Big, massive, giant weekend roundup...

will be coming later.

Because folks, I had one kick ass weekend. Kick. Ass.

Saw X2 again, got my best friend firmly entrenched as a fan of the cat (she squealed more than I did).

Went on a ride along with the police in my town (the major kick ass portion of the weekend). Nothing like having some redneck bitch get in your face and threaten you with screams of "hooker" while her drunk/high boyfriend is resisting arrest and losing across the yard. Yep. She threatened me. *g* Wanna know who won that one? Let's just say when every cop in town has shown up on the scene, and you know some of them and are related to at least one (by marriage), then it will be the redneck bitch that goes down.

Anyway, more of that later. It was highly entertaining.

And then last night...Mother's Day dinner at my mom's house. Which was ruined and an all-around disaster. My grandmother did her selfish thing (can't possibly come for dinner, just come to visit a bit ahead of time, and she does a grand diva exit). My sister stupidly is in a beauty pageant (on Mother's Day!), which means her fiance's family pushes back a meal so she can attend. Which is a problem, seeing as then she decides that means she should show up at *our* mother's house for only about 30 minutes, won't eat, just wants to parade in with her trophies from the pageant and crow about how fabulous her day was. Uh huh. She seems to have forgotten that it's *Mother's Day*, not Katie day. Of course Mom had enough and blew up. Katie immediately screams "it's not my fault!" and storms out the door. Yes, my sister is a 3 year old whiney butt. Can she sit down and argue something through? No, she runs out the door. We have to walk on egg shells so she doesn't get her feelings hurt, and she inevitably wants everyone to conform to her busy schedule, then she can't make the time to show up. And blames it on everyone but herself.

Needless to say, mom's neighbors got an earful when I went out the door and told Katie to get her ass back inside and quit acting like a 2 year old. When she wouldn't, I demanded she give me the Mother's Day present since we went in together. Hell if she's ruining it for the rest of us.

But there were homemade burgers and homemade strawberry cake with fresh strawberries, so it wasn't a total waste.

More later once work has settled down again.

Can I sleep now?

I'm about to die here. All I want is sleep. Sleep, blessed sleep.

Consider this, I got up at 7:00 on Saturday morning, worked (hard) at the hair salon until 4:00 on Saturday, then had to run by necklaces for the bridesmaids before getting back home at 5:00, knowing I had to be at the police station at 6:30.

No time for a nap in there!

Let me give the rundown on how the night went.

First off, I was paired up with Rusty, who was big and tough. I spent part of the night with him (up until about 12:00), then about an hour with Ralph Norton, my criminology teacher at school who is also in charge of the entire crew that was on duty this weekend. Then I got paired up with Clark, who it turns out is married to my 3rd cousin. I was around a lot of people. *g* Usually ride alongs stick with one cop. I got three. Hee.

Riding with Rusty

Seeing as it was around 7:00 on a Saturday night when we hit the road, Rusty decided he's "initiate" me by starting off with speeders. Yay! Note for all of those who might ever drive through Asheboro (being as probably the only one would be Amy, since she's the only North Carolinian): the cops in Asheboro will only pull you for doing 50 or higher in a 35.

So we got one guy. He was doing 50 in a 35. It took us a while to find him, but as soon as we let him go with his ticket, we nabbed another one. A 16-year-old who had her license for 6 months. She stupidly told Rusty she didn't know why he pulled her, even though she was grinning and shaking her head when she passed us. Uh-huh. That pissed Rusty off, because he doesn't like to be lied to. She knew she was speeding and had immediately started to slow down when she got past us.

But I got to make the call on whether or not we gave her a ticket. She was doing 52 in a 35, so she would have lost her license until she was 18. Because the car was in her name, as was the insurance, I decided to be nice and let her off with a warning. Or as I told Rusty, "Let's scare the shit out of her, then let her go."

Yep. We scared the shit out of her, she cried, then we let her go and told her to lay off the gas. Do I feel any guilt? Nope. She got lucky.

Absolute Stupidity

Next stop was Fayetteville Street to catch people driving without seatbelts. We spotted one almost immediately who tried to run from us. Hee. Turns out, he was drunk. I didn't get a whiff of the alcohol when Rusty opened the door, but I could see his eyes, and they were bloodshot like you wouldn't believe. Or could believe if you've seen drunk before. Which I'm sure plenty of you have.

Anyway.

He had serious issues with touching his finger to his nose, and balancing on one foot didn't happen. And the lying about his name thing didn't help. First the car was his brother's, then his cousin's. He would give us a name and *swear* that his last name wasn't the same as on the sheet in his glove box that said he'd been arrested before.

So we hauled him to jail. He had a blood alcohol level of .10. Drunk! Driving on a revoked license. And joy of joys, when we went to book him, we checked the "other" name we had found that he swore wasn't his, and because he had been put in jail for 60 days, there was a photo on file. With a picture of his tattoo. Yep. Busted.

So Mr. Man is sitting in jail right now for DWI and for failure to appear on his two counts of trafficking cocaine. *g*

It was entertaining.

The Call From Hell

Once we got all of the paperwork taken care of, we headed back out to ride some more. Went down a few back streets. Saw a party that had lots of guys drinking on the front porch and lots of cars. We were going to keep an eye on it and bust some drunk drivers later.

That didn't happen.

A call came in to 911 about domestic violence. Another cop was already there, so we were going to back him up. Suddenly the other cop comes on the radio and we start zipping along. We were first there as backup, so I just stood in the yard and watched (like I was gettig too close...yeah).

The guy doing the assaulting (a redneck from West Virginia, and I do mean redneck) came storming out the door. Rusty detained him while Paul was dealing with the uncle. The guy had been assaulting the uncle and threatening the aunt and girlfriend. The aunt and girlfriend were on the porch, while the guy was at the bottom of the steps with Rusty.

Then the guy decided that he didn't want to be detained and started to take off.

Let me tell you, a flying tackle is a fun thing to see in person. Rusty went airborn. The women start shrieking, Paul comes tearing out from inside and jumps into it all.

Now, for clarification since there seem to be a lot of people in the world who don't understand. When a person is hopped up on drugs and alcohol, they don't feel things the same way as someone in a normal state of being. This guy had been drinking something that made him mean, plus he was on some sort of drugs. Hey, it was obvious even to me. So he's fighing these two guys that together are probably twice his weight. He doesn't want to be handcuffed, is cussing like crazy, and somewhere in the melee Rusty got clocked good and started bleeding.

Throughout all of this, the girlfriend is screaming that his hand is hurt, be careful of his hand, it has stitches. This guy is fighting like hell, he's hurting the officers, and they're supposed to treat him with kid gloves.

As Paul so eloquently said, "fuck his hand!" Not like he could feel it anyway.

Then another officer arrives. Donnie. Who I've known all my life. *g* Donnie is huge. Massive. Okay, so it's mostly fat. But he's incredibly strong too and you don't want him to catch you. He goes over and plants a knee in the guy's side to hold him. Rusty goes in to check on something while Paul finishes handcuffing the guy.

Which is when the bitch of a girlfriend decides that she doesn't like the look of me.

She got in my face, telling me to get off her fucking lawn (we won't point out that it was the aunt and uncle's lawn, not hers). I told her I was with the cops. She didn't care, just kept cussing me and getting in my face. Literally, she was right in my face, but she never touched me. I told her to back off, she cussed more. She actually threatened me (something about removing me from her lawn) and I told her if she touched me, I would press charges. She got even more abusive, so I just stepped to the side and hollered out "Donnie! She's threatening me!"

Rusty came out about then and told the bitch to back off, to leave me alone, then he told me not to leave the yard. Hee. I got to stand right where I was and piss her off. Justice! She kept standing to the side, yelling "hooker" at me and doing some big gestures like I was supposed to be scared. Me, I just looked at her. Stared. And didn't move. Man it pissed her off.

All of the other cops got there then, so the bitch had to go talk to the cops. Drunk guy got his butt hauled to jail by Rusty. That's when I got transfered over to Ralph, because they didn't want drunk guy spitting on me through the cage. (Yeah, ewww.) Ralph actually said that the bitch was annoying the hell out of him, and he wished he had a reason to arrest her. I told him what she did to me. I sort of wished she had taken a swing at me. *g* Just so her ass could go to jail.

Harrassing Hookers

I rode with Ralph for a while, then got transfered over to Clark. We rode in the bad area of town and came up on a girl who's known as a hooker. She's a crackhead and looks to make money any way she can. Clark pulls up beside where she's sitting on the street (by the way, it's after 1:00 in the morning at this point) and proceeds to ask her if he knows her. Of course he's ruining her business, so she calls him a motherfucker many times as she tries to storm off. She actually asked Clark why he was stopped there, why didn't he just move on. Of course he informed her he *had* to stop there. There was a stop sign.

*snicker*

We drove around the block and came back, and there she was on the opposite corner. She screamed and cussed some more, Clark told her if she didn't stop that he'd haul her in for disorderly conduct.

It was very entertaining.

We drove around a bit more, harrassed a few drug dealers, then went back looking for the girl. She was actually talking to a guy, so we pulled up nearby and just sat. Man, she got so mad.

There are a lot of fun times to be had by harrassing a hooker and keeping her from her job.

I rode with Clark the rest of the night. There was one traffic accident at one point, and we got to go somewhere around 100 mph down the interstate (dude! NASCAR!), but otherwise it was sort of boring at that point until I went home at 5:15.

But you wouldn't believe how many people are at the Waffle House at 4 in the morning.