Training Day 3: Cloaca Me Crazy!

 Today was FAR more enjoyable than yesterday. The trainings we went over were WAY more interesting & we actually got to do a wetlab where we did PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) training and got to catch chickens w/a chicken catching pole, restrain them, then swab the oropharynx & cloaca.
 We also did some training w/ dealing w/ media & the public. Basically, we treat them the same, that is to say, the public IS media nowadays. Some of the scenarios they put forth sent a chill down my spine, kind of unexpectedly. It seems that we could do everything right & still be wrong. All it takes is one single, solitary frame of a picture taken at precisely the wrong moment & someone w/ bad intentions can say whatever they want to say about what happened in that picture at that moment. For example, I was taking Xmas pictures w/ my Husky many moons past & trying to get him closer to me, I pulled him in, so he was leaning toward me & my arm was kind of around his neck at that moment. At precisely that moment, my friend snapped the pic & it looks like I am really strangling him, but I was not. Put that into someone's hands who had nefarious purposes & real trouble could come about. What is not assisting us is that the trust of the government is at an all time low & there are hundreds of thousands of conspiracy theorists out there. This is a relatively benign video taken by a premise owner during a surveillance/sampling visit of their backyard operation. This could have gone very badly for the USDA & who knows, someone could still take this information & edit it to make us look very bad. Oh & the video is far longer than anyone will actually watch, but it's merely an example of the kinds of things that we'll be faced with & we just have to grin & bear it.
 Well, I woke up at 3:30 this morning, so I'm kinda beat. Not to mention that I probably lost 3# in water weight during training. Stay classy, San Diego!

Training Day 2...or The Day I Stopped Worrying & Learned to Fear Active Shooters, Meth Labs & Pissed Off Farmers

For today & tomorrow, our class was divided in two. We each have different schedule of things to do, then we switch & do what the other team did today on Wednesday. First on my docket today was blood draws! Yay! But, I find out when we get there that it was US getting blood drawn, not us getting to draw blood. Grady was not happy. One of my colleagues was FAR unhappier about it than I am & I would NEVER poke fun of someone for having a fear of needles entering your skin & stealing your precious, precious lifeblood. After that, my group had only online training modules & a couple of videos that we had to watch as a class. ONE document contained links to 21 other items that ranged from documents/powerpoints that were a few pages, to one 146 page document to other web pages that contained links to also other docs, or still OTHER web pages with multiple links to other docs. However, it seemed like a house of mirrors, b/c some of the links & items were redundant.
 I spent hours looking at various presentations & documents. Some links lead back to places I had already been & a LOT had information that was already covered in a different document/slideshow/whatever. I was pretty much done with my work by about 1. We didn't leave the facility until 4:45.
 The trainers put a couple of shorter presentations up on a screen. One was about Worker's Comp, had to be probably over 45 min, maybe an hour. It was a slideshow with a poorly mic'd woman narrating over it. Now, this wasn't just any woman's voice. Imagine, if you will, the most boring lecture or class you've ever attended. Imagine if you attended that 12 times consecutively in one day. Now imagine if that experience were embodied in the voice of a woman narrating a slideshow about Worker's Comp. Now, multiply that by 10. At about 2 minutes, 23 seconds in, the trainer that started it could no longer handle it & said, "Hey, how about if we just email this to you guys & you just watch it later?" Our decision was unanimous. Another trainer, an older lady who hasn't really seemed to have any discernable sense of humor said, "Yeah we showed that to the last class at 3PM on Friday & we nearly died."
 Later, they showed us a training video on an "active shooter." I honestly couldn't tell if it was that or a campaign video for one of the current 9500 Republican presidential candidates, or an actual training video produced by the Feds. Fear mongering much? Then, they show us a video on general safety, which was basically, pay attention to your surroundings, if a farmer comes at you with a weapon, get the eff out, buddy system, blah blah blah. As a side note, the trainer tells us, "oh yeah & if you come across a meth lab, leave immediately & report it to the Incident Commander. If you're deployed in Iowa, they're *everywhere* & there's a good chance you could come across them. Oh, & the meth manufacturers also hit the anhydrous ammonia tanks in the fields, sometimes in broad daylight, so watch out for that too." Thanks again, IA. And here I was, a little put off balance by the Kum & Go convenience stores.
 They provided us with a roster of everyone in our class (20 of us) w/ name, address, phone #'s. At one point, I was so bored that I manually entered everyone of my classmates' info into my i-phone. It took me a little over an hour. On the upside, I listened to a LOT of Foo Fighters & Pearl Jam during the interminable boredom I experienced today AND ate lunch outside w/ some of my homies & went for a walk after that w/ a couple of them. It was a beautiful day, sunny w/ big puffy white clouds. I think it got up to about 80 degrees today. Back at home, I heard that it got up to 103. I definitely think I got the better deal on that front.
 We still don't know where or when we'll be deployed. I believe it has been 9 days since a new outbreak was detected, which is very, very good. I really hope I get deployed w/ this group. Its amazing how much we've bonded in only two days. I think I will have made some lifelong friends here in Ames.  

NAHERC Training Day 1: The Phantom Menace

Wow...It has been a DAY! So, I woke up at 4 AM Iowa time, which is 5 AM my time. Actually, I woke up before that, but I didn't look at the clock until 3:56. This is pretty typical for me when embarking on a new major league adventure. One of the coordinators I had contacted me via email & told me that they'd be picking me up this morning @ 7:30, so I didn't have to take a taxi to the other hotel. That was cool w/ me. Oh yeah, I last night I watched a couple of Mystery Science Theater 3000's to unwind. It was a good choice.
 So, I can't post much in the way of pics from the training facility, what w/ the NSA snooping about all up in mah bidness. I have a few to post.
 I met some pretty cool people today. As it turns out, for my coordinators, this is only the 3rd deployment us staff that they've managed, EVER! There are many kinks to iron out. In my class, there are 20 people. 2 vets & 18 AHT (Animal Health Technicians). The AHT's run the gamut from biologists animal scientists, former military, animal trainers, vet techs, OJT vet techs, etc. We are a diverse bunch. We even have a volunteer firefighter who has also had HazMat training.
 As it turns out, my hotel that I was in last night, I was not supposed to be in, but as I said, the communication lines have gotten crossed a few times & I was a casualty of that. A coordinator got everything sorted out for me today, but I had to move hotels at lunch. I met the rest of the class here for lunch today. It was a weird place, but not bad. They had a lime vinagrette dressing that was quite tasty! I didn't have much else. I didn't try their chicken or pizza, both of which they're supposedly famous for.
 We got issued these Windows tablet/PC things today to use for our training only here in IA & an i-phone 6 that we get to keep for an indeterminate amount of time. The i-phone is cool, of course. The Windows tablet/PC things are total pieces of fecal material. Thanks Microsoft. I belive that "microsoft" describes the company, as well as its products, on multiple levels. But, I digress. We did a LOT of HR type training today, including training verification, IT set up, ID badges, tablet orientation, i-phone orienation, & timesheets. We also did some animal welfare & an overview/SITREP. Side note: goddamn, if I see one more "Magic Mike XXL" commercial, which has played a minimum of three times during my writing of this document, I may have to murder someone.
 I met some crazy girls today or "Mean Girls" as they called themselves that I ended up grocery shopping w/ after training today. It was a lot of fun, but mostly it was just great to be out of training. We shopped at a store called "Hy-Vee," which is an absolutely terrible name for a grocery, but I wasn't driving & there prices were actually pretty decent.
 So, the Mean Girls van was full of drinkers, but here's the catch: when you're a Fed employee, YOU CANNOT TRANSPORT ALCOHOL IN A GOVERMENT OWNED/LEASED/RENTED VEHICLE. Thanks Obama. The Republican party would blame you if they caught gonorrhea from a stripper in Thailand, so I figure this is your fault too.
 Fortunately, there's a little gas station right next door to my new hotel, so it was GAME ON. I really over exaggerated that. I just walked over, bought some beer, & am drinking it as I write. & NO, I did not "expense" it. I bought it out-of-pocket.
 I guess I should talk a bit more about the Avian Flu that we are going to fight. Here's some interesting facts:
 -There are NO human cases w/ H5N8 or H5N2 (Eurasian OR North American strains)
 -There have been 309 detections of HPAI (Hightly Pathogenic Avian Influenza). This has involved 21 states
 -There have been 230 premises that are positive for HPAI
 -Congress has allocated $393 million to combat this.
 -There have been 3100 State & Fed responders to this crisis. That includes direct hires, like me, & contracted agencies (heavy equipment, disposal, equipment rental, etc).
 -This is an important part that I've seen in NO news agency: this disease doesn't particularly affect wild game birds (ducks, geese), but they harbor & transmit it.  IT KILLS RAPTORS!!! Please, if you know anyone w/ raptors, falconers, raptor rehab, please tell them to not feed ducks or other game bird meat to their raptors, because raptors are awesome & we must keep them alive.
 -MN, IA, WI & NE are the only four state to declare a state of emergency due to this epidemic.
 -One of the scarier things is that a chicken colony can go from ZERO clinical signs to 80% fatality rate, which necessitates the remainder to be humanely euthanized, in 11 days. Pretty scary, huh?

That's all folks! More tomorrow!

Insert Training Montage

Well, its official. I'm in Ames, IA to begin training with the USDA APHIS NAHERC to help combat the current avian flu epidemic! The flight here was mostly uneventful, w/ little to no turbulence. I flew out of Charlotte, NC & into Des Moines, IA, as my family & I were already in Charlotte for Tina's cousin's high school graduation.
 The airports were jam packed w/ people at a level I've only witnessed over the winter holidays! I couldn't believe it! My traveling companion, a coworker from NCSU, evidently had the misfortune of having her bag under someone else's that had a very large bottle of quite strong perfume that broke during handling. Her bag, soft sided & made of fabric, soaked up the perfume quite nicely. It absolutely reeked!
 The two of us were in a shuttle from the airport up to Ames to our hotels, along with three other ladies: Mom Jeans, White Canary & Girl, aka Candace Cooler's Cousin (she looks like a friend of mine from work--not exactly, but you know, enough to be her cousin). It was an odd ride. Our driver, who was very nice & weighed, I'm guessing, pushing near a quarter ton & he played some really irritating music. None of us appeared to be particularly happy, but everyone seemed tired to some degree. I wanted to take some pics out of a window, but Mom Jeans had her right arm suspended from the "Oh Shit" handle up over the door THE ENTIRE RIDE. Yes, we drove in an almost straight line from the airport to the hotels & she's gripping the Oh Shit handle without respite. IA is largely unimpressive, at least from what I've seen. It looks pretty much like my Mother State, IN.
 At any rate, I am checked into a different hotel than presumably most of the rest of my team-to-be. Currently, I am uncertain if I have a ride to the training facility tomorrow. I emailed someone & am awaiting response. If not, I have to take a cab to another hotel & be there before 7:30. Lovely. I've been taking some pics, but for some reason, I cannot upload them from my phone to the blog or to my Google Photos. I'll work on it. More tomorrow.