Sunrise Chronicles

This past week we spent most of our time learning how to use the manual detailing the proper handling of animal products. I think the biggest point of confusion in the whole lesson was, "What the heck? Beef jerky isn't considered shelf stable? That stuff lasts forever!" Also, we only have authority over certain animal products that pose a risk to US livestock or public health due to specific diseases. If you bring in some exotic product like iguana meat or kangaroo meat, we may call Fish and Wildlife Services on you, or the FDA, but we can't do anything ourselves. Some people were flipping through the manual saying, "Where's the section on reptiles? What about fish?" No, we don't regulate those.

Finally we entered the home stretch, which is our last chunk of lessons on things like anti-terrorism and other such topics. Our final exam will be this Thursday. After that, we'll just do some role play activities and prepare for our graduation.

And none too soon. Frederick got its first real, visible-on-the-ground snow yesterday. It has grown colder all week. Earlier, I slipped on some ice in the parking lot of the training center and went splat full-length on the ground. Luckily, neither I nor my new uniform was hurt. I will be glad when I get back to San Francisco, where I doubt the temperature is in the thirties.

I had intended to post earlier with a picture of me wearing my new uniform. Unfortunately, my camera is malfunctioning. Something is wrong with its ability to perceive light, because all of the pictures appear either completely washed out or bathed in shadow.

Classes are proceeding as usual. We're learning various manual procedures now, which mainly involves looking items up on lists and tables to see whether they are allowed into the country. Everyone asks, "Why can't we just look this stuff up online instead of flipping through this six-inch manual?" The answer is that the government is slowly accumulating the information into databases for us to access. The first chapter of the manual (the one handling fruits and vegetables for consumption) is currently online at FAVIR. (If you want to try out this site, note that the public does not have access to all of the special exceptions, such as seasonal exemptions.) Even when they get the whole manual online, though, they aren't sure whether they will teach classes using the online version...because if they did, they would have to provide the entire class with laptops to study outside of class time, and that gets expensive. Then what happens if the server goes down, or the connection, or there's a power outage? So we'll be flipping pages for quite a while.

Otherwise, things are going pretty well. The weather has turned quite cold, so it's hard to pry myself out of my room to go anywhere. I tried using the hotel's grocery shopping service, but it didn't live up to expectations. Though I wrote all the specifications of the grapefruit juice I wanted, they bought 30% juice instead of the 100% juice that I had requested. I guess I'll be doing my own grocery shopping from now on.

I did go out yesterday when a couple of classmates invited me to join them perusing the Frederick Christmas craft fair. It was pretty nice. Not as large as the Ann Arbor Art Fair, of course, but it did take up a number of warehouse-sized buildings. I made a few small purchases, though I had to limit myself to things that I could carry back to California.

My Warcraft characters are leveling slowly. What with my poor connection and the time I have to spend on training-related affairs, I'm not getting as much gaming done as I would otherwise. I'll get there eventually, though.

This week at the professional development center we finished up the last of our pest identification classes. The way these classes are designed, the instructor lectures with PowerPoint for a while and then gives us several hours to look at our samples under microscopes. Last Friday, when we were doing caterpillars, we had the entire eight hour day scheduled with nothing but examining samples. This Wednesday we had six free hours for beetles, and then another several hours for beetle larvae on Thursday.

Considering that we don't have to memorize the samples, we just have to be able to identify them by comparing them with diagrams and descriptions in our books, it doesn't take that long. In fact, I got through the samples by looking at them once, and I was done, with hours to go before we could leave at the end of the day. No problem, though, I just pulled out one of my novels and sat there reading for the duration.

That is, until Thursday morning, when the instructor dropped this bombshell on us: "On CBP time, you can only read CBP-approved material." We are apparently not allowed to bring in reading material of any kind (not just novels but also things like newspapers) to fill our time during class when we have nothing else to do. Our fourth week into the course, and this is the first time anyone has said such a thing. We are also not allowed to listen to music because wearing earphones is a violation of the uniform code. We can't put our heads down and sleep, either; we were warned that students have been fired for sleeping during class time before. By that point, I was so annoyed that I burst out, "Well, how about staring blankly off into space, is that still allowed?"

After that, the instructor felt guilty and went to fetch a collection of CBP-approved material for us to read. This included the official CBP magazine, entomology books, a couple history/culture-related books, and the muster binder. (This is a binder filled with printouts of reports detailing various smuggling methods that have been uncovered and lists of wanted fugitives.) I grabbed a book called Understanding Arabs, which was interesting enough. I finished it by Friday, though. I hope the remainder of our classes don't have so much dead time, because entomology texts are not my idea of a compelling read.

Another incident this week is that one member of the class flunked out. This happens by scoring lower than 80% on both a test and a retest. The tests are so mind-numbingly easy that I didn't believe it at first when I heard the news.

But then, I'm also surprised when other members of the class fail to notice study methods that would make their lives sooo much less stressful. For example, with the beetles, they tell us what the host of each beetle is. This information will be given on the test. Though we have 30 beetles to identify, there may only be 4 beetles that are found on wood, for example. Thus, once you know that it's a wood beetle, you only have to choose among 4 possibilities, of which only two actually resemble each other (with differently shaped antennae to tell them apart). What amazed me was that some people in the class didn't think to check the host before trying to identify the beetle. Well, sure, it's going to be hard if you're picking one out of 30 when you could be picking one out of 4. Whenever someone asked me for study advice, "Check the host first!" is what I answered. It seems blindingly obvious to me, but I guess people miss things when they stress out.

And, I imagine, this is why they give us so much dead time during class. If everyone studied the most efficient way, we could cut out all that time and go home a week earlier. <sigh>

Friday we had our practical lessons on pest interception. The instructor brought in knives and cutting boards for each of us and supplied us with a number of produce items purchased from a local organic grocery store. We had to cut open the various fruits and vegetables (and flowers) and examine them for pests. They even supplied us with several pumpkins for us to "check for pests" by carving faces into them. ^_^ The people in my row decorated our pumpkin with various pieces of the vegetables we were examining to make the pumpkin look like a beetle. Once that was put on display, bunches of the other instructors in the facility came in to snap pictures of it.

Friday night I was invited to attend a Halloween party that one of my classmates was throwing. I baked ginger cookies and brought them. It turned out to be the most sedate Halloween party I've ever attended. When I walked in, everyone was sitting around just staring at each other. It took considerable effort to get some conversation going; there were no games or music or anything planned. Once people got to talking, it went okay. If I had known it would be so low-key, though, I probably would have skipped it to go raiding with my Warcraft guild instead. They had fun killing Illidan (final boss of Black Temple) for the first time.

Another issue that cropped up this week is that my roommate told me she expects her brother and boyfriend to come visit for a week. She expects they will be very noisy, so she requested to move to a single room. However, the manager told her that if she moved to a single room, then I would have to move to a single room as well. Single rooms don't have ovens in their kitchens. I said flat out that I didn't want to move because I didn't want to lose my kitchen. I suggested that she see if one of the other women in single rooms would switch with her, but apparently they don't want to go to the trouble of moving all their accumulated stuff. (If she had asked earlier, like when we first moved in, someone would likely have agreed.) I don't know how this is going to turn out. I don't mind if she has visitors, I just hope they don't have wild parties until the wee hours every night.

Next week we will be moving on to the "regulatory decision making" portion of the course. There will be lessons on such things as smuggling, ag bioterrorism, and quality assurance. We are going to move out of our current classroom (which is a lab) to a more standard classroom. We will also be closer to wearing our official uniforms. We had them all delivered over a week ago, but half the class had to return items that didn't fit properly. We have to wait until everyone has enough parts of the uniform to wear before we can switch over. The replacement pieces are starting to trickle in, so it won't be long now.

I had a lovely visit with my parents last weekend. They drove me around shopping, and we paid a visit to some local wineries plus a nearby outlet mall. megory was able to get a pair of shoes just like my new ones for a considerable discount.

The training week started with our first test. We will be having 12 tests over the course of the 10-week program, and we need 80% on each test to pass. After the test, we started working on identifying plant diseases and weed seeds. They gave us samples to look at, and we matched them to illustrations and samples in our study booklets. We had our test over that material on Friday and then moved on to the entomology segment. We will be doing the same thing--looking at bugs preserved in alcohol and matching them with illustrations and an identification key. The nice thing is that we don't have to memorize the names of everything, we just have to know how to look them up in our reference books. That makes the tests relatively easy.

On Friday, some boxes of our new uniforms arrived. Not everyone has all the pieces yet, though. For example, I have the pants and shoes but not the shirts. We won't start wearing them until everyone in the class has at least one full set, so that we all match.

In my spare time, I've gotten rather addicted to the Animal Planet channel, which I've never had before. I've also started working out a bit in the evenings, mainly because sitting in a classroom for eight hours a day can't possibly be very good for me.

I discovered that several other members of the class are also Warcraft players. We decided to start new characters together on a server to form our own CBP guild, just for playing around.

My main guild, Wicked Claw, has been working on making further progress in Black Temple now that the latest patch has made the bosses easier. Last night we killed Reliquary of Souls and Mother Sharaz, both of which were new for us. We were hoping to go back and finish the last two encounters, but it seems the instance servers are all down tonight, so we'll have to try again next week.

I started out my journey with a bit of panic ~7pm Sunday night, when I looked up the BART schedule and found that the earliest train would get me to the airport (international terminal) at 5:30am, while my plane was scheduled to leave (from the domestic terminal) at 6:10am. Luckily, mangaroo was able to suggest an airport shuttle service that could get me there earlier, even on such short notice. They came to pick me up at 4am Monday morning, and I was off.

The flight was turbulent in places, but other than that, uneventful. For those of us traveling through Chicago, that is. For the poor guy who had the later flight through Texas, such was not the case, and he wound up delayed by over an hour.

We checked in to the hotel, where I was assigned to share a suite with another woman from my San Francisco group. The suite consists of two private bedrooms, each with its own bathroom attached. The bedrooms open onto a shared living/dining/kitchen area. The kitchen comes with a refrigerator, four-burner stove, coffee maker, toaster, and dishwasher. (I will be hard-pressed to find an apartment this nice when I move back to California...) There is also an organic grocery store about a block away, which is convenient. I went a bit overboard on my first shopping spree, though, purchasing four bags full of items that I then had to lug back to my room. It's a good thing I've had practice carrying heavy bags around!

We get a free breakfast buffet every day. It's not just danishes and coffee, either, it's a full spread, including scrambled eggs, potatoes, biscuits, and various types of cereal. At 7:30am, some of the instructors showed up to drive us all to the training center. (There are five government-owned Suburbans that are assigned to our class, which we can use for traveling within an 8 mile radius of our hotel.) We spent most of the day on orientation-type lectures. At the very end, we were sent to pick up our off-the-shelf trainee uniforms.

This turned into a bit of an issue for some of the female members of the class, because the trainee uniforms are all designed for men, in male sizes. I had submitted my waist and hip measurements, and wound up being assigned pants with a waist two inches wider than my hip measurement. I have no idea why they picked that number, but they were HUGE. They had to keep giving me incrementally smaller sizes for me to try on, and I ended up one of the last two to finish (along with my roommate, who had the same problem). The size I ended up with is slightly shorter in the leg than I would prefer, but they didn't have anything else in that waist size that wouldn't drag on the ground.

Fortunately, later in the week we will be professionally measured for our official uniforms, which will be delivered in about three weeks or so.

On our lunch break, we were sent out to a nearby strip mall to buy food, since no one had brought any lunch. (Not everyone had the opportunity to buy any food the evening before.) While we sat around eating and chatting, I found out that one of the other women from my class (the one not my roommate) also plays Warcraft.

The hotel where we're staying is quite nice, as you may have gathered. They even have a grocery service where we can submit a list of groceries and they will go out and buy everything, delivering the items to the room for free. (We pay for the groceries, of course, but not for the delivery.) That's very convenient if one happens to want food that's not organic, and doesn't want to go through the trouble of signing out one of the government vehicles to drive around shopping. The downside of having such an easy time cooking supper is that not everyone is a good cook. A short while ago (while I was in the middle of trying to set up my internet connection), someone burnt their steak, setting off the fire alarm and sending everyone out the emergency exits. I sure hope that doesn't happen often...