The food here continues to be pretty awful, which is actually going to turn out to be fortuitous, since I'm certainly going to lose weight. I made it over to the base gym yesterday and got a halfway decent workout in, despite the fact that the gym is undergoing renovations and was crowded. I'm spoiled by my home gym which is almost never crowded when we go--in fact we're often the only ones in there.

Otherwise though, I'm enjoying myself. The class is absolutely terrific. I really don't know diddlysquat about drugs, and this is filling in a lot of gaps in my education. I'm learning how different drugs affect the body in different ways, and how to recognize the symptoms and determine approximately what a person might be on. I'm learning a lot of the methodology of making drugs, and also the usage. Some of the ways people use drugs just blow me away--like slicing the skin open and placing tabs with LSD on them in the cut, them closing it with a bandaid..leaving the paper under the skin. Ick! Also learned about Ritalin. There is No Way I would ever put a child of mine on Ritalin knowing what I know now. For the love of god, if any of you have children on Ritalin who are approaching puberty, get them off of it!. Ritalin is a stimulant, that "helps" children with ADD (I'll go into my ADD rant some other time) by stimulating a portion of the brain that allows them to focus and pay attention. However, after puberty, the body chemistry changes, and Ritalin acts like Cocaine or Meth on little Johnny's brain. Ritalin can be crushed for snorting, or cooked and injected. People who have a family member on Ritalin need to watch that other family members or friends aren't skimming a few pills off little Johnny's prescribed supply.

I'm also learning some of the ways that drugs can be hidden for shipment, though this is not an interdiction class and we're not going into a whole lot of detail on that subject. I'm definitely going to ask to go to the interdiction class though. This Academy is essentially free for our agency (and, of course, for me) and so our agency tries to send people to classes here as often as possible. I've already looked through the course curriculum and picked out which classes I want to go to, and T-CAP (interdiction) is at the top of my list.

But of course, this type of school des not have anywhere near the stress level of Basic Academy, and thus there is something of a night life. I volunteered to be the DD (Designated Driver) last night, which resulted in me driving three drunk cops in a marked unit through downtown Meridian,MS, in the hopes of finding a decent club or bar. We ended up striking out though, and discovered that Meridian, MS, has no night life on a Monday night. Apparantly Wednesday is the night. Whatever. But I actually had a hysterically good time driving these drunk fools around. Wednesday should prove interesting.