Well, it's been a little while since I've posted. No real specific reason for it, other than just not sitting my butt down and typing in an entry. I haven't been terribly busy, although I have been working out and running a lot. (By the way, Myke--extremely tempting offer, but I'm afraid I'll have to pass. I've already cancelled all of my convention plans for the rest of the year due to financial constraints. A 5K would be fun though, I admit, especially since I'm running that distance fairly regularly now. And as far as meeting some of your buff buddies--again, very tempting, but I'm really wanting something not long distance. I want someone right here in snuggling range!)

I've also been trying to be better about getting enough sleep. I've scared myself a time or two on the drive home from work when I've been really tired and I've started to fade out a bit. That would be a really stupid way to die.

But all in all life is pretty tame and uneventful. I'm still waiting to hear when the academy is supposed to start. Originally they'd said July, but then it got pushed back due to an accident that happened with a reserve deputy. I guess they're re-evaluating their training or something. I am getting a tetch antsy though. I want to get started!

Work continues to be work, though yesterday I had a really bizarre experience when a women totally went off on me. She was playing Roulette, and when the dealer marked the point and swept the losing bets, she started insisting that she'd had a chip on the split between the numbers and that the dealer had swept it by mistake. So, the dealer calls me over, and tells me what's going on, and I tell her that I'll call surveillance and get them to run the tape back and see where the bets were. No big deal. We do this all the time, especially on Roulette. So I call the Eye and tell them the deal, and a few minutes later they call me back and tell me that the woman had bets in several other locations (none of them winners) but she did not have a chip where she'd said. Fine. I go over to the table, and politely apologize to the woman and tell her that the tape showed no bet.

Well, she gets very irate. "I did so!! Everyone else saw it!" (Everyone else is keeping their mouths shut at this point.) I apologize again and say that she was mistaken. "I want to see the tape!" she demands. I inform her that she'll have to go to the gaming commission for that; we don't show surveillance tapes to players. "Well you'll just lose the tape!" she says. I patiently explain that no, we have to keep the tapes for a certain length of time. She jabs her finger at the place where she said her bet was. "You bitch! You should pay me!" I explain that I can't pay her for a bet that wasn't there. Then she leaps to her feet, gives me the finger and screams, "Fuck you! Fuck you!"

The amount of the bet in question? $8.50.

My mother told me yesterday about a couple that attended her church. It seems that this couple was elderly, with no children and no living relatives. He had advanced pancreatic cancer, and she had the beginnings of Alzheimers. They packed up all of the posessions in their house, wrote some letters, then together they walked out to some nearby woods. The woman got on the phone and called the police, informing them where they were and what was about to happen, and then he shot her, and then himself. Apparantly they'd been planning it for months, even down to the phone call at the end so that their bodies would be found by the police instead of some wandering kids.

A lot of people are thoroughly aghast at this, and yes, I agree it's sad, but I can't help but admire them for wanting to end their lives together, with dignity.