Anniston, Alambama....

I left my home at 05:52 this morning, on the way to the Salt Lake Airport....flew to Atlanta, and rode a bus to McClellan Army Depot in Anniston, Alabama.

I'm here at the Department of Homeland Security's national training facility, for yet another training class (fully funded by you, the American Taxpayer-- and thank you, by the way) to help me with emergency preparedness in the ER, dealing with unknown chemical exposures and decontamination.

They teach a myriad of classes here, from incident command training, to deep water body recovery, to hospital emergency management, to weapons of mass destruction, etc., etc.
In our orientation briefing, I talked with a man who is here to learn about and deal with domestic animal pandemics... he asked if I knew anything about those pheasant deaths in Utah. I was CLUELESS.

I'm in the land of hurricanes (at our rest stop I picked up the Alabama Hurricane Evacuation Plan), Bar-B-Que, and fried EVERYTHING. The sides at dinner tonight included sweet potato cassorole (with toasted almonds, butter and brown sugar), turnip greens, and lima beans (you could also have mashed potatoes and gravy, of course) to go along with the fried chicken. My major goal is to not gain too much weight this week. I'm looking forward to the fried okra, hush puppies, dill pickles, and cheese that they had last year.

Pictures to follow. It should be quite exciting.