“A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

As excited as I am about our move (and as daunted by the still colossal amount of work we have to do), life goes on here at the police department.

During summer campus is divided up between sports campus, youth groups, lecturers, exhibitions, and (of course) the Mob of Idiots.  Officers debate which of these events are the most stressful to work, but I find I get the best stories out of the kids running around.

However, nothing will beat the day many summers ago when I was interning at NATO.  It was the one day a year the embassy was open to school groups and a small horde of five year olds were invading to be led around, fed cookies, and meet the ambassador.  Halfway through their visit, alarms went off.  Someone had threatened the compound with a bomb.

We had several procedures in place for this sort of thing.  We dismantled our computers and locked various things away in explosion proof safes and lockers as per normal.  The soldiers were supposed to come through and verify that everything was secure before exiting.  I say “supposed to” because in reality they were suddenly charged with herding scores of excited children towards the nearest exit (“Is this a fire drill?  A bomb threat?  Cool!”).  I’ve never seen so many brawny, overly muscled men look so haggard.