells. I can't figure that out. I would think that if I were going to take part in illegal drug use, I would do it in the privacy of my apartment, not out in the stairwell I share with a cop! So I've walked out of my front door a few times to be greeted by a huge wave of marijuana. They always go running into their apartment when they hear me coming out of the apartment. It really made me mad though cause they've got two kids under 5 years old that they have running around while they do it. So I notified the apartment management company but those wastes of skin won't do anything about it because they're all too busy making sure people have their "activities passes" to go to the gym. BAH!

I'm also not going to miss having my neighbors slam their car doors into the side of my car when they open them. The parking is on a hill so if you open your door and there's a car parked next to you, then your door will slam into the other car if you don't hold on to it. I'm obsessively careful about not letting my door hit other cars when I get in or out of my car, but my neighbors are not so considerate. A week ago I walked out to get into my car and discovered a 2 foot long white scratch down the driver's side of my car. I'm not completely convinced it was an accident since I have such a good relationship with my neighbors, but I don't think I'll be getting it fixed until I don't have to park in that lot anymore.

I've got 10 more days till I can say goodbye to this stupid apartment FOREVER! Yay! Utah here I come!!!

My Dad

2008-06-15T15:13:00.014-05:00

In the spirit of Father's Day, I thought I'd use this opportunity to post some pictures of my dad. I realized I don't have a whole lot of pictures of him, but I found a few. Here they are:
This is my dad and me back in 1984.

Another one from 1984. Christmas 1985 My 3rd birthday.

My dad's graduation from college.

Dad sculpting a bust of Joseph Smith. This one is my dad's mug shot from our Christmas card last year. These last few photos are pictures of my family who all get to share a pretty awesome dad:
A couple years ago

The Christmas card picture from a few years ago.

This is our family picture from Christmas break 2007.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY DAD!

MY NEW JOB

2008-06-12T16:37:00.002-05:00

On Tuesday I was offered a job by BYU Police Department and I told them I would need a few days to decide if I was going to accept or not. Then today I got a job offer from the University of Utah. I ended up accepting the offer from U of U. My last day of work at Vanderbilt is June 26th. My dad will fly out and help me drive the moving truck (towing my car) back to Salt Lake and I'll start my job at U of U on July 14th. I'm totally stoked!

Time is a great healer, but a terrible beautician.

2008-06-08T20:56:00.005-05:00

Why is it that the cute shoes always hurt the most to wear? My sister had these Roxy sandals that I really loved and so after borrowing and coveting them off and on for a couple years she gave them to me a while ago. She gave them to me because they hurt her feet so she never wore them, and truth be told, they hurt my feet too if I walk to much in them, but I don't care that they hurt my feet cause I think they look good on my feet (which is difficult cause I have ugly man feet). Well today I wore them to church and by the time I got home, I had blisters forming on the top of my feet. So now my feet look like this:
The funny thing is I after I put the jumbo bandaids on my feet, I put the sandals right back on and wore them for the rest of the day. It probably seems crazy, but I'm ok with being crazy. At least my shoes are cute. :)

Poopdeck

2008-06-04T23:25:00.003-05:00

This is a picture of the back deck at the police headquarters at work. Anything seem out of place to you?

Job Update

2008-06-04T12:40:00.002-05:00

Bad news. I probably won't hear anything about either the UofU job or the BYU job until next week because of a couple factors. UofU is still waiting for the results of the psychological evaluations and then the Chief is out of town until Tuesday of next week and so it'll be after that before I hear anything from them. BYU apparently wants a reference from my bishop and the soonest I can meet with him is Sunday, so I won't be hearing anything about that job until after that happens it looks like. It's making me crazy. I'm tired of waiting!

VOTE

2008-06-02T22:41:00.003-05:00

I've posted a poll over to the left. I want your opinions on which job I should take. (I have no job offers yet, but let's just assume that I'm so awesome that they both give me offers really soon).

Surveillance

2008-06-01T21:02:00.004-05:00

So I spent like 12 hours this weekend doing surveillance on one of the fraternity houses that has been burglarized twice in the past week. The detective who was assigned the case believed that the burglar would be coming back because when she went to follow up, they noticed that one of the window panes on the back side of the house had been broken and removed. Anyway, so she and the Special Operations supervisor put together a plan for surveillance on the house hoping to catch the burglar and I got pulled into the supervisors office Friday afternoon. He asked me to add some hours to my schedule this weekend to assist with the surveillance, and since I will be needing as much money as possible for my move, I agreed. It was soooooo boring. The first night i saw like 4 people and a few cars go by the whole time I was watching the house. Nobody went anywhere near the house though. The second night there was more passing traffic, but still no action at the house. It was all I could do to stay awake. I have included a couple pictures of the corner I was perched in to do my surveillance. It sucked.

Utah Trip

2008-05-29T12:07:00.011-05:00

My trip to Utah started off pretty bad. I had my roommate drive me to the airport on Sunday morning. That wasn't the bad part. Apparently when I got my suitcase out of the trunk of her car, I knocked my phone off of the clip on my hip and didn't notice. It took me about 20 minutes to get through the line at the security checkpoint. I was about 3 people away from the metal detectors when I noticed my phone wasn't on my hip anymore. I began to panic because i didn't have any phone numbers memorized except for my best friend Mike's, and his number wouldn't do me any good on this trip. I thought I had left my phone at home because I had used it right before I left the house and thought maybe I had set it down instead of putting it back in the clip. Then I hear my name being paged over the airport intercom, telling me to report to the Southwest ticket counter. So I have to get out of the security line and go back to the ticket counter. When i get to the ticket counter they tell me that one of the Southwest Skycaps found my phone outside and had brought it to them, but had just left to take it to my gate. So I had to go get in the security line AGAIN. And it took another 20 minutes to get through the line a second time. Before I made it to the metal detectors, I start hearing them paging me again to report to the departure gate that my plane was at. So I speed-walked from security to my gate and when I got there, they gave me my phone and told me the plane had already boarded and there were only three seats left on the plane.

I thanked the Skycap for getting my phone back to me and got on the plane. I ended up having to sit between two really unfriendly people. I tried saying hi to them but they didn't respond. The girl immediately fell asleep and slept until we landed in Phoenix. The guy fell asleep pretty quickly too but woke up about half an hour before we landed. The turned to me and asked if I knew what time zone Phoenix was in and I about died when I smelled his breath. It smelled like he'd had a big plate of crap for breakfast. So I ended up being glad that he hadn't talked to me the whole ride.

Once I landed, the trip got better. My dad and brother Bilbo picked me up at the airport to take me back to the folks house. We got there just in time for family dinner, which was really good. I miss having home cooked meals. It's pretty pointless to try to cook for one so it's been a long time since I've had anything made from scratch.

Monday was Memorial Day. I spent the morning running around to a few stores with my parents and then waited the rest of the afternoon for 6pm to come so we could have our barbeque. My cousins were coming over and I was really, really excited to see them. I was a little worried for a little while that the weather was going to put a real damper on the bbq because it kept raining and even hailed for a little while. Luckily it cleared up before they arrived and we were still able to bbq outside. We ended up eating inside because the patio furniture was pretty wet still. It was so fun to see how big they're getting and to be able to sit around and laugh with them. They're probably some of my favorite people to spend time with. I've gotten to watch them all grow up since I started babysitting the oldest one before he could talk.

Tuesday was a LONG day. I had to wake up at 5:30 am so that I could shower and head up into Salt Lake for my psychological evaluation for one of the two police jobs I'm in the running for. The psychological evaluation consisted of the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) which is 567 questions, the IPI (Inwald Personality Inventory) which is 310 questions and the CPI (California Psychological Inventory) which is 434 questions. All of these questions are True/False and I had to fill in little bubbles for the answers on an answer sheet. That's 1311 questions like these: Do you love your mother? Are you afraid of dirt? Are you afraid of being outdoors? Do you need to drink to relax at the end of the day? Blah blah blah... and they would repeat the same questions over and over and a lot of the questions were exactly the same on all three tests. I also had to take a vocabulary test and talk to the psychologist for like 15 minutes. Apparently if you haven't used any illegal drugs, it cuts out about half of the questions they ask you, so my interview with him was pretty short.

After 4 hours of the psychological stuff, I headed to my first interview. I had mapquested the directions, but apparently some how missed the street I was supposed to turn on and got lost trying to find the police station. I eventually found it and even though I was starving, I didn't want to try to venture out to find food because I didn't know if I would be able to find my way back to the station at 2pm for my interview with the Chief and the Captain. So I went in and talked to the detective that did my background. He and another detective were about to go get lunch and invited me to come with them since I had an hour before my interview. So I went and talked to them for a while. At 2pm I had my interview. I thought it went really well and I felt pretty good about my chances of getting one of the two positions they're hiring for. There are 3 more people up for those spots and they were all interviewing on Wednesday. It was about 3pm by the time my interview was over and I headed toward my folks house. It was 4pm by the time I finally found my way back because I got lost AGAIN. I had just enough time to have dinner with the family before I had to leave again. I had to go take the National Police Officer Selection Test which I had taken and passed twice before I got the job at Vanderbilt as a Police Officer. But because that was 3 years ago and in Tennessee it wouldn't work for the Utah POST people. One of the other two taking it was a complete moron and took the whole time allotted for each section of the test so that the other guy and I couldn't leave early. I finally got to relax when I got back to my parents house at 8pm.

Wednesday morning I got up a little before 7am to get ready for my 9am appointment at another department. I got there a little early so one of the ladies who worked at the front desk gave me a tour of the station, which I thought was really nice. At 9am, I interviewed with a Lieutenant and 3 Sergeants in a panel interview. I think it went really well too. After that interview, I had an informal interview with the Chief. He was really nice and we talked for a while. When I left there, I headed back to my parents to pack up my stuff and get ready for the trip home. The trip home went pretty good. I got a window seat and took a bunch of pictures out the window. Flying above the clouds makes for some really good shots.

As an added bonus, here's a video of Ingrid learning to skate on Wheelies (or Heelies).

Good News

2008-05-24T23:40:00.002-05:00

As many of you know, I'm trying to find a job near Salt Lake so that I can be close to my family for a while. I submitted a really long application to the Utah P.O.S.T. Commission (Police Officer Standards and Training) to determine whether the Tennessee P.O.S.T. Certification that I got here would transfer without me having to go through another academy. Well yesterday I got a phone call from a lady at the Utah P.O.S.T. Commission and she told me I had been approved to take the P.O.S.T. test for Utah, which means I don't have to go through the academy there to be a certified police officer in Utah. This will make me getting a job in Utah a lot easier. I am flying to Utah in about 12 hours to spend Memorial Day with the family and then I have a job interview and some testing on Tuesday and another interview at another department on Wednesday morning before I fly back to Nashville Wednesday afternoon. Wish me luck! I'm very excited!

Best Friend, Softball and Midnight Bowling

2008-05-21T20:55:00.002-05:00

Monday and Tuesday were really good days for me. Monday my best friend Mike (who moved 2 1/2 hours away back in February) came to Nashville to visit his family for the night but luckily I got to spend a lot of time with him in the short time he was in town. Monday night I met him and his 3 year old son at a Mexican restaurant for dinner. After dinner we went and walked around the Opryland Hotel. For those of you reading this that aren't familiar with the hotel, it's a huge resort and has several huge botanical gardens. One of the gardens has a large man made river in it and they do flat boat tours on it. We walked around in what my best friend's son called "the jungle" and looked at all the different trees and plants while he looked for tigers and elephants. He didn't find any tigers or elephants, but he got pretty excited when he saw the fish in the river. We did the flat boat tour because we thought he'd get a kick out of it and we were right. He loved looking over the sides of the boat into the water watching for catfish.

Tuesday morning I met them again at Chuck E. Cheese so that we could eat pizza for lunch and play games before they had to leave town and I had to go to work. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately since he's only 3, he didn't have a very long attention span and would start playing a game or driving on a racing game and decide he was finished before the game was over so Mike and I took turns finishing all of his games. It was really fun. Plus it helped that at noon on a Tuesday it wasn't too busy so it wasn't too loud and there weren't kids everywhere.

Tuesday night I had a softball game. I play on a team called the "Raging Hormones" and we have these bright yellow shirts that are hideous. I made it through the whole season last year without having to wear one of the shirts because all they had last year was XLs and I refused to wear a shirt that big. Unfortunately they must have gotten more made this year cause the coach brought me a medium and it was just a little too big so I couldn't really come up with a good excuse not to wear it. The coach didn't see me standing there before the game so he had already asked someone else to play first base which is where I usually play, so I was just an extra player in the batting order and didn't play on the field the whole game. We won 14-5 which was a complete turn around from last weeks game where we lost 22-0 (I didn't play in that one cause I was in Washington).

Even later Tuesday night (or technically it would be Wednesday morning) I went midnight bowling with two of my friends from work. It was the best I think I've consistantly bowled since we started doing this midnight bowling regularly. We bowled 4 games. I bowled a 122 in both the first and the second games, then bowled a 102 in game 3 and a 100 in the last game. I had 11 strikes total for the night. This is pretty crazy to me because I usually consider myself lucky if I break 100 in 1/4 games and get more than one strike in a night. So I was pretty pleased with that.

Working, Riding, Hypothermia

2008-05-17T11:51:00.011-05:00

This may end up being a really long blog since a lot has happened since I last wrote and because I have a lot of pictures. After graduating on Tuesday night, I worked from noon until 7pm on my normal shift doing bike patrol, then worked the Senior Party that Vanderbilt puts on for all of the graduates every year. This year they had the Commodores (minus Lionel) play and had a bunch of food and bars set up on one of the lawns. I worked until 1am that night and finally got to sleep around 2am. Then I had to be at work the next morning at 7am to work the Senior Speaker event. Instead of having someone come and give the keynote address at the commencement itself, Vanderbilt has them speak a day earlier so they can take as much time as they like and it not prolong the ceremony itself. I believe the speaker this year was Bob Geldaff, who I’m told was in a Pink Floyd video and is now an environmentalist. I never actually saw him because I was posted outside the gym where he was speaking doing bike patrols and assisting with traffic control. After that event was over, I had to be a police presence at the Senior Send-Off event where each of the seniors go to get a free book from the school Chancellor and they give away free soda and ice cream. It was almost 4pm when I was done with that and headed home. I fell asleep really early that night, I think around 7pm. That ended up being a really good thing because I had to be at work at 5:45am to work the graduation ceremony. I ended up standing up by the corner of the stage keeping people back when the graduates walked off the stage. I left at noon even though they hadn’t finished the ceremony yet so that I could get to the airport for my 1:30pm flight to Norfolk, Virginia.
My flights weren’t too bad. First I flew from Nashville to Baltimore. I went from 70 degree weather where I was comfortable in my work shorts to 50 degree weather where I was freezing in those shorts but glad I had thought to bring a hoodie. Then I had a 40 minute flight from Baltimore to Norfolk and sat next to a 10 year old girl who was trying to help me with a crossword puzzle I was working on. It was very sweet but she wasn’t very helpful. I was able to finish the puzzle before we landed even with having to explain some of the clues to her. When I landed, I was supposed to mean one of the Police Unity Tour executive board members at the baggage claim in the Norfolk airport for my ride to the hotel. That guy didn’t show up, but sent someone else and while I was waiting for my luggage to come out on the conveyer belt, I heard them paging for me to meet the police officers in the main lobby of the airport over the intercom. It was a little embarrassing but at least nobody else standing around me knew I was the one the police were looking for. I finally got to my hotel around 7ish and met up with the rest of Team Nashville who were all working on bikes in one of the conference rooms at the hotel. I was so tired from working so much all week that I fell asleep really fast, but for some reason woke up 2 hours later and had a hard time getting back to sleep.
Saturday morning was the first day of biking on the Police Unity Tour. We started biking at 8am in Portsmouth, Virginia and rode about 100 miles to Richmond, Virginia. The weather was a cold and overcast in the morning but warmed up and the sun came out for a few hours in the afternoon. I was really tired since I had only gotten a total of about 4 hours of sleep before we started. My left shoulder and right knee were pretty sore a few hours into the ride but I was pleased with how well I was doing on the ride and wasn’t as physically exhausted at the end of the first day as I had been on the first day last year. My butt really hurt a lot but that’s to be expected when you sit on a bike seat for 7 ½ hours in one day.
Sunday morning was also really cold and the expected high was 53 degrees. The weather was also supposed to get stormy later on. The rain held off until after lunch, but for the last 4 hours and 30 miles of Sunday afternoon, we pedaled through the pouring rain in 50 degree weather. It was miserable. I was so cold and soaked completely through all of my clothes. The first couple miles after each rest stop were the most miserable parts of the ride because it took a few minutes for the riding to warm me up. I say warm me up, but really it was more me getting numb enough that I couldn’t tell how cold I was anymore. When we arrived in Stafford, Virginia where our hotels for the night were, they had the 230 of us in our group separated into 5 different hotels. Four of the hotels were all right next to one another and of course the hotel I was supposed to stay in was a mile away from the others. So I waited dripping wet and shivering in the lobby of one of the hotels until they figured out how they were going to transport the individuals at that hotel over there. The head medic noticed me shivering and came to make sure I was ok. They quickly determined that I was suffering from hypothermia and began pulling my soaked jacket, gloves, shoes (which they dumped water out of), socks, arm warmers and my helmet liner off, then wrapped me in like 10 towels and pulled a comforter and sheet off of one of the beds at the hotel and wrapped me in that too. They made me put heat packs under each arm and eventually made me put on one of the medics tshirts since my jersey was still soaked. Since I was no longer wearing shoes or socks, they put me in a chair in the lobby and when they moved me around, they picked up the whole chair and carried it to the new spot. Eventually when they were satisfied that my body temperature was on the way back up, this really, really big medic carried me out to a patrol that was waiting outside, put me in the passenger seat and the officer drove me to the hotel that I was staying in and they sent my roommate Amy over to take care of me. It was really embarrassing and sad.
I went out that night and bought a rain suit from Target that night because I was hoping to avoid the whole hypothermia thing on day three since the forecast was showing another pretty miserable day for biking. They ended up cancelling the last 40 miles that we were supposed to ride on the 12th because parts of our route were flooded and had trees down on it that would prevent us from being able to go that way. So they hired buses to transport the thousands of people from all of the different chapters to Washington DC. I was both relieved and disappointed. It was a relief to know that I wasn’t going to have to ride through that kind of weather for another 40 miles, but disappointing that we were not able to finish the ride. The last few miles into downtown Washington DC is the best part of the whole ride because of all the survivors and other people lined up along the streets cheering and clapping as we ride into the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. It makes the whole painful ride worth it. We spent the rest of Monday and Tuesday in Washington DC for the presentation of the Police Unity Tour donation check to the memorial fund and the Candlelight Vigil. We donated $1,227,000 as a whole. I got to meet the family of the fallen officer I rode in honor of right before the vigil. It was really cool. The officer’s wife seemed really glad to meet me and her boys weren’t sure what to think of me, but it felt really good to get to give her the bracelet with her husband’s name on it that I wore throughout the ride. It was definitely very cool.

Wednesday morning we packed up the van, truck and trailer and headed back to Nashville. It took about 14 hours including breakfast and lunch stops but I slept through a lot of it so it didn’t seem that long. It was nice to get to sleep in my own bed again. I seemed to have completely recovered from the hypothermia. I was a little weak and sickly for a few days but I feel pretty good now. All in all I would have to say it was a good trip.

Graduation

2008-05-09T04:26:00.009-05:00

So I graduated on Tuesday, May 6th, which is also my mom's birthday, so that's neat. I don't have a lot of time to type right now because I have to head to work soon to work Vanderbilt's graduation and then I fly to Virginia after that, so I thought I'd just post a few of the pictures from my graduation ceremony. Here they are....
Me looking amazing in my graduation threads. Note all of the super cool cords and the honors sash. Me standing with the other graduates during the ceremony.Me being presented my diploma holding folder thingy that didn't have my diploma in it.
Obviously when you graduate from college, you become way more mature than you were before.

I am the Great Cornholio

2008-05-02T18:25:00.008-05:00

So after months of seeing the Greeks play this bean bag tossing game, which they call cornhole, I finally learned how the point system works. I don't think I had thrown a bean bag since I was in Joy School (a pre-school taught by various mothers from my church). So last night I stopped by Greek Row to visit my old partner at one of the fraternity houses. Most of the students are gone now that finals are over, but there were 6 or 7 people in the front yard of this house playing cornhole. After watching 4 of them play for about 10 minutes and not being able to figure out how they were scoring the game, we broke down and asked one of the guys who explained it all to us. Then once they finished their game, one of the other people who was watching wanted to play but didn't have a partner. So being the super cool person that I am, I agreed to be his partner even though I hadn't thrown a bean bag in years and was pretty confident that I would stink. I was right. We lost 21-0 and my first throw beaned one of the students in the back. I felt a little bit bad about that but it was pretty funny. I'm really going to miss being on Greek Row with all of the Greeks. Sad.

Just a few days till graduation and I'm pretty excited. I picked up my cap, gown and my honor cords. That's right, I'm graduating with honors. Woo! Unfortunately they didn't factor in this semester's grades, so I'm graduating "Magna Cum Laude" instead of "Summa Cum Laude" but it's still pretty exciting. I also learned that my school has colors. I had no idea. My mom asked me what the school colors were and I realized I had never even thought about it. So when I went to pick up my graduation stuff, I learned that apparently Nashville State's colors are Teal and Black. For those of you still trying to decide what to get me for graduation, here are a few ideas:

1. A Maserati

2. A Custom Made Heidi Action figure (See Here)

3. All expenses paid trip to New Zealand

Ok, so I'm totally kidding. If any of you get me any of those things, I may beat you upside the head with your own shoes. I'm not violent at all. Really, I'm not.

This time next week I'll be in Virginia getting ready to take off on my 300ish mile bike ride to Washington DC. That is if I live through the next week at work. I think I'm working 60ish hours next week all before Friday at noon, and it'll be all on bicycle. On the bright side, maybe my butt'll be bike-seat broken in well before I get to Virginia. If that was too much information, I'm sorry.

Countdowns

2008-04-30T14:06:00.005-05:00

I officially have just 6 days left until my graduation and 10 days until I start the Police Unity Tour. I'm very excited about both and I should be busy busy busy until I leave town. I'll be working a lot of overtime in the couple of days between my graduation and when I fly out since that's when Vanderbilt has their graduation. Since I'm going to be so busy up until that point, I've already started packing. Crazy huh?

Last night was probably the last time I could go midnight bowling until I get back from Washington DC. I disappointed myself last night because I didn't break 100 in any of the games I played. I finished all 4 games in the 80s and 90s and even beat everyone else in the third game. My goal everytime I go play is to break 100 at least once and this was the first week since we started the midnight bowling thing that I haven't done it. So that was a little disappointing and I lost all faith in my lucky pink Weezer tshirt that I was convinced helped me hit my highest game so far in midnight bowling (132). So I may retire the pink Weezer tshirt from midnight bowling. Yesterday was Fuzzy's birthday, so we took him cake and decorated it with pirate toys since he hates pirates. The toys were kind of fun. There was a little plastic pirate, a little plastic raft and a little plastic cannon that shot little plastic cannon balls, which we shot at each other in the bowling alley. Fun times.

Work is stressful. I'm not real crazy about my new assignment. In fact, I pretty much hate it but I'm trying to do the best I can because I don't particularly want to get fired. I'm strongly considering a move to Utah to be closer to family. I'm looking at a couple departments out in Utah, and have had some strong interest shown from one department in particular. So I'm very optimistic about the possibilities there. It sure would be nice to see my family more than once or twice a year. Anyway, not a lot of news to report. I've mostly just been working and watching Gilmore Girls on DVD for the last week, so not much else to mention. I'll try to post again before I leave town, but if not, look forward to a nice long blog during or after my trip to DC!

I'M DONE!

2008-04-23T21:01:00.000-05:00

I'm done with school! Now I just have to wait 2 weeks to graduate. In the meantime, I'm going to spend a lot of time training for the unity tour and working overtime to improve my financial situation. I thought my stress level would go way down once I was done with all my finals, but getting rid of school stress just left more room for work and money stress which immediately filled the void. Bleh!

Anyway, back to positive, happy things. I was successful in breaking 100 in one of my bowling games last night at midnight bowling. I averaged 96 per game so I think I'm improving. The only bad part of midnight bowling was that I had ridden 30 miles with steep hills earlier in the day and so the sore muscles were setting in while I was at the bowling alley. We had 5 people bowl this time which is the most we've had so far and it makes it a lot more fun to have more people. I'm starting to think that the people that bowl there have very large misshapen feet. Once again, I ended up with shoes that were stretched out (not as bad as the women's shoes I mentioned a couple blogs ago). These ones were men's shoes that had indentions in the toes that looked like an anvil had been dropped on the tip. So they weren't very comfortable, but at least I wouldn't have to put on 200 pounds to make them fit.

I'm planning on playing softball again this summer. I'm not an amazing softball player, but I have fun playing, so I look forward to it. I just hope they don't try to get me to wear one of those gigantic yellow tshirts with "raging hormones" on the front of it. I had no interest in wearing one last year, and nothing about that has changed. Anyway, must get to sleep. I've got another 30 miles to bike tomorrow plus a long list of errands. More later.

I wondered why the Frisbee was getting bigger, and then it hit me.

2008-04-20T15:39:00.007-05:00

I finally heard back from my department about detective in the form of a rejection letter in the mail. I just think it sucks that I sent emails and asked on the phone if a decision had been made and they wouldn't respond or claimed not to know anything because they were too wimpy to just tell me I didn't get the promotion. The date on my rejection letter confirmed that the decision had been made before I asked about it and that's kinda irritating. News travels fast and the frats aren't happy with my reassignment either. They've expressed it thoroughly. It's nice to know I'm loved.

Tomorrow is my last final. It's in my Interview and Interrogation class and I'm feeling pretty good about the outcome of the test. I've been studying and I know my stuff. I'll be really relieved to know that it's over. I'm also taking the final for my online report writing class tonight or tomorrow, but the instructor takes a long time to respond to emails and to post the grades and feedback for our assignments so I may end up having to turn in my final assignment without getting feedback on the 3 previous assignments, which the final assignment builds on. So that's pretty frustrating. Oh and by the way, since a couple of you asked, a hurkey is a jump where one extended leg goes in front of you and one extended leg goes behind you. I've included a picture so you can visualize what I'll be doing tomorrow afternoon when I'm completely finished with finals. If I still had photoshop on my computer, I'd make it easier for you to visualize, but since photoshop died with my old computer, you'll have to rely on your imaginations to do the work.

Midnight bowling seems to be turning into a weeklyish thing now. We went again this past Tuesday and I actually beat Don in one of the games. I was pretty excited about it. I'm not even close to being an impressive bowler, but I have fun so it's a nice change of pace from work and school. My goal every week is to break 100 in one of the games. This week, I broke 100 in 2/4 games so I guess I'm improving. I look forward to many more weeks of midnight bowling. I've included a few pictures from last week's midnight bowling so you can visualize that too. :)

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'm going to go practice my hurkeys (or would that be hurkies?).

Short Update

2008-04-14T17:08:00.002-05:00

If I never had a bad day, how would I know when I was having a good day?

So I still haven't heard anything about detective which is making me think even more that I didn't get it. I would've thought that this would mean I stay put in the Greek area, but I would be wrong. I got a phone call Monday morning from one of the Major's saying that I was being reassigned to the Pro-Active Crime Team (PACT). I was not happy to get this news. I didn't want to leave Greek Patrol unless it was for a promotion. I'm still looking into other options, but my first choice would still be detective. I start my new assignment with PACT on Thursday. I would've liked to have known that last weekend would be my last week on Greek Patrol, because I would have taken a lot more pictures.

This weekend a couple of the fraternity houses had crawfish boils. This picture is of the crawfish that we found crawling around inside the house and rescued along with about 20 others that had escaped being boiled. The others were scattered around the back yard and were venturing out across the parking lots. I don't think they would've lasted long with all the cars driving throught there. We put the rescued crawfish in a cooler and Don took them home and relocated them to the pond in his yard. Better there than them wandering into the sorority yards and scaring the sorority girls. Crawfish sure are ugly.

I've only got one more week of school. I have a final on Friday, another one on Monday the last one I have to take online at some point in the next week. I'm very very excited for that to be done. Then I'll have almost two weeks off before graduation. YAY! It makes me so happy I could hurkey.

I can resist everything except temptation.

2008-04-09T20:00:00.010-05:00

"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up." -Muhammad Ali

I've been rather frustrated with work lately. My supervisor has changed AGAIN for like the 50 billionth time this year... ok so maybe it's just the 3rd or 4th supervisor this year, but since it's the beginning of April, that's still pretty sad and extremely annoying. Well the guy we report to now was my supervisor about this time last year when I was still working patrol on campus. He made me want to find another job then and I don't think the working relationship is going to be any better this time around. So I'm kind of in limbo about my work situation. I interviewed for a detective opening last Friday and they told me they would let me know something this week. Unfortunately they must be sadists and know that it's torture for me to have to wait for them to announce it so they haven't announced anything yet. So I've been checking my email and the online memo thingy for my department over and over all day long hoping to see it posted. I'm almost to the point where I don't care if I get it or not, I just want them to post it so I don't have to wait anymore.

Today I got a phone call from some guy at the University of Utah Police Department wanting to set up a phone interview. He says they've never done a phone interview before but they were going to try it out with me and see how it goes. So I've got that interview Tuesday afternoon. It sounds like it might pay just a little less than I'm making right now, but it might be enough to get me out to Utah where I can work while I try to find a more permanent department out there. That'll all hinge on whether the detective thing goes through or not.

I got a temporary break from the job-related stress last night when I went midnight bowling with Don, Jessi and Fuzzy. It was fun and I was pretty terrible but I broke 100 in one of the three games so I was content. It was pretty sad that the bowling shoes I had were really stretched out. I have HUGE man-feet so I had to get the biggest women's size they have so my feet would fit long-ways but they were so stretched out that I had to pull the velcro as tight as it would go to get them to stay on my feet. It was pretty sad. I just wonder how many behemoth women had to wear those shoes to get them so stretched out.
Monday night was also a great night. After I got home from the Greek Awards at work, I plopped down on my bed to watch the KU vs. Memphis game. The plopped position didn't last long and I was jumping up and down on it when KU tied the game up in the last few seconds of regulation play. Then there was more jumping when they won 5 minutes later. I was so excited. Every year when I fill out my tournament bracket, I always have them winning it all and usually I get disappointed. This year they made me very happy and I got a way better score on my bracket. Not that I got anything for having a winning bracket except the satisfaction of knowing I won. So anyway, good times.

So anyway, I've only got 2 weeks left of school and I'm so glad that it's almost over. I took my exit exam for the Police Administration degree and passed so all I have left is finals in 3 of my 4 classes. I'm pretty confident that I'll finish up with all A's this semester and that'll bring my gpa to a 3.9 (SUPER GENIUS!) which is higher than my high school gpa and those classes were supposed to be way easier... What's up with that? I guess I care more about acing the classes when I'm having to pay for them.

Oh and Ingrid, I would take a picture of my half-face-burn but I've been trying to expose the other side of my face to the sun the last few days and it's evened out quite a bit. Sorry!

A Case of the Mondays

2008-04-07T00:38:00.005-05:00

Monday is supposed to be the start of my weekend but this Monday is going to be pretty action-packed. I'm supposed to be meeting other members of my team at 08:30 am to ride 25 miles as part of our training for the Police Unity Tour in May. This will be after I get off work at 04:00 and get home around 04:30ish... Then after I finish the 25 miles, I have 2 hours of Interview and Interrogation class. So I'll probably have to go straight from biking to school. And straight from school to my 2:00pm chiropractor appointment which was supposed to be on Wednesday of last week but I got busy and missed it, so I need to make it even more today, especially since I've been having shoulder issues again lately. So after my chiro adjustment, I have to go home, shower and dress up nicely for the Greek awards, which start at 06:30 so I'll probably have some time to eat in there hopefully. Then after the awards ceremony is over, I can go home and crash HARD, that is if I don't fall asleep at the awards ceremony from exhaustion.
I'm down to the last week of fundraising for the PUT and I'm scrambling to find sponsors. One of the fraternities had parents weekend this past weekend and one of the fathers that was visiting is supposed to be giving me a donation, which is cool, but not enough really. Me and another girl on my cycling team were the only two to show up to our tshirt sale fundraiser this weekend and we had both worked the night before so we were really sleepy and not real aggressive so we didn't collect as much as we probably could have if we had gotten more than 4 hours of sleep. I ended up walking away from the shirt sale with a nice pink sunburn on the right half of my face. That's right, just the right half of my face got burnt. I look like Tommy Lee Jones as two face. It's pretty obvious, but at least I can still sleep on my left side since it's not burnt...

Anyway, I'll do a more detailed update later. I'll try to get some new pictures soon too.

I have nothing to say, and I'll only say it once.

2008-03-30T21:50:00.007-05:00

It's definitely turned out to be an interesting week for me. It's been extremely busy and I'm looking forward to school being over so that I can breathe a little more. But anyway, I had a test on Wednesday in my interview and interrogation class that I'm pretty sure I aced. I also had a test in my Crime Scene class on Friday which I think I also aced. I've got a couple of reports I have to finish by tomorrow for my Law Enforcement Report Writing class, so I'm going to try to get those done tonight so I can start studying tomorrow for my test in that class on Wednesday. You're probably thinking that this all sounds very boring and you would be right.
It's also been a busy week for me at work as well. I had to come in on Tuesday night for the third and final night of the Rape Aggression Defense class I was co-teaching. The third night is "simulation night" or "fight night" where the girls in the class get to go through three scenerios with an aggressor in a large padded suit who attacks them. They then get to use the techniques that they learned in the three weeks of classes to beat the crap out of the aggressors and escape. We video tape all of the simulations and then let them watch it afterwards so that they can see how well the techniques worked and that they were actually using what they learned in the class. So that was fun especially when one of the girls did a flying kick that looked like something out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or a Jet Li movie, but I'm definitely glad it's done so I have my Tuesday nights back.

On Thursday night I came to work expecting it to be a fairly relaxed and uneventful night. Unfortunately it ended with a major disappointment. A guy in one of the fraternities that we recently went and talked to about alcohol and DUI a few weeks ago was involved in a one car accident versus a concrete wall. Luckily he and his passengers were unharmed in the accident, but it was pretty obvious to me and my partner when we arrived at the scene that he was intoxicated. He ended up blowing almost 3 times the legal limit (which is .08) so we ended up having to take this guy to jail for DUI. To give the guy some credit, he manned up and admitted that he made a really stupid choice to drive in his condition and was by far the most cooperative DUI arrest I've ever had. It's got to be similiar to the disappointments parents face when their kids screw up, to have these kids that you watch over every weekend screw up like that. Don however, did not seem impressed that it took me all of about 3 minutes to do the affidavits for the arrest when he usually takes a lot longer to do his.

Friday night I expected to be a little busier, but hoped it was a better night than Thursday. We had four parties going on and went from party to party, checking up on them. Unfortunately it was pouring down rain for most of the night and the temperature dropped down into the lower 40s. My hair was dripping about 15 minutes into my shift and didn't dry until a couple hours after I got home that night. My boots were also completely soaked and when I got home and took them off, I realized that my socks were also soaked up to the top of my ankles. It was pretty miserable. Plus when we went to shut down a paint party, I ended up with neon orange, yellow and green paint spots all over the back of my rain coat. In case you're wondering, a paint party is where they have all these bottles of paint and they hand them out to the people who come to the party and they spray each other with paint until they're covered from head to foot with it. It seems crazy to me and we usually avoid going through those parties while they're going on to prevent anyone from being tempted to soak us in neon paint.
Saturday I was supposed to do a 50 mile bike ride at 9am, so I had scheduled it so that I would come in to work 3 hours later than normal Saturday night. Since it was rainy and cold, I decided not to do the 50 mile bike ride, but I still went to work at 8:30pm instead of 5:30pm. So I was hoping for the night to fly by. Sadly this was not so. We had 5 parties. Three of which had bands playing at them. The biggest party had a band from Texas playing. I wasn't at all impressed with them, and I don't think they were worth all the money that the fraternity spent to have them come play at their house, but I really enjoyed the fraternity house band that opened up for them. They were really good. I've included a few pictures from their performance. There was a rather funny accident at that house, that I feel comfortable mentioning because the guy involved did not get hurt. My partner Don and I were sitting on the back deck of the house with the big party when one of the fraternity brothers came up and sat on the railing around the deck with us. He was mid-sentence when he leaned too far backwards and fell over the rail backwards into a row of bushes and fell about 6 or 7 feet. We made sure he was ok, but then gave him a hard time about it for a while. It was hilarious.
Anyway, all of the parties seemed to go well and we didn't have any trouble shutting them down. So I thought the night had gone pretty smooth considering all that was going on until after we shut down the last house. Their president told us that he had just gotten a phone call that one of the guys in his fraternity was being arrested by Metro for DUI. So we went over to the scene and talked to the officer since the DUI officer had already headed to booking with the kid. In his case, he had taken another brother's truck and went to the gas station. When he pulled into the gas station parking lot, he hit a cement pole that was about 3 feet tall by one of the pumps and the Metro officer saw it. This kid told the officer that he hadn't been drinking and refused to do a breath test so i was even more disappointed with him. It just hasn't been a good weekend for the Greeks.

You guys probably don't care, but I'm pretty excited about the fact that my lily bloomed recently. I was so stoked about it that I had to take pictures. See how pretty?
Oh and just to add another picture, this is me cooking chicken on my new Foreman Grill. You know it's hot. Admit it.

Past and Present

2008-03-23T23:45:00.002-05:00

I got this sent to me on myspace, but I thought it might make a better blog, so I thought I would post it. It's a comparison between the past and the present. I think it would be fun to see others do this. It's interesting to see how things change over just a few years.

10 Years Ago
How old were you?: 13
Where did you live?: Topeka, Kansas
What did you drive?: I didn't drive yet.
What did you do for work?: I wasn't working yet either.
Had you been in an accident?: As a passenger.
Who was your best friend?: Crystal or Miranda
Who did you have a crush on?: Keanu Reeves
Where did you hang out?: Crystal or Miranda's house
What was your favorite TV show?: Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel
What was your favorite band/artist?: R.E.M.
What couldn't you live without?: sports

5 Years Ago
How old were you?: 18
Where did you live?: Provo, Utah
What did you drive?: Volkswagen Jetta
What did you do for work?: Night Auditor at a hotel and Sales for Verizon
Had you been in an accident?: Yes
Who was your best friend?: Serina
Who did you have a crush on?: Curtis
Where did you hang out?: At the pool at my apartment complex
What was your favorite TV show?: Law & Order SVU
What was your favorite band/artist?: Weezer
What couldn't you live without?: My cell phone

Now
How old are you?: 23
Where do you live?: Nashville, Tennessee
What do you drive?: Toyota Camry
What do you do for work?: I'm the Po-Po
Have you been in an accident?: Yes
Who is your best friend?: Mike
Who do you have a crush on?: I don't want to jinx myself
Where do you hang out?: I spend all my time at work, school or home.
What is your favorite TV show?: The Office or Gilmore Girls
What is your favorite band/artist?: It changes, but I really like Sara Barielles, Amy Winehouse, and System of a Down
What can't you live without?: My laptop and my gun.

Sick Again

2008-03-20T23:34:00.005-05:00

I'm just not having real good luck when it comes to being sick this year. This morning I got woken up at 4 am by Pan, the evil migraine midget. I was in tears and had to take a Percocet to knock the headache out so that I could go back to sleep. It seemed to work and I woke up later feeling considerably better, but feeling a little nauseous. Sometimes migraines make me kind of nauseous so I assumed that was why.

I snacked on carrots all afternoon and felt ok when I went to work. I could tell the headache was still there, but was more of a dull ache than a full blown migraine. I felt kind of nauseous in the car on the way over to the Greek Row area but felt fine when we parked and started walking around, so I chalked it up to motion sickness. I was really hungry by 9pm when I usually take my lunch break. So Don & I got back in the patrol car and headed to Taco Bell. On our way back to headquarters with our food, I started feeling really nauseous again. Only this time I was pretty sure I was going to horf. I was hoping I would make it back to the police station before I did, but ended up having to get Don to pull off into a parking lot not even a block away from the station. So in the parking lot of the J. Alexanders, I horfed up a bunch of carrots. It was very orange, very textured and very gross, but I instantly felt better.

I ate my Taco Bell and made it through the rest of my shift, which was only until 10:30pm tonight since I worked 5 hours on Tuesday night. I made it almost all the way home when I started feeling really nauseous again. This time I was able to get all the way to my apartment, and ran to my bathroom before I horfed again. Thanks to the Taco Bell, this time there was more color and texture variation but was still a very miserable experience. Once again, I instantly felt much better and went and laid in bed.

Unfortunately the feeling better didn't last long and I had to dash for my bathroom for another round of digestive pyrotechnics. I don't think there's anything left in my stomach and I don't think I have the strength to make another run to the bathroom, so I hope I'm done with horfing for the night.

Anyway, I think I've hit my sick quota for the year already and I definitely shouldn't be sick again till next year. Wouldn't you agree?

I'm Grateful For...

2008-03-17T17:33:00.019-05:00

I recently read a post that my cousin Audrey posted where she went through all the people in her life she is grateful for. She challenged others to do the same, so I'm going to attempt to mention those people in my life that I appreciate. I'm grateful for: My mom. She listens to me vent about all of the frustrations in my life every couple of days. I appreciate this because I generally feel better after I vent to her and I can get through the rest of my day. Plus if I ever need anything, she's always willing to help me out. Plus she gave me some pretty good genes.
My dad. Even though he hasn't always agreed with my choices, he's always willing to do whatever he can for me. He's always worked really hard to ensure that our family had everything we needed growing up. And he's gonna get me a horse. ;)
My oldest brother Jesse. He's really funny and an amazing artist. I'm always extremely impressed with the things he can do with film, charcoal, paint, etc.
My other older brother Tyler, aka "Deaner Wiener." He's also really funny and can make me laugh without really trying. I even love that he makes it his mission, when we're having family dinners, to make me laugh so hard that I shoot something out of my nose.
My little sister Ingrid. She's a polar opposite of me which I love about her. She's been able to help me a lot by picking out cute clothes for me, cutting my hair, doing girl talk, etc. She's very outgoing and very social which I love about her. She's also very talented musically because for some reason my parents forgot to give me musical talents when they made me so they gave my share to her...
My baby brother Dylan, aka "Bilbo." I admire that he's developed such a fun personality and he's gotten to be a pretty funny kid. It blows my mind all the time how old and grown up he's getting even though you guys probably just see the spastic hyper hypo who dances kind of like Elaine on Seinfeld and makes noise just to hear himself. He's also an amazing athlete, but he's too competitive for me to play against him. My cousin Serina. She's always so positive and such a good mom to her 5 amazing kids. She is one of those people that everyone loves because she's so fun and so nice. She would do anything for anyone and gives people way more chances than they deserve. She's also easy to talk to and has listened to me vent a billion times.
One of my best friends from High School, Crystal. She is fun to hang out with and we have really good conversations. She has a lot of fun when she does something and I love that about her. Unfortunately we're crappy friends and don't call each other enough.

My other best friend from High School, Miranda. She's such a good example. She's responsible and smart and an amazing mother to her two adorable twin girls. She's going to home school her kids which I totally respect because I don't think I'll have that kind of patience with my own children. We don't talk enough either.
My best friend in the world, Mike. I talk to him several times a day and he keeps me sane. He listens to me vent. He's helped me through some really tough times. He's supportive and encourages me to go for the things I'm interested in. We have so much in common that we always have something to talk about. He's the one who always ended up having to take me to the hospital when I would have really bad migraines or kidney stones. He sometimes make me crazy, but mostly I like him a lot. Plus he's got a really cute little boy who makes me smile.

My partner Don. He has to put up with me for 30 hours a week. That right there is impressive enough for me to appreciate him, but he's a good guy and he really cares about what he does at work, which I like about him.
My friend Walker. He's a genuinely good guy. He's very selfless and easy to trust. He helped me raise money for the Police Unity Tour last year which was the only reason I was able to go.

My aunt Becky. She reads my blogs and leaves me comments all the time. Plus she just seems really cool and the funny stories my mom always told me about her childhood usually included her and Becky doing funny cute things like dressing up like fairies that came to clean their room while they were gone. Who isn't grateful for main characters like that!

There are a lot more people I'm grateful for but this post is getting really long, so I won't mention anymore individually. I'm also grateful for kevlar vests, chocolate, laptops, my Camry, vacation time, cute clothes, money, Thin Mint girl scout cookies, Hot Hands, hot tubs, icy hot, the summer, massages, indoor plumbing, and just being alive. Audrey was right. Doing this list really made me feel better. I would also encourage everyone else with a blog to do this. It's therapeutic.