It's so good to be alive in such a hazardous world/To be alive and see the victory unfurled

Today little guide dog puppy Simba came over for part of the week. He's a darling little 13-week-old black lab. All legs, big floppy ears, and he loves pouncing around the floor. Since he's just a baby we're not going many places with him. He's going to Starbucks with me when I hang out with Cortney today, and Tully's tomorrow when I hang out with Sam. Oh, and to Eburg on Weds for the job interview.

I also got to meet with a deputy at Sammamish Police Department to talk about starting an explorer post. She especially wanted to find out what we do exactly and what would be the selling points to get people interested in joining the post. I'm really excited for them! It'll be great to have a post on the plateau and hopefully it'll be some good competition for Redmond. I also offered to help out with mock scenes on the off-weeks if they'd like. So cool! It was fun just to talk through why I've loved being an Explorer. Like one of her questions is what was the biggest thing I've learned? I think it's just having that self confidence when you walk into a room that "I'm an officer so I'm not going to let you walk all over me." Sure, I'm not an officer yet but that's an attitude we're taught from day 1 because it can be hard to actually develop that strong presence. And learning to balance that with being a person who it's easy to talk to....I guess I just value myself more than I did before. That like I've said on here before about how I learned at Academy how to push yourself. Like I remember our 2nd night, we were all exhausted and had just gotten done with evening formation. After evening formation we went to TAC time where basically they could do whatever they wanted with us. We'd been running, doing 6-inch leg lifts, pushups, etc all day and then our TACs decided to take us on a run. We had no idea how far we were going to go, we just had to find some reserve of energy and go. And our head TAC led the run so he set a pretty quick pace. And we did even more PT after the little run.

6 days ladies and gentlemen.