| This might look okay in the second bedroom... |
[23 Jun 2009|08:33pm] |
mood:  productive
I built a workbench in my shed today. The 4x4s were scraps leftover from building my fence, and the 2x4s and 2x6s were pieces of lumber left in my brother's garage when he moved into his house. Does that count as recycling? It oughta count as something - the whole thing cost me about five bucks.
I also used my late grandfather's circular saw, which is about as old as I am. I hadn't noticed earlier, but this thing pulls as many amps as my washing machine.
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[13 Jun 2009|02:44pm] |
mood:  ecstatic
Gotta love library book sales. They were selling "by the inch" - meaning you paid by how tall your stack of books was.
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| career milestone |
[12 Jun 2009|12:29pm] |
mood:  optimistic
Sitting around the table at our morning meeting yesterday, our officer looks at me and says,
"You've gone through the classes for Officer and all that, haven't you?"
Those are the classes I JUST completed, so I say,
"Yeah, I'm just waiting on the certifications to come in the mail before I put in for the promotio-"
"Close enough, you're riding officer on the engine today."
So that happened a lot quicker than I expected it to, but that's a bit of tradition in the fire service - trial by fire, right? As it turned out, I wasn't nearly as nervous as I thought I would be. We had a few calls, but nothing especially challenging; a car wreck, some medic calls, a carbon monoxide incident, and we got dispatched to a structure fire but we were the third piece in so all we had to do was provide a water supply from the hydrant to the Ladder truck.
At about 11 pm we got dispatched to another structure fire in an adjacent district. My driver is sitting in the seat ready to go, I've got on all my turnouts and I'm ready to go, but our rider, who was a rookie from another station, was nowhere to be found. We're sitting there, assuming he just takes longer than normal to get out of bed compared to most people. All the other units are marking enroute to the incident over the radio. Pretty soon, we're both saying, "Where the fuck is that rookie?" Just as I'm getting out of the truck to go find him, the engine on scene of the fire cancels all the responding units; they had it under control. So no harm done, but I still want to know what the hell happened to the guy. One of the other firefighters in the station comes up to me and says, "That joker is out in the parking lot talking to someone." I go out there in my turnouts and sure enough, he's leaning in the window of a car talking to some girl. I had to be officer-y, so I went out there and cussed him out in front of his girlfriend. The leadership manuals would say that I could have chosen a more positive approach to the problem, but we all got a good laugh at his embarrassment and I'd wager he won't forget to take his portable radio with him next time he wants to leave the station for a little late-night sugar. :-)
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| Luckily, I was on top of my patient assessment skills this day. |
[08 Jun 2009|05:03pm] |
mood:  smart
Me: "You need to stop putting your cigarettes out in these trash cans. That's how fires get started."
Crazy Lady: "I think I'm dead."
Me: "No, I'm pretty sure you're not."
Crazy Lady: "I think I burned my house down and I'm dead."
Me: "No, not yet..."
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| camping trip |
[03 Jun 2009|11:27am] |
Went camping with some friends out near the WV border the other weekend. Unfortunately, my 5 year old Canon Powershot A80 picked that time to finally give up the ghost. As a result, all my pictures came out with the colors weirded out, and some odd psychedelic electric pink effects to the sky and around the edges of the pictures. They're viewable, though, so...( camping pics! )
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| Beware of deer |
[28 May 2009|12:13pm] |
Them deers...they'll get you one way or another...
This concrete light pole was buried four feet in the ground - the guy hit it hard enough to knock the pole completely OUT of the ground and carry it about 15 feet. The car is sitting on top of the bottom 1/3 of the pole.
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| I'm the boss of you! |
[26 May 2009|09:24pm] |
mood:  drunk
I finally finished my Fire Officer 1 course, and I'm celebrating by getting pleasantly snookered and geeking out.
Yeah, there's a couple of pretty dudes on the cover, but the show has got ghosts and ghouls and golems in it, so it's totally STRAIGHT!
I swear, in four years of college I don't think I had a single class that had a more intense workload of homework assignments. It was a 9-day, 72-hour class, and every spare moment I had at work was spent using resources on the city server to finish the homework. Stressful as hell, especially since I was turning that homework in to a Battalion Chief.
We were all kind of disappointed that we didn't get to the good stuff - company tactics, incident command, reading smoke, etc - until the last day of class. All the rest of the lecture was bullshit like interpersonal communications, labor laws, decision making processes...crap we'll probably never need or already know. Everybody liked working on the command scenarios and wanted more of it. More importantly, we felt like we needed more of it. :- /
Anyways, it's finally over. I'll get a promotion, another ribbon for my Class A uniform, a shit-ton more responsibility, and an extra $4.58 per paycheck. Woot.
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| Bug-Out Bag |
[19 May 2009|10:10pm] |
mood:  accomplished
This is a presentation I put together for my Fire Instructor course. I've modified it a bit to include sections I had to edit out due to time constraints, and to widen the target audience. If you'll allow me to indulge myself - the presentation went very well, and it was the only presentation for which members of the audience (my peers) stayed after class to ask questions. I was pretty stoked. More importantly, I hope it convinces you to collect some kind of emergency preparedness kit for your home. I hope you all enjoy it, but be forewarned: it's kinda long and full of pictures.
Nerd note: I first discovered the concept of a bug-out bag when daydreaming about my capability to survive if the dead were to rise from the grave and attack the living - the zombie apocalypse. Don't let that dorky detail turn you off, though - I guarantee that if you put one of these bags together, you WILL use it in the very near future.
How to Build a 72-hour Emergency Preparedness Kit
(aka Bug-Out Bag/B.O.B./Go-Bag)
( Your guide behind the cut... )
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| turning the other cheek |
[08 May 2009|10:32pm] |
mood:  sympathetic
Saw this picture on MSNBC's "The Week in Pictures" - thought it looked pretty wild. It was taken by a guy named Gene Belvins out in Santa Barbara, CA. Gotta hand it to that firefighter for trying, but he doesn't have a chance of saving that house with an 1 3/4" hose line.
I finished the last requirement to get certified as an International Trauma Life Support (ITLS) Instructor today - I had to go over to Portsmouth and teach a few portions of a class while being observed by the senior instructor. First I taught advanced airways, which was mostly intubating, but we made it interesting by making the students intubate upside down, or blind folded, or simulating the patient being trapped in a wrecked car and the student has to sit on the dashboard while performing the skill. I guess it doesn't sound very interesting when I write about it, but it's fun for EMS nerds.
Later I taught patient assessment, where the student applies all their skills in a role-played EMS scenario; you get dispatched to a hypoglycemic diabetic cowboy who got knocked off his horse by a low branch and fell down a thirty foot cliff...what do you do? In one of those scenarios I was trying to prompt the student to remove the patient's helmet (in order to have access to the patient's airway in case they vomit) but the senior instructor "corrected" me and said it wasn't necessary. I was sure she was wrong and I wanted to throw the flag...bad. I held my tongue, though, because I didn't want her to get shitty with me and refuse to sign the paperwork I needed to finish the instructor requirement. Now that decision is burning a hole in my head. I want to e-mail her the page in the text that says all motorcycle helmets must be removed during the initial assessment and explains why. I'm going to resist and tell myself not to be petty. I am not a slave to my ego.
The frequent-flyers in our district have been dropping like flies. We usually celebrate when this happens. Nobody likes going to pick up 400-lb, bed-ridden Mrs. Thatcher who poops on herself for days and has maggots in her decubitus ulcers and must be carried down two flights of stairs to the ambulance. When a gomer dies we all hoot and holler and high-five. Yeah, I know it's bad manners, but that's part of EMS. We all develop callouses.
One of the people who recently died was a guy named Ricky - a sickle cell patient. I've known Ricky since the first year I lived in this town, and there are plenty of other medics who have known him for longer than that. Most of the fire department knows him by name. He must have been transported in our ambulances a hundred times. It was at the point that, when we heard the dispatch information come over the air: "black male in sickle-cell crisis requesting transport," we would say, "Oh shit, that's Ricky, let's go." Ricky was a super kid - he had a really positive attitude, he was always happy to see us, ask us how our day was going, and say thanks when we were moving him into the hospital bed. He was was told he'd never make it to 18. He'd had 7 full-blown MIs (heart attacks) and four strokes by the time I first met him, but he was still getting along. He was 32. A 17 year-old kid shot and killed him during a drug deal last month. Can you believe that? I've had Ricky's arm around my neck while I carried him down the stairs because he was in too much pain to move. I've seen him grit his teeth while I fished in his arms for veins and I've held his hands when they were shaking from pain. That joker cheated death for decades and he gets killed over some goddamn weed. God that pisses me off.
/sigh
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| pranky prankin' pranksters |
[03 May 2009|10:18pm] |
mood:  nostalgic
So I'm watching the first season of Supernatural on dvd and lemme just say, their run-in with the "paranormal investigators" in Hell House - that's classic stuff right there.
Later in the episode, Sam and Dean get into a vicious cycle of playing pranks on each other. Sam sabotages Dean's car while he's away: turns the radio up real loud, turns on the windshield wipers and flashers, etc. It scares Dean when he starts the car, but he's unimpressed with the prank. He retorts, "That's all you got? That's weak. That is bush league."
We used to do the same shit with the ambulances. If someone was parked at the hospital, we'd hop in their cab and turn on all the switches for their lights and sirens. When they were finished with their paperwork and ready to leave, they'd hop in, start the ambulance, and the thing would go off like the end of the world, right there at the front doors of the ER. Ah, good times. Can't do that anymore, though; now we have touch-screen computer panels for controlling the emergency settings and the battery switch has to be on to change the settings. If they come back to their ambulance and see the battery is on, they know someone has set them up.
:-(
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| Guys are allowed to squee, right? |
[01 May 2009|01:15pm] |
mood:  giddy
After spending the last few days in my Fire Officer class and poring over the computer writing business memos and letters, I NEED this.
*squee*
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| Garden '09 |
[26 Apr 2009|04:49pm] |
mood:  hot
How much you wanna bet this is the exact same snake I dug up last fall? Missed him with the shovel again - he needs to start playing the lottery.
The Jennifer Lopez of wolf spiders.
I'm interested to see how the garden turns out this year - first time I've tried companion gardening. I planted the tomatoes with okra and two of the tomato plants also got basil in with them because I want to do a Pepsi challenge taste test to see how much of a difference the basil makes. The basil was also kind of expensive, so I didn't want to buy too many if the rabbits were going to have a feeding frenzy on them. The marigolds are supposed to help keep them away. I'm gonna try harvesting the marigold seeds this year and saving them for next. They're cheap, but I can save $20 a year if I can successfully bring them up and transplant them from seed.
The other half of the garden got cucumbers planted with sunflowers and peas. I made a dumb mistake planting the peas; it's way too late and they're never going to make it. I'll replace them with bush beans; both are nitrogen fixers. I'm pretty excited about the sunflowers - I figure I'll either have a lot of migratory birds passing through in the fall, or the fattest squirrel in the neighborhood.
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[19 Apr 2009|10:10am] |
mood:  sad
This is kind of a coincidence since a few folks on my friends list have recently lost pets...
The other morning I was riding the engine and we got a call for a public assist - an older gentleman needed help getting a drowned dog out of a pond on his property. We get there and floating in the pond is a small, dead Pomeranian. The owner said the dog was 20 years-old and half blind. He'd let him out first thing in the morning as he'd been doing for the past two decades, but when he went to let the dog back in a few minutes later, he'd already drowned in the pond. He said he figured the dog must have gotten disoriented and fallen in. We could tell the guy was right on the verge of breaking down - his voice was hoarse and he was speaking in short sentences. He was just barely holding it together. Figured he probably didn't want to be seen crying in front of the firefighters.
The dog was floating too far out in the pond for him to be safely retrieved, which is why the owner called us. I got a 10' pike pole off the engine and had one of the other guys hold onto my belt while I reached out with the pole and brought the dog in. I pulled the dog out of the water, removed the leaves and brambles from his fur, wrapped him up in a towel and handed him to the owner. The guy thanked us many times and kept apologizing for calling us out, saying, "I know this isn't what you guys are paid to do." He was wrong, of course - helping folks through difficult times is exactly what we're there for, and it's the most rewarding aspect of public service.
True to the firehouse, the guys were joking on me just a few minutes later while we were riding back to the station, saying they'd never seen me treat a human patient with that much care and respect. ;-)
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[30 Mar 2009|08:53pm] |
mood:  busy
Many updates to make, so forgive the rambling nature of this post.
Went to an apartment fire yesterday and we were first on scene, but not much to the fire. It was just a small kitchen fire and easily extinguished with no major damage to the residence. Some girl had put a plastic container into the oven to heat up a meal - her boyfriend will probably never let her live it down. Although the fire wasn't very exciting, running up to the third floor in all my bunker gear, plus carrying a 40 pound fire extinguisher and a 9 pound axe was...exhilarating. Even more challenging was trying to act like I wasn't winded when I got to the top.
While I was doffing my gear the captain called me over to the landing and told me to look across the way. On the other side of the parking lot was another apartment building, and there was a woman sunbathing on the balcony on the third floor. Although that alone would be worth pointing out between a few guys, what was notable was that this idiot was laying on a 12" section of deck that projected out beyond the balcony rail. It was comparable to sunbathing on a third-story window sill. It was so narrow that her left shoulder and arm were actually hanging off the edge.
This is an image of her balcony, courtesy of GoogleMaps:
Now I've seen some serious attention whoring in my day, most notably the entire "suicides" tag in my journal, and this woman was certainly being just as ridiculous. She kept looking at us looking at her, so she knew she had an audience. I asked my captain if he wanted me to go talk to her (my plan was to say, "What the hell is wrong with you?") but he said,
"Hell no. She might fall off and then we'd be working a trauma. Let's go."
She climbed back over the rail once we packed up and were driving off.
Later that night we went to a brush fire out at a local park. It was a bit of a surprise because it's been raining around here every day for the last week - not exactly brush fire weather. I got to sling some mud in our 4-wheel drive brush truck, which was fun. When we got back to the station later that night we heard on the news that a huge meteorite had been sighted in Virginia Beach, so we tried to talk the guy doing the paperwork into putting down "meteorite" in the Source of Ignition field of the fire report. Turns out it was actually exploding debris from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket, so tomorrow I'll see if the captain will let us put that in the report. :-)
I "plowed" my garden today, (quotes because I don't have a tiller and have to do everything by hand) though I think I may have been a bit impatient since the danger of last frost isn't for another month. Just means I'll probably have to weed it and turn over the soil again when I'm ready to plant. I'm liking how black the soil is looking - three years of cow manure and compost amendments are turning out nicely. I'm also going to try companion planting for the first time this year, so I'm excited about seeing how that works out.
The tiger lilies I put in last year (aka ditch lilies) are getting out early and strong - I expect them to totally take over this bed. My mom had these planted all around our house when I was a kid.
I recently finished a Fire Instructor course, so now I'm officially certified to teach fire classes *gasp*. I think teaching in the Academies would be fun, but I want to save that for much later in my career. I want to be IN the fires while I'm young, not talking about them. I did my final presentation on how to build a bug-out bag, which is a 72-hour emergency preparedness kit that's kept in a backpack or otherwise portable container. It's designed with the intent of evacuating (by foot if necessary) an area in the event of a disaster rather than attempting to stay at home during the emergency. Big photo post on that later. The presentation went over very well - much better than I expected - and it was the only topic for which people were staying after class to ask questions about the subject.
I also got into an instructor course for International Trauma Life Support (a commonly required EMS certification), and just found out I have three days to prepare a presentation on thoracic injuries. I might actually be able to pick up some extra cash with that instructor certification since I could use it to teach ITLS at the local community college. After that class is over, I'll need to start getting ready for a Fire Officer class - all of these schools are necessary for promotion in my department. I already feel like I did my last year in college - sick of writing assignments and just wanting to work.
In our department I'm supposed to get paid extra since I'm a paramedic - in the state there are 3 general levels of certification for pre-hospital medicine; EMT-Basic, EMT-Intermediate, and Paramedic. Our department requires everyone to be at least an EMT-I, but we get extra incentive if we're trained as far as the paramedic level. The primary difference is that paramedics have more A&P, pathophysiology and pharmacology education, and they don't have to call a doctor to give certain medications or perform certain skills like pleural chest decompressions or surgical cricothyrotemies.
Anyways, our department recently changed it's payroll service and the Deputy Chief sent out an e-mail asking everyone to review their paychecks for errors. I noticed that my paramedic supplemental pay wasn't listed and asked if he would look into it. He did, and e-mailed me back that I have never received the supplemental pay, and that the Finance Department was looking into how much retroactive pay I should receive. I know the math roughly, not counting overtime; five years of back pay will come to almost $15,000 (before taxes).
Cha. Ching. Actually, the taxes kind of worry me. The accounting people haven't told me how they'll be taking the state and federal with holdings out, and I don't know if the extra income is going to put me in a new tax bracket for 2009. You want to know how clueless I am about taxes? My mother still does mine for me. Thirty-three year old man and my mother still does my taxes.
/sigh
Whatever the Finance Department does, I figure it will be wise to put about 1/3 of it into a savings account in case Uncle Sam comes around to take a huge bite out of my ass next tax season.
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[14 Mar 2009|09:04pm] |
mood:  jealous
On Monday I was the driver-pump operator for our engine and we had three structural fire responses. The first two were pretty easy but the third one involved the better part of the second floor of a town home and we were out there for a while. It was in our district and the engine I was driving and our ladder truck were the first two to arrive. There was dense, oily black smoke rolling out of the open front door and flames coming out of a second-story window and the roof in the back. The residents had already evacuated. We use the ladder for defensive operations and the engine for fire attack, so the hoses were coming off my truck and I was going to be pumping for the fire. We'd lost a couple commercial structures to fires in the last week so we felt some additional pressure to get in quickly and put the fire out before it got out of control.
We deployed an 1 3/4" attack line and after I charged it they entered the house with a three person crew. They had zero visibility but the officer had a thermal imaging camera, so they were able to climb the stairs, find the seat of the fire in the bedroom and put it out quickly. They had a rookie on the nozzle and he was pleased as hell to finally have some soot on his gear, which was previously bright, clean and looked brand new. He accidentally left his safety goggles on his helmet when he went in, so they got melted and he took some teasing for it. He also forgot to put down his helmet cowl, so he got his ears burned bad enough to get a few blisters, but nothing that will leave scars. It hurts, though, so I'm sure that will be the last time he makes that error.
Overall we were pretty happy with the way things went. The fire looked bad to the units arriving on scene behind us because they could see the flames shooting up behind the building, but we were swift about getting in and putting a stop on it. I was reminded that sometimes it sucks to be one of the senior guys at the station. We have a lot of rookies and since they're not very experienced, they can't be allowed to try to manage the task of pump operating at a structure fire. That leaves it to guys like me and the older fellas. As a result, I don't get to ride in the back as often and don't get as many opportunities to go inside on the good house fires. Sigh, jealousy.
Just a video grab of the front of the town home. This fire displaced 7 people, but they were taken care of by the Red Cross and family members. Cause was some linens against an overloaded electrical outlet.
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| things you learn in the FD |
[12 Mar 2009|10:41pm] |
I wonder if most people think they could actually go for 42 hours without sleeping. I can't think of a long list of reasons why a person WOULD do something like that, unless forced or by accident or necessity. But here I am and it didn't seem like it was that hard. A lot of coffee and Red Bulls, showering, eating, driving ambulances and cleaning equipment, very little leisure time. We ran calls through the night, struggled with a new software system for our EMS reports. I dodged passes made at me by a 20 year old stripper who was 18 weeks pregnant, still working the pole and on the hunt for a baby daddy. She was cute but I think maybe a little retarded.
By the time my shift ended and I headed to class, I was starting to run on sugar only. I felt twitchy and punch drunk. I felt like the little muscles in my back wouldn't stop moving. My "inside voice" took the opportunity to talk on the outside. I was sitting in the back of the class and occasionally making jokes with a guy next to me. A rookie was sitting in front of us and would sometimes look back at us when he heard us talking. About the third or fourth time he did that, I said,
"Goddammit you look back here one more time and I'm gonna stab your fucking eyes out."
I guess that sounds awful but I bet we all think things like that without letting it slip. He turned back around without a word and didn't make eye contact with either of us for the rest of the day. I just ran into him at the theater.
Now I'm thinking - I have to get up in 6 hours and do it again; maybe I should just not bother going to sleep? I mean, at this point, going another 6 hours would be a breeze, right? And then I'll be taking a shower and eating breakfast and going into work to sweep the bay and drive the fire trucks and it'll be easy to stay awake. Nah, laying down will feel too good to pass up...
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| Fire Department Urban Renewal Project |
[05 Mar 2009|06:26pm] |
mood: productive
Having trouble with drug dealers at your local strip mall? Neighborhood policing just not cutting it?
Fixed! That's how we roll. For what it's worth, we saved the church next door.
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| Hog Island |
[20 Feb 2009|11:02am] |
mood:  relaxed
A few days ago I went out to the Hog Island Wildlife Management Area to hike around their trails and explore the area. The peninsula was never truly an island, but back in the 17th century it was sufficiently surrounded by marsh that the settlers could allow their pigs to roam wild without fear of losing them. Today it's primarily a wildlife refuge for waterfowl, although I'm not sure if "refuge" is the right term because they allow hunting on the property.
I wasn't able to hike the big loop around Homewood Creek because that area was closed for something the ranger called "bird baiting." I assume that meant they had set out decoys to attract some waterfowl, because when I observed the creek from a distance I could see it was full of swans. It was probably for the best - it was 40 degrees and windy that day, and I wasn't dressed warmly enough to be hiking right on the coast with the wind blowing off the river. I was actually trying to test some new nylon and poly hiking clothes, but since the whole area was flat I never got warmed up enough to break a sweat and see how well it wicked moisture. At any rate,
( PIKSHURS... )
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