How'd it get to be July so fast?
Wowee zowie, here it is four months and fifteen million or so calls later, no wonder I've had no time to write.

K. moved on to the police dept. in February, and so for the past six months the two of us who were left have had to handle what is, in the summer, really a four- or five-person job. Our usual on-call rotation is two weeks on, four weeks off. We've been doing three weeks on, three weeks off all this time instead, from spring into summer, just when (of course) we're busiest. That's how long it takes them to hire somebody new.

Actually, it only took them a little over three months to hire the new guy. He started in May. Then he had two months of on the job training, riding along with our senior officer while she tried to cram her twenty years' worth of experience into his head in just sixty days. In the meantime we still had to split up all the calls between just two of us, so it's not like his presence was any help as far as spreading the load out a little.

Now I guess it's been two or three weeks that he's been out on his own, handling his own calls, but still with constant supervision and consultations because it's probably going to be at least a year before he really knows what he's doing. And in the meantime none of the three of us have had any time at the police range. He has to qualify with the rifle before he can start doing the on-call. That could take another few months. So it's still three weeks on, three weeks off into the foreseeable future for M. and me.

Oh well. Lots of overtime. It's aggravating when you're doing it, but a month or two later it's nice to get that extra fat paycheck.

Our new guy D. is the first new hire since I started five years ago. Just five years? It seems like it's been much longer. Watching D. going through the learning process is an unexpected reminder to me of how hard it was for me when I first started. I seriously did not think I was going to make it through my first summer. Guess I was tougher than I thought. Or something.