Life With Lani: January 2014

My excuse for the delay in the writing of the post is that it seems like we're barely at home long enough to relax. I'm still not a fan of cold weather but you'd never think that with all the fun we've been having.

I never would have thought to take a 2 year old ice skating but we've taken Mira a couple more times (so that Mark can get some exercise and ice time when he's not playing hockey, and it's cheap) and she loves it! Although the last time we took her she started to get frustrated because she wanted to go faster and she hasn't quite figured it out yet.

I love that she gets so excited about anything active. Mark and I have decided that our present to her for her birthday will be to take her skiing. I'm sure that will be fun!

Speaking of skiing, we've been able to go several times but sadly the snow isn't exactly the best right now. But hey, at least there's enough to have fun. We've been doing lots of half-days which I actually prefer to spending the entire day skiing. That's definitely the nice part about having a season pass is we don't have to exhaust ourselves trying to cram in as much fun as possible.

Mark has signed up for the second half of the Rookie League's hockey season so he's been keeping busy with practices and games. In addition to that, he also signed up to play in the annual Guns and Hoses Hockey Tournament. I think most people know already but it's a hockey game with cops playing against firefighters and all the money goes to a fund to support families of fallen police and firefighters. So in addition to getting to watch a fun hockey game we're supporting a great cause as well. It was so much fun! There were two leagues playing. Mark was in the B League, which was players who hadn't played in the tournament in the last few years, and the A League was made of the more experienced (I guess) players. The Guns hosed the Hoses in both games. Yay guns!

During warm-ups.

I absolutely LOVED the police tape on the Guns' jerseys. Total win.

During the game.

Guns win!

I didn't get any pictures during the A League game, mostly because Mark wasn't playing in that game but also because I had to chase Mira around because she was tired and done with sitting still. I have to add that during the National Anthem, we stood in the stairway and I showed her how to stand still and hold her hand over her heart and she proceeded to belt out her own version of the anthem. A family near us thought this was the cutest thing they'd ever seen and the mother gave Mira a high-five afterwards. Mira definitely is not one to get stage fright.

As for me, I've been training for a 10K. It's been a slow process since I'm paranoid about injuring myself (I only do a long run like this once a week since I feel so achy and exhausted afterwards), and I don't enjoy running on a treadmill but it's still better than running in the snow and ice with the icky inversion. But I can do it!

I'd say being able to run 6.2 miles in under an hour is pretty damn good. So now that I am capable of consistently running that distance in my goal timeframe, it's time to find a race and sign up! It's been so empowering for me to realize what I'm capable of doing - especially since I never considered myself a runner!

So those are the good things that are going on with us now. Unfortunately life really likes to wait until you finally have your ducks all in a row and then lob a massive curve ball right at you. This has been in the works for awhile but a few weeks ago everything kind of culminated in Mark losing his job - but to be more specific, he was forced out.

Long back story but here it is if you want to find out. A couple years ago the police department where Mark had been working for years hired a new police chief, whose previous job had been the assistant police chief for West Valley City PD. Those of you who live in Utah will have an "aha!" moment after reading that. For everyone else, WVC PD in the last year has been in the news a LOT for rampant unethical abuses of power by most of the administration, which of course would have included Mark's chief. The WVC chief left, and Mark's chief put in for WVC chief - he didn't get it, luckily the department hired someone from out of state and from what we can tell he's been doing his best to turn some things around. However, a lot of the old administration is still there. More on that later.

So Mark's chief has a background of working as an administrator in a department that is notorious throughout the state for having corrupt administrators. How bad could it be, you might ask? Well, to condense the story, Mark had to take a report for a neighboring city due to a conflict of interest that was discovered at the scene. One of the people involved decided to get an attorney involved, who tried to do what attorneys do best, which is to say distort the truth so people don't have to take full responsibility for their actions. After getting pestered by this attorney for some amount of time, Mark's chief told Mark he needed to change his report to, basically, alter who had actually been at fault at the scene.

I'll let that sink in for a minute. Mark was asked to lie in a legal document and change who was at fault so that his chief could get an attorney off his back.

Mark, of course, refused to change his report. It was unethical, lying, and just plain wrong. I'm very proud of him for standing up for his convictions, and also for standing up to his tyrannical chief who clearly didn't know or care what actually happened.

I'm assuming that Mark's chief is so used to leading by fear and intimidation and getting what he wants all the time that when someone finally stood up to him, he was stunned and had no idea how to proceed. I'll tell you that he did not handle this well, not by a long shot. His response was to single out Mark and start making his life a living hell. Mark was verbally abused on a regular basis, had internal audits and investigations started on him for doing his job correctly, got chewed up for doing nothing wrong. It's impossible to not bring that home with you. Finally Mark was given two options. He could resign, or he could be terminated and get a file full of bad recommendations that would basically keep him from ever working in law enforcement ever again. We honestly did consider termination so we could turn around and sue for hostile work environment and wrongful termination, but in the end Mark decided that he just wanted to be done with the whole mess and resigned. Wrongful termination or not, being fired in the law enforcement community basically guarantees you'll never work in law enforcement again anyway.

So we've been in a transition period for the last few weeks. Mark's severance was enough that we can go a couple of months before we really need to worry about money but it's still stressful. Mark has put in for a couple of other police departments but it's a very long process to get hired in law enforcement. Ironically one of the departments he put in for was WVC, but he decided that even if it was the last law enforcement job on the planet and they offered him a job, he would still turn it down, so he's not going to go through with that application. I'm relieved - I had really mixed feelings about him working there in the first place. Almost every day WVC is on the news for some homicide or string of violent robberies or whatever - I'm selfish enough that I don't want Mark working for a place like that. Not to mention, plenty of the old administration is still there, and Mark's old chief is still really buddy-buddy with lots of people there, so how safe would he really be if he went there? We've tossed around the idea of Mark just working in law enforcement part time and going in a completely different career direction (there's an oil refinery nearby that apparently pays well), and we've even talked about Mark leaving law enforcement entirely. He can get retirement at 20 years in law enforcement and he's 10 years in now. It would be nice to get the retirement at 20 years but as we've discussed, that retirement by itself won't be enough income to support us, and Mark is adamant that he does not want to do more than 20 years in law enforcement. So that means he'll be about 50 years old when he retires and then he'll still have to work to bring in enough money for us to make it. Starting an entirely new career at 50 is not impossible but definitely not easy or ideal. When you look at it like that, it might actually be better to have him start over now since he'll need to at some point anyway.

The frustrating thing for me is Mark is a fantastic police officer and he did nothing wrong but because of a &&*%!@&(^%$@#%$@ he not only lost his job but has lost his passion for what he does. Clearly law enforcement is a profession you do because you love it, not for the money or the praise or admiration of the public. It's so infuriating for me that one bad, horrible excuse for a human could do this to a good person and get away with it. But it is what it is, and here we are making the best of the situation. We'll be okay, we'll get through this but for now it's stressful and scary.

I have to add that the past few weeks while Mark has been at home and away from all the stress he's had to deal with at work, he has been such a better person!! So I'm glad he left for that reason alone. :)