Jet came home from Nashville on Saturday morning. He left for his flight at 5am, and we picked him up at DIA at 8am, and so started a very dense five days.
Two for the police department, one for the K9 unit, one for dispatch itself (the Thin Gold Line), one for the fallen, and one that was for the whole Public Safety Department. That last was the newest coin for the whole unit, and it was a coin that the manager of the whole Dispatch company hadn't gotten, yet.
And tonight, Jet went home, very much feeling like we'd all accomplished a fair bit.
On Saturday was the graduation of a dear friend of both Jet and myself. Jet met them during high school, I've really gotten to know them better in the last year, as they and I made more of an effort to see each other and really talk and listen to each other, as we're both involved in the restorative justice practices of the Longmont Community Justice Partnership. So it's a natural mix of people who like asking each other open questions and really listening to each other.
They're finishing at PhD, with some really rough spots with an advisor that has not been the most available for them. It gives me a lot of gratitude for Jet's advisor, who is nearly always available to him as he navigates his early years through his program in Bio-Medical Engineering.
Having several young researchers in my gaming group has exposed me to a lot of what's going on with modern research, and it's amazing to see how far they've gotten, what practices are matter-of-course these days, and what kinds of tools are available to them, as well as how far the fields that were new in my day have progressed to the point where they are just everyday tools for anyone to pick up and use.
It was fun, during the party, to just sit around and talk with all the people that they felt were important to their life: partners, high school teachers, classmates, housemates, all, and getting to interact and exchange interests was fun. But it was also a celebration of a long long effort that was ending.
Sunday was the end of Sarah Varasco's pastorship of our congregation at UCC Longmont. She's been our head pastor for the last six years, and with her partner, Beth, has led us to a much better place. Her confidence and faith, combined with our ability to help her get things done, have gotten us to doing a huge amount of the gun safety in Longmont, including finding the money and gaining the influence to do county-wide gun safe and gun lock giveaways and partnering with RAWtools to allow people to turn their guns into garden tools, or at least give them over to be broken up and destroyed to the point where they can't hurt anyone ever again.
She's also helped us keep on the track for housing the homeless, and worked hard to shepherd us through work service in Puerto Rico and helped us get our own confidence and faith in ourselves back after a rough patch with a pastor that wasn't so helpful. She's also helped Amelia, our associate pastor, grow to the point where Amelia is willing and capable of taking the helm for us, and becoming our senior pastor with room for a new associate.
On Sunday we celebrated her release from all her duties to us. And the mix of celebration for her, sadness for all, and a parting of ways, but opening and making room for what the Spirit will do with us going onward was very real.
Monday was my last day at 911. I've spent twelve years, now, doing transcripts for dispatch, with full access to all criminal databases, and it's one of the reasons why I decided to stay away from writing publicly so much. The security training is pretty clear about the hazards of having it known that I had access, even as a volunteer, and I realized that I needed to just walk away for a while.
It was a mix of things. There is definitely second-hand trauma involved. It was also eating my hands, because I'd gone from doing maybe six cases a week to averaging 50 a week in the last few months. Longmont has grown, and I'm not all that fond of the fact that I have first hand knowledge that the crime here has grown as well. That doubling the population in the time I've been working at it, plus the court system here demanding more transparency of police activities with every case, has grown the work load to ten times what it used to be. The whole system has changed twice since I started, and while I can laud it for exercising my neural plasticity, it was also such a pain.
I'm traveling a lot more, now, and my parents are at a stage where being able to visit them at any time is getting to be more important to me. And I hated being gone for a week and having twice the reports to do the next time I came in. Fifty was bad enough, doubling it to a hundred, and even if Ken had time to do a few, it might be seventy or eighty or sometimes ninety and taking twice as long was tiring, and really made my hands ache.
But... when I went in for my last day, they gave me a gift basket that included six challenge coins.
It says a lot that the "police department" of Longmont City actually goes by the name "Longmont Public Safety" in the directory of for all the police departments in Colorado.
The charcuterie board was amazing, and actually had my years of service on it. The blanket made me cry a little, as Dispatch has a room where any dispatcher can go if they just need some time, and all that room has in it is a very comfortable chair with a lot of blankets, pillows, and soft music. I really needed the time out. And I got to keep my lanyard, and the head of the volunteers said that she would keep my ID card for the next six months, just in case I was going to come back.
I might. I don't know. I just know that I need some time off to actually process my experiences there and to work through what I'd want if I did go back. I heard the Longmont Flood of 2013, I heard shootings, stabbings, countless domestic violence cases, hundreds of accidents, thefts, and attacks. Kristine said that she was grateful for the thousands of tapes I'd made. Luckily enough, they'd long gone from making tapes to doing it all in a digital archives, but I still remembering burning floppy disks for each of the incidents I was finding phone traffic for.
Tuesday was the end of a year long saga concerning blood in my urine that was, at first, considered a flag for possible cancer. We did an exam, took a few months to get a biopsy, and that turned out negative, but after several months of just not knowing. The year after follow up was Tuesday and while I'm not completely clear, the amount of blood has lessened, and it's an indicator that things are going in the "right" direction. The urologist said he didn't want to see me again, with a smile, and then he added, well, of course, unless there was visible amounts of blood or my annual exam showed anything worsening. Dr. Paddock was good, and if I need him, it's good to know that he's there; but for now, I'm glad enough to be done.
Wednesday, today, was when Jet finished his saga of his upper jaw surgery to correct his bite. The whole thing had to move last Christmas/Winter break, and we had him for six of his eight week recovery period. Fed him a lot of ice cream then, and it was good to be able to take care of him while he recovered from the surgery. He did great. The surgeon was absolutely fabulous and even gave Jet all the paraphernalia for the surgery to give to his fellow lab mates (who are all making various types of equipment for surgeons and wanted to see).
There was the interesting bit where the surgery itself stretched the nerves in Jet's face to the point where they all went numb for a while. So Jet never had to use pain medication, at all, and by the time his nerves came back, his bones had healed and the rest of the tissue was healed enough he had no pain at all.
Jet's had to wear Invisalign since the surgery to do the fine tuning of his bite, and it's all good now, so today he got to recycle all his old trays and get a new retainer fitted for the rest of his life.
The weather is turning toward fall, too. From 100's in the height of summer, that were a bit much, the monsoon afternoon thunderstorms have returned, for a while at least, and hopefully will continue as they've washed away the smoke from the four wildfires that happened just a couple of weeks ago. The damp and the cooler nights have made the fires easier to contain, and hopefully will retard new ones.
So I'm processing, and figured I'd write it up, and I hope this finds you well. I'm tired, I think, but feeling pretty accomplished. That was a lot to get through, but it's nice to mark the ending this time.
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