Jeeeeeez.... I can't believe how many people emailed me after my last entry and got on my case for not writing more fiction!

Well, life and work have been fairly mundane in this past week. I'm steadily plugging away on home improvements, and am finally feeling pleased about how the paint job is turning out in the living room. I did discover that I absolutely SUCK as a painter. I make mistakes and errors and sloppy spots all over, and I simply can't do corners properly, especially when the walls are two different colors. And just FYI, the ole masking tape trick does NOT work, and all it actually does is allow the paint to seep underneath and create a bigger sloppy spot, and then peels the paint off when you try and remove said tape.

But, anyway, the living room is finally to the point where I would not be embarrassed to have people over. (Not that I'm overwhelmed with house guests as it is, but, well...)

In work news, I leave on Sunday to go to Meridian, MS, to the Regional Counterdrug Training Academy, to take a weeklong course in Patrol Officer Response to Street Narcotics. I'm really looking forward to this class, since my actual knowledge of street narcotics is pretty limited, and I've heard from others who have gone through this school that it's pretty darn excellent. So I'm psyched. I think I'll probably take my laptop along with me on this trip since a) I'm driving not flying, and can therefore lug more junk more easily and b) who knows, I might actually decide to WRITE.

In other work news, I got called back out to Bob's Apartments today (where the fire was.) But this time I was just there as a Uniformed Presence while the Fire Marshall, Arson Investigator, and several Parish Code Enforcement Agents descended on the place to cite the owners for a plethora of code and zoning violations. Bob's is a pretty dismal slum and violations were easily found. I didn't have to do much except stand around and look vaguely official and slightly menacing. Actually I was really hoping that the fire dudes would want to do inspections inside some of the apartments, since they don't need warrants to go in because of Fire Marshall Act something-or-other, and if I went in with them (for security purposes, you know) I would then be lawfully there and if I happened to see something, like say, contrabandish-looking, then I would be able to legally seize it... But unfortunately the fire dudes had plenty of violations on the outsides, and no need to go into any of the fine dwellings at Bob's Apartments. However, I and one of the code enforcement agents were amused by the antics of one of the residents, who apparantly realized that we might very well be coming inside his apartment at some point. We watched as he hauled his sofa out of his apartment and dumped it in the back of his pickup, and then a big stuffed chair which went on top of the sofa. He then drove the pickup fifty feet to the other side of the parking lot. Then for some reason he removed a wire cage containing a ferret from the apartment, but this he merely placed on the grass in front of his dwelling. So, the agent and I snickered at him for a while, then we got into a game of wondering where he had actually hidden the dope.

I won when I exclaimed: "He's hidden the dope in the ferret's ass!!"

Yes, the rest of our time there we were imitating the ferret from the budweiser commercials.