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Well, my long awaited return to the Kingdom of Hays has come and gone with out much ado. Although I did get my name in the paper, check out Hays Daily News. If this link dies let me know. I don’t Google myself as much as I should. This new position appears to be opening some doors already, although slowly.

Virginia and D.C. were impressive (I’m not sure yet if that is the right word) I don’t think there are many places where you can find Secret Service and bums within four or five blocks of each other. We saw the construction of the Nationals stadium. Who are the Nationals? I’m not big into baseball and asked myself the same question. Sorry America, I know that’s your favorite past time. I don’t care much for apple pie either, come to think of it. Intriguing…

My wife came down for the weekend and we got to experience D.C. on a windy, rainy, cloudy day. Needless to say we moved pretty quickly, although we did enjoy seeing the monuments and were impressed by the shear size of all of them. The National Monument in particular was so much larger in real life than I had expected.

After we trekked around the monuments we thought it might be time for a drive. Wrong answer. Although the traffic wasn’t bad the layout of D.C. is pretty insane. I understand it is an old city and based of the English system of transportation, but it took us a good bit to get used to. I saw an angry drunk kicking a light pole and helped a very large oppressive looking man push his SUV after it died. We didn’t talk so he may have been pretty nice, I was slightly concerned that getting out of the vehicle may not be the best idea. Only after I got back in the car did I notice the mile of traffic backed up honking at us. What can you do? He couldn’t do it himself. And only after I got back in the car did I realize how much safer I felt inside a vehicle.

Well that’s pretty much it for the D.C. trip. Overall the training in VA went pretty well. I feel like I learned just enough to probably screw something up. From what I’ve heard everyone kind of felt the same way, so that is a good sign, right? I guess the bad part of the trip, and I knew this before I left, is trying to keep up with school. I think I’m about a week behind and have quite a bit to catch up on so I’m going to get started. Peace.

First week in VA

So the first week of training is over. The hardest thing to learn so far is which program will be used for what. Like any new position there is a learning curve that I will have to get over. Probably one of the most frustrating things is that there is no actual ‘training class’. We basically sit in with the current agents and learn by watching. It’s different than anything I’ve experienced before. Of course I don’t know how much a class would help because of the randomness of situations. There are so many one off situations that it wouldn’t make sense to spend much time training on them. This may be the best way for this department to train so I’m rolling with it and trying to make the most of the training that I am getting.

School has been difficult to keep up with to say the least. I was used to having days off in the middle of the week and time in class to work on homework, but now the only time I have is after work. I’ve been couped up in the hotel room working on site mock-ups and javascript projects for four hours a night. I’ve got quizzes and exams and discussions due this week so I’m sure it’s going to be another busy week.