I'm beginning to get the "Are you alive?" emails, so I guess it's time for me to do some updating of the ole blog.

Yep, still alive! Nicely busy with work and training and personal life. Work is slowing down a bit now that our three who were in the Academy are graduated, which means that instead of taking call every fourth week, it's every sixth or seventh week, instead. MUCH nicer. Although, I did get called out a couple of weeks ago even though I wasn't technically on call. There was a homicide over in Slidell, so the on-call techs were busy with that, and then someone called to report a skeleton in a tree on this end of the parish, so dispatch called to see if I could come out for that.

And, since I wasn't massively busy with anything, I said No Problem. I figured it was either someone's leftover Halloween decorations, or maybe some kind of intimidation thing. But, no, it was the real thing: skeletal remains hanging in a tree. (Most likely a suicide, and had probably been there for a couple of years.) So, work remains pretty interesting. And no, they still have not announced who is getting the promotion to Sergeant. [insert eye roll]

This Sunday I'll be driving up with one of my coworkers to St. Louis for a week-long Medicolegal Death Investigation course. I'm not looking forward to being away from my family for a week, but I am looking forward to the course itself. It's supposed to be a great course, and it has a good reputation and carries a lot of clout. Besides, it'll probably give me TONS of writing-related info!

And, finally, after I get back, I'm going to be going down to New Roads, LA on May 6th to compete in a Bench Press competition. I'm still steadily training and losing fat; I'm just not posting the stats anymore. It was good to do it for those first three months, though, because that definitely kept me on the right track. I'm wearing a size ten very comfortably now, and I stll have about 3 months until the contest that I'm debating entering which gives me a lot of time to tighten up a lot more. And then, of course, in August I'll be heading out to LA for the Writers Of The Future award ceremony, and I definitely want to be in top shape for that!