What I learned over the weekend...

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to spend some time with some like-minded people (as well as a pair of very strange individuals), in order to receive classroom and hands-on instruction on a variety of topics including map reading and navigation, first aid, radio communications, first aid, proper draw, grip, and use of a pistol in defensive situations, and quite a few other things.

Among these lessons are the following:

1) Narcotics, extreme heat, and exercise are a generally bad idea.
One student in the group was suffering from a knee injury being treated medically with morphine patches at the time, who fell out while walking across a field in the East Texas heat.

2) It's generally best to go over safety information beforehand, so everyone knows where everything is.
There were several current and former members of the medical profession in this group, and there was a fully-equipped first aid kit on site. I was toward the rear of the group when the call to get the kit, so I dropped everything and hauled ass toward the campsite to get the kit. Unfortunately, I heard "Get the kit! It's in the back of my truck!", and I had no idea what truck it was in...or the fact that the medic was, in fact, driving an SUV and not a pickup.

3) If you have equipment considered "essential", and it runs on batteries, make sure you have good batteries.
When you're carrying a hand-held radio for purposes of communicating with someone else in deep woods, and you can't see or hear the person you're trying to communicate with, your radio is dead weight when your batteries die.

4) You should have paid more attention in school.
Some of the most basic instruction we sat through during the classroom sections of the weekend were stuff you likely could have deducted from what you learned in the 9th grade...math, especially. Stuff learned in the map-reading/navigation portion makes a lot more sense if you have a basic understanding of geometry.