Suspicions

If you remember my post about the dragon puzzle that my sister sent me a few months ago then you'll love this one.

She sent me this sailing ship puzzle today. It was supposed to look more or less like the picture above. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred pieces and no real instructions. And we all know how challenged I am even when I have instructions to follow.

About five hours later I ended up with this:
Not quite like the picture. You can't tell from the package picture, but all of those wooden sails are tied on with one continuous string about eighty five miles long.

And, once again, no real clear directions.

I made a hash out of the rigging and ran out of string before I got to the end. And wouldn't you know I couldn't find any white string in this house anywhere? Ah well, it's a good thing I'm a corrections officer and not a sailor. I'll round up some string and finish the last two sails on the top when I can.

My dad and stepmom sent me a very cool dragon picture and a bacon wallet (no assembly necessary) and a wee motorized insect that is currently chasing my dogs all over the house.

But I suspect strongly that my sister is trying to drive me crazy. She used to drive me about losing my hair before it actually started falling out. Back then it bothered me. Now that it is falling out and I don't care, she's trying to make me pull the rest out manually.

Payback is a beeyotch, apparently.

Miss Dorothy Has Left The Building

Miss Dorothy has left us and gone on to another job outside of the DOC. Tonight was her last night.

That just sucks. I know it's good for her. Hell, she got away from this snaphole of a place so it's got to be good. I know she was having to commute a long way to get here and it was hard on her.

But dammit, she was one of the good ones! She was one of the people you could count on to be there and do the things that needed to be done. We don't get alot of those.

And now she's gone.... snif........ pfui.

Miss Dorothy, we will miss you, dear. Come back to the blog at least now and then to reminisce, okay? Let us know how you are doing and what life outside the wire is really like. The rest of us have been here too long to remember things like that.

On the other hand, I hear that we will soon be losing Mr. Nose Hair.

I won't shed a single sniffle over him.

I'm sorry, but he's too young, too immature and too insecure to be working in this place and even though we will be down another officer, I think in the long run we will be a little safer without him here.

I just hope he doesn't get anybody else killed where he's going.

So, we lose one good one and one bad one. That's the way it goes.

And we'll just keep truckin' along...... doing life in prison on the installment plan.

Pfui.

Bye, Miss Dorothy!

ASAP Calls

I just hate the ASAP calls. They mean that something bad has happened or something bad is about to happen or somebody found something bad that needs to be handled right away.

It's like when you are in a hospital and they call for something "Stat". They always mean "right freaking now, not ten minutes from now or even tens seconds from now, but right freaking now or somebody is probably going to die."

So we're up in D-wing finishing closing the windows since it didn't get done on day shift. Nothing against them, they were busy. And we hear a call for the B-yard sarge to come down to the wobblehead house ASAP.

Oh snap. That is not a good place for an ASAP call.

A few minutes later we hear a garbled call from there and we all freeze. The Control Center asked them to repeat and we hear "Code 16! (medical emergency) We got a guy down here with his head all busted open!"

Oh snap again.

All of us.. Me, Chuck, KP and the New Guy (haven't figured out a name for him yet) all cross our fingers and silently pray "Please let it be an accident! Maybe he just slipped and fell!"

No such luck. Not long after that here comes a lockup. No blood on him, so I'm assuming he's not the one who got beat up. It's B&C (for Big and Crazy), who manages to assault someone every time he gets let out of the house, it seems.

I ask him "Did you get in a fight again?"

He just nods and says "Yup. I did." So we lock him in a cell.

And the great part about that was we never even got a call that they were locking him up. He just showed up in cuffs with another C.O. Heck, we didn't even know why he was getting locked up until I asked him. I just love the flow of information.

I get intel from other staff who have seen the guy and the nurse when she finally comes down. The dude had a cut on his forehead all up into his scalp and came very close to losing his ear. So it looks like B&C will be facing some new charges again.

And the thing is, he's one of the quietest and calmest inmates from the wobblehead house we ever get. It's always "Yes, Sir" and "No Sir" and "Please" and "Thank you" when we are dealing with him down in the hive.


But at least we managed to get the D-wing windows closed. Something went right.

And tomorrow is my friday. Yayyyyyyyyyyy!

Closing The Windows

It's that time of year again. We have to close and secure all of the cell windows. Unlike in a regular house where they can open and close them at will, we have to remove a heavy steel screen and close each window ourselves by hand.

It also means that we have to cuff both offenders, open the door, take them out and wrestle this heavy frame out, close the window, put the frame back and relock it. What a pain in the butt.

I have tried for years to get them to put the latches on the outside of the windows. That way one guy with a ladder could open or close the whole house in about an hour with no reason to take the inmates out of the cells at all.

I guess that makes too much sense. When you start making sense here, people get suspicious and think you are up to something. Like trying to get out of work.

I'm just thinking.... one hundred cells we have to enter one at a time. We only have one window key and one tool for pulling the frames out so we can only do one cell at a time. We have on an average one hundred and fifty inmates in the house. And every single one of them has to come out of the cell to close the window. Plus the fact that the chances of getting hurt wrestling that heavy frame.... that is almost a certainty. KP dropped one of them on his finger tonight. I've done that and it doesn't feel good. Almost every year some staff member gets hurt by the window frames.

If we did it my way we could just weld those frames shut and never have to mess with them again.

It'll never happen.

Discordant Notes

No, this isn't one of them, but it's eerily similar. This inmate up in C-wing has been passing these notes out under his cell door for the past couple of days. Each one is stranger than the next. His notes are like reading the labels on Dr. Bronner's soap.

The first note I read was addressed to our governor. Well, sort of. It had the governors name on it but it was addressed to "Our Government". It was begging the governor not to take away his program or mental health. I'm assuming he was referring to the mental health staff and not his actual mental health.

But you never know.

At the top of each note is the word "History" and they are all signed "The Prophet."

Hoo boy.

I shuffled through the notes as quickly as possible to keep from having a severe brain hemorrhage. They were a bit difficult to decipher on some of his points. But one thing he made sure to add in each one was these facts: "I have an IQ of 36 and I'm 44 years old. I'm smart."

Wow. With a fine brain like that I'm surprised he isn't working for us.

He sent out a couple more notes today demanding money for various charitable causes. Millions of dollars for cancer and stem cell research and sick children and the like. I didn't know quite what to make of them. It almost sounded like he was holding himself hostage in there until they cough up the dough.

Like I said, you just never know. He might be.

Right before we left BG went upstairs in C-wing to do something and came down to tell me "He's stuck out a few more notes! Do you want them?" I just shook my head and said "No no! Let someone else pick them up this time...... My brain already hurts."

Holes

I don't know what it is about our maintenance department. But they just love digging holes and leaving them.

Working in a prison, doesn't that seem a little counterproductive to you?

You watch any prison escape movie and they almost always get out by using a tunnel. Sure, sometimes they use disguises or crash the gates or go over the wall..... but when you think of someone escaping from prison, you think of someone tunneling out.

And here these guys are digging holes all over the camp. And it's not even really the maintenance staff that is actually digging! It's their inmate workers!

They will have a plumbing problem or something, so they will dig a hole where they think the problem might be. Then rather than fix the problem and fill the hole back in, they will just string some yellow caution tape around the big a** pile of dirt and the hole and leave it for a month or two.

Does this seem like a good idea to you?

Maybe it's just me. Apparently I have issues.

Maybe the maintenance guys are taking bets on whose hole will turn into a starter kit for an escape tunnel. It wouldn't surprise me at all.

And boy, won't that make us look like freaking geniuses when it hits the papers.

Ohhhhh yeah.

No I Won't Make You One, Sorry

OK, just in case anybody was laboring under the impression that I was some kind of genius (he says as he rooooollls his eyes) here's the proof that I might just possibly be one step up from a totally brain dead idiot.

I posted while I was on vacation about Guy and his swell blog (grin) and how he got me on the idea of making an adirondack chair. And I wrote about how I sweated and ciphered and cut and sawed and split wood and cussed and finally made one and how proud I was. It turned out okay. So much okay in fact, that I have had people asking me how much I would sell them for, if I was so inclined to make more of them.

I'm not quite sure I want to go there just yet. As long as I am making them for fun, it's all fun. But if I start making them to sell, it might seem like work and I might not enjoy making them anymore. I don't know.

At any rate, I had this brilliant idea that I would make a smaller version. Mostly due to the fact that I didn't have enough wood on hand to make another full-sized one. So I sat down and sweated and ciphered some more and figured I would make a chair half the size of the first one.

It seems there was an error in my ciphering somewhere. Maybe I should have gone for three-quarter size instead. The sucker turned out only sixteen inches wide and only about nineteen inches tall! Ack!!!!!

Big enough, maybe, for a two year old. Or somebody really short whose butt is no more than about seven inches wide. That sure lets me out.

I don't think I'm mentally set up for making itty-bitty things like that. Even though it was cold in the shop I was sweating bullets like I was performing brain surgery when I tried to put the damn thing together.

I'm just glad that the demon possessed thing is done. I'll take it back down to the shop and throw a coat of stain and sealer on it and call it good. Then I'll stick it up in the storage and never look at it again.

And no, before you ask, I will not make you one.

Forget it.