Arrival at Quantico

Hello all. As many of you know I (Lamine) am attending a 10-week training course at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, VA, and for those of you who care to follow along I will attempt to provide some updates.

I have wanted to attend this course almost since I started my career, just figures that I finally get the opportunity now that Viana has joined our family:-( So being away for that long will be tough (send happy thoughts Alexis' way). A quick shout-out to super-birth-instructor Alexis for helping our friend Susan through the birth of her first child, a little girl who arrived this past weekend! Great job Susan!

Anyway, after arriving Saturday following a delayed flight I've spent the past few days settling in and getting used to dorm life. I feel like I'm back in college again with one roommate and two other suitemates sharing one bathroom...yippee! Monday was a painful admin day, but today has been better with the start of classes. My classes are a mix of undergraduate and graduate level classes that are accredited through the University of Virginia and include a mix of dealing with the media, leadership, organizational change, forensic science and more media relations (I'm the public information officer for my department).

Those of you who live on the east coast already know this, but it's awful humid back here! So far the temperature has cooperated, only getting up to 96 on Sunday. Hopefully that will hold since we also have a LOT of physical training to do. Fortunately I've found a bunch of other crazies who like to run and I'm trying to convince people to get in the pool as well. We have two physical challenges: one is the famed Yellow Brick Road which is a 6-mile obstacle course (the same one that Jodie Foster ran in Silence of the Lambs) and the second is the less well known Blue Brick Challenge which is to swim 34 miles over the course of the 10 weeks. So far I've gone one mile!

If anyone has any good suggestions for what to do on the weekends I would love some ideas, because although we are planning some trips back and forth I will still have to spend some weekends here and would prefer not to be trapped in the dorms.

That's all for now, hopefully more updates to follow. Best wishes to everyone.