Can you tell it’s late summer and classes are about to start? Yep. I’ve got two brand new classes this semester that I’ll have to basically design from scratch. Both have to do with ethics — one on legal ethics, and another on business ethics. Should be interesting! But the planning has kept me swamped (not to mention the stack of legal briefs I’ve been writing — business is up at QP Legal). With all this handicraft teeming, my cybercrib has been crickets for over a month. Apologies to folks wondering if I had been kidnapped by aliens. Besides the mortgage-paying ventures, I’ve also been hard at work burning through the training budget. In the last few weeks, I took my first formal rifle class in Virginia. Woo hoo! It was pretty awesome. The AAR is incoming (soon as the work schedule loosens its vice grip), but for now, I’ll just tip my hat to the great John Murphy of FPF Training. Slow clap, dude. Slow clap. Excellent class. Oh, and my first BSG sincerely thanks you for convincing me to finally take it out for a spin.

And then this weekend I added Personal Protection Inside the Home to my NRA instructor ratings. I actually like that class a lot more than Basic Pistol. In a few weeks, I’ll add Personal Protection Outside the Home too. Then I think I might take a stab at teaching a few of these classes rather than just sitting on the creds. I never considered actually teaching NRA stuff just because it’s so different from the Rangemaster school of thought. But the defense-oriented courses actually have more redeemable qualities than I thought (well, if you subtract all that point shooting stuff… stay tuned for more on that).

At any rate, now I’m about to follow Mr. GPS to a little Mexican restaurant somewhere close to my small-town Alabama motel. I met some interesting people here for the PPIH class, but (brace for the shock) I’m pretty sure I was once again the only student who was relatively new to the gun community. There was one person who said she didn’t have much shooting experience, but even she sang the usual gun class tune: “I grew up around guns.” I always find it hilarious that the inner city girl from the nation’s most dangerous city is the only one in the class who didn’t grow up around guns, LOL. One person said to me, “Memphis is HUGE.” That cracked me up. Los Angeles is huge. Memphis is, eh, I suppose it’s much bigger than the little town where I took this class. Just goes to show, perspective is everything.

Class completed, mission accomplished, and extra jalapeños with my queso dip tonight! Then I’ll get up early and enjoy the windy, hilly road back to my “huge” little city on the river.