BlockBlaster ad: Two winters with the same drawer and a count I never did

I kept a pistol in my nightstand for two winters. The first winter I checked it the way I always had. The second winter I did it the other way. Here is my honest side-by-side. My name is Kim. I'm 50. I've been a surgical tech for twenty-two years, the last nine on the ortho team at a hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. Knees, hips, ankles put back together with plates and screws. I hand the surgeon what he needs before he asks for it. Three years ago my mother Bev sold the farm outside Seward and moved in with me. She's 79, sharp as a tack, and she has opinions about how I load a dishwasher. Let me say this first, because I'm not going to run down the man who taught me. My permit class was good. A full day at a range west of town, with an instructor who was a retired highway patrolman and made every one of us say each step before we did it. I passed. I shot better than I thought I would. This isn't that kind of comparison. It's about what happened after the class. Winter one. I bought the pistol in the fall of 2024, after Mom and I both woke up one night to somebody trying the handle on the back door. They were gone before we got to the kitchen. It went into the drawer of my nightstand in a zippered case, under a pair of compression socks and a paperback I'd been reading since summer. Every night I opened the drawer, pressed my palm on the case, and closed it. I called that checking it. On February 12, at 12:40 in the morning, there was a crash in the basement. Glass, a lot of it, all at once. Then something rolling across the concrete. I got the case out by the light of my phone. I got the pistol out. And standing at the top of my own basement stairs in pajama pants and a hospital fun-run T-shirt, I realized I did not know if there was a round in the chamber. I couldn't remember how I'd left it after the range in October. I couldn't see the side of it in the dark. My thumb went looking for the magazine button and couldn't find it at all. I kept the muzzle pointed down at the stair treads and my finger straight along the frame. That much the class had put in me for good. Everything after it was gone. Mom's door opened behind me. She came out with her cane and her glasses on, looked at me, looked at what I was holding, and said, "Kimmy. Is it loaded?" I said, "I don't know." It was the shelf. One of the brackets on the old wooden shelf in the basement had finally let go, and two dozen quarts of Mom's canned tomatoes hit the floor. A jar lid was still rolling in a circle when I turned the light on. Nobody was ever in any danger, except the tomatoes. Mom went back to bed. I didn't. I sat on the bottom step looking at all that red glass until it was time to get ready for a 7 a.m. case. In the OR, we count. Every sponge, every needle, every instrument, out loud, before the first cut, again before closing, again at the end. The circulator writes every number on the count sheet, and if the count isn't right, nobody leaves the room. So here is winter one, the way it would look on a count sheet. Permit class: 1, the year before. Range trips: 1, in October. Videos on handling: maybe ten, on my phone in the lounge between cases. Nights I opened the drawer and touched the case: almost every night. Call it 140. Nights I actually dropped the magazine, locked the slide back and looked into the chamber: count not done. Times my mother asked me if my own gun was loaded and I didn't know: 1. The line I couldn't get past was "count not done." A hundred and forty nights of opening that drawer. If a count sheet came out of my room looking like that, it would be the only thing anybody talked about for a week. The fix came out of my own work a few weeks later. I was precepting a student from the community college, a young woman named Abby. Students don't learn to count on a live case. They learn in the skills lab, on a back table, with an expired practice tray nobody will ever use on a person. Open the tray, set up the table, count every sponge and every needle out loud, close the count, open it again. Over and over, every lab, until she was so bored she was counting in her sleep. Then her first week in a real room, when the surgeon was in a hurry and the radio was on, she counted it right without having to decide to. Nobody learns a count in a live case. That's when I saw what the range had been for me. It was the live case. It proved I could do it once, in good light, with somebody watching. That's all it ever proved. And the drawer had turned into a motion. I was doing the shape of checking without checking anything. I've worked with techs who do exactly that. They say "count correct" from habit, and they never actually touched every sponge. Those are two different circuits. One is whether you can do it. The other is whether you look, every time. The class and the range were wired to the first one. Nothing in my house was wired to the second. I needed a practice tray. I tried the right way first. Snap caps in the real pistol. That's correct and I'd tell anybody to do it. But it meant unloading, carrying every round to the locked cabinet in the hall closet, checking twice, practicing, then putting it all back, with Mom asking from the living room what I was doing. I did it seven nights in March and quit. What I wanted was something I could sit down with at the kitchen table after supper, where nothing was at stake, that ran the whole cycle like the real one. And something nobody, including me at one in the morning, could ever mistake for a gun. Winter two. That fall I was eating lunch in the lounge with Mae, a circulating nurse I've worked beside for years. She asked how Mom was, and somehow I ended up telling her about the tomatoes. She nodded and said, "You need a practice tray, honey. I've got one on my kitchen table." She pulled up a picture on her phone. It was the BlockBlaster™ Black Edition. I ordered one before my next case. I'll say it plain. It's a toy. 100%. Matte black, built out of studded bricks, a red trigger, and a blaze-orange tip on the muzzle that stays on. It came fully built in the box. It fires soft rubber tips. But it runs the cycle. A 6-round magazine you load one round at a time. A magazine release button right where my thumb went hunting on the basement stairs. A slide you rack. A little brass-style casing that kicks out the right side every time you pull the trigger. When it's empty the slide locks back and stays there, so you can look in and see it's clear. Ten minutes after supper, pointed at the pantry wall, finger along the frame. Magazine out. Lock it back. Look. Say it out loud, the way I call a count. Week one I looked down for the button every single time. Week three I did it with just the light over the sink. Week six Mom stopped calling in from the living room to ask what I was doing. Same woman, same house, same pistol, same drawer. Here's the side-by-side, winter one against winter two. Range trips: 1 against 3. I'll be honest about that row. I went more the second winter, so I can't give the kitchen table all the credit. Nights I opened the drawer: about 140 against about 140. That row didn't move at all, which is the point. Nights I actually looked into the chamber: count not done, against every one. In winter two the real check got its own time, in the morning, lights on, muzzle at the closet wall, before I leave for the hospital. Seconds to drop the magazine, lock the slide and look, on the real pistol with every round in the hall-closet cabinet, timed on the stopwatch I keep on my scrub top: 44 and one dropped magazine the week after the shelf. About 5 by March, no drops. Times Mom asked me something about my own gun I couldn't answer: 1 against 0. That third row is the one that matters. In January, Mom came into the kitchen early for her coffee while I was checking the real one. She watched the slide lock back, watched me look, and said, "Well. That's more like it." Then she went back to her jigsaw puzzle. From a farm wife of fifty years, that's a blue ribbon. If you've never had a class, take one. This doesn't replace a class or a range, and it isn't for little kids. You treat it like the real thing or you're practicing the wrong lesson. Mine has only ever pointed at the pantry wall. They make it in runs of 50, and the black runs go fast. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee. No forms, no fight. Don't count the nights you open the drawer. Count the nights you look. Tonight, before you open yours, do a count. Write down the last date you actually locked the slide back and looked in. If the honest answer is "count not done," you're still in winter one. This is the one I have 👇 https://block-blaster.com/pages/lp5b-black-edition-adult