A PERSONAL REVIEW OF 2015

Is it time for New Year’s Resolutions? I dunno…that tradition never particularly worked for me. It is, however, a logical time to look at the past year and forward to the new one.

The Evil Princess and I were lucky in a lot of ways last year. Health? She came down with a monster flu a bit less than a year ago that made us cancel our trip to the 2015 SHOT Show, but she recovered soon.  I had a tenacious respiratory infection it took all summer to shake, but I came out of it OK. At our my age, I’m just glad nothing was worse.

2015 was a very heavy travel year for us. But we never got stranded in air travel, nor lost our luggage even briefly, and road travel problems were few and relatively minor.  Given that we’ve had years where none of those things were true, we consider that an overall win.

Having taught outdoor shooting classes in tropical storms and horizontal sleet, we were blessed with the weather this year. The worst we experienced was Texas in May, just when the monster rains started that didn’t stop, and caused the massive flooding the Lone Star State experienced. We shot in horizontal rain and major mud, using iPhone apps to follow the weather and get our students safe before the lightning hit. A day or two after the Evil Princess and I drove east, the hotel we’d been staying at was wrecked by a tornado.

What we teach has potential for injury. I didn’t keep a total “round count” of live fire training, but there were weeks where we and our students put 20,000 bullets downrange. There were no gunshot injuries…par for the course. We only needed two ambulance runs: a wounded warrior’s wheelchair went out of control on the handicapped-accessible ramp and dumped him during a classroom break, and one young woman dislocated a knee during weapon retention training with dummy guns. Both students were in and out of the ER and swiftly back to class. We are grateful.

On this end, we have to occasionally had to re-schedule classes because they conflict with court dates. We had to do that twice in 2015, fortunately with enough advance notice that the students had no problem with it, though on our end we ended up losing a class or two that we could have done elsewhere. One trial ran longer than expected (again, par for the course) and my staff proved they don’t need me by teaching the first day of class superbly prior to my late arrival. Whew.

For us, the first part of the year is mostly sabbatical from training. For most folks, right after Christmas is a lousy time to be coughing up tuition and travel-for-training money, and on the police side, it’s when Academies are often starting and the instructors who take train-the-trainers programs can’t be spared. It allows us to get caught up on writing, bookkeeping, curriculum review, and “personal time.”  My significant other and I enjoy competitive shooting, and just a few years ago, were able to log 24 matches in one year. In 2015, from mid-March to the end of the year, we were able to shoot exactly ONE match.  Frankly, it’s not looking much better than that for 2016, but we ARE gonna hit at least four or five shooting tournaments during our first-quarter respite.  That’s about as close to personal New Year’s Resolutions as we can get.

How about y’all?  Feel free to chime in here on last year vis-à-vis this year, from YOUR personal perspective.

Share or Bookmark