If anyone reading this journal is at all interested in history or women's issues, I highly recommend you check out the I DIG site (Informal Distance Intellectual Growth) which just happens to be run by my mother, Sue Rowland. ;-) Also, be sure to check out her Miscellaneous Musings page, which is her own "journal" and has much food for thought in it.

Pretty smart chick, my mom is.

Body armor in the summer is nothing short of Brutal. I come home after a day shift and the very first thing I do is peel off the shirt, the vest and the completely sweat-soaked undershirt and bra. Then I'll drop the gun belt and take the combat boots off. But the top stuff has to come off first thing.

Several people inquired, so I'll clarify in the journal: I only had a partner while I was in training. Generally speaking, we patrol solo. Most non-urban departments work that way.

I've been getting a lot of experience with dead people since I came into this line of work. I'd never actually seen a dead person up close and personal-like until I became a cop, and now it's another one of those things I'm gradually becoming inured to. Most of the dead people I've encountered were already old and sick and under hospice care in their home. Any time there's any sort of death, even a hospice-care death, we have to go out and make sure that there's no evidence of foul play or trauma. The hospice death cases are easy, generally speaking, and usually all that's required of us is to verify that the person was indeed sick, and then have the coroner call and release the body to the family.

Non-hospice deaths are a little more complex, though again, mostly it simply has to be verified that it was a natural death and there are no knives sticking out of the person's back. And sometimes, even natural deaths can be... unusual. Like the guy who was found standing at his kitchen sink. Quite dead. Yes, standing up.

I got to the scene, and the EMS guys were kinda grinning at me. They'd been dispatched first, of course, and when they got there and verified that the guy was DOA, they had to call a deputy. So, as I walk up, one guy says, "Wait 'til you see this one..!" I follow him up the rickety stairs, into this fusty room that smells like someone's been dead there for a few hours. (Dead People Smell is hard to describe--a distinctive cloying, sweet-sour-sweaty smell, that is subtly different from Dead Animal Smell.) We walk through the living room, and into the kitchen, and there he is, standing at the kitchen sink, slumped over, very obviously Dead. His legs were black with lividity, and there was that complete lack of any motion that cannot be copied by the living. Apparently, this guy had a history of heart disease (he was 79) and he'd had bi-lateral knee replacements. When the coroner arrived and after she and I had wrestled the fellow off of the sink and onto the sheet on the floor, she surmised that the knee replacements had kept his legs from buckling when he'd passed out. Then she proceeded to show me various things to look at on the body to determine time of death, such as the condition of the rigor mortis, the bloating of the hand that had been sitting in water in the sink, and the lividity in the legs and face. (He'd been bent over the sink, so his face was black as well--in fact it would have been easy to mistake him for a black man if one didn't look at other parts of his body.) The coffee pot had still been in his hand--the coroner had had to pry it from his fingers--and the coffee-maker had not been turned on, plus evidence of newspapers lying around the house and the fact that the guy was still in his underwear, led us to finally conclude that he'd died very suddenly in the early morning of that day, while making his morning coffee.

But it was mighty odd to see a dead guy standing up.

In reference to Tamela's rant about antibiotics and weedkillers, I'd just like to share that I do my part for the ecology by simply letting the damn weeds grow where they want. And until I get that lawnboy in the leopard-print loincloth that I've been asking for, the weeds will continue to grow where they want.