My location is my location. Come over for a beer anytime.
Ugh, why is it already Monday? :: whine ::
What? You are definitely NOT reserved. 
I’m here at work and we managed to pick up another lunch for the day. So, I don’t know why I’m sitting here goofing off. 
Traditionally, at the opening of each calendar year, is Fire School. The state of North Carolina requires 32 hours each year of training to maintain active duty status for volunteers. Failure to maintain training hours means you lose out on the state pension we get, and you are unprotected by insurance if you are injured on the job. The easy way is to go to 2 or 3 fire schools, which cost the attendee nothing except gas and food, and you’re done for the year. If you don’t go, you can also get 2 hours of training time by going to department meetings.
Since I’m still the department FNG and therefore a little gung-ho, I signed up to go to 3 different schools, covering January and February. Also, because I’m a sneaky sh!t, this year I made sure that the classes I signed up for also crossover to the rescue squad, so I’m double-dipping my training time.
This weekend’s topic was Personal Protective Equipment; everything you would ever want to know about care and use of turnout gear, SCBAs (air packs), and PASS devices (our trouble alarms). I’ve been in the department for a year and a half now, and already I’ve seen and done things that would make mere mortals quake in fear. I went in with the attitude that I know this stuff already, but there’s room for more. Even this old dog learned a few new tricks.
Saturday morning was classroom time. We started out by watching a training documentary on a truck fire in Indianapolis, and I sat straight up when that started. It happened just before VWife and I moved east to Virginny, and we knew second hand one of the guys burned in the back of the truck because we fostered his dogs for a couple of weeks. The film followed 4 of the 13 victims of the fire for a year as they went through burn treatment. Not for the faint of heart… If I never have to treat burns while I’m a EMT, I will have had a good career. The whole point to the show was what happens when you don’t use your gear properly. :eek:
Our first exercise was to suit up. Easy. I’ve done that many times before. Next, take everything off, arrange it how you like, and put it back on; this time, with our smoke hoods on backwards so we can’t see anything. :eek: I didn’t have any problem with this, either, because when I was taking Tae Kwon Do, I had a sadistic SOB instructor that made us practice our forms blindfolded.
Next came the air packs. Suit up, put them on, etc. We went to the gym (the class was in the local high school), and did all kinds of exercises, such as how to search a room. Then the sadistic side of this instructor came out.
He led us to a back corner of the school, pointed out some concrete and steel benched, and said, “Each and every one of you is going to crawl underneath THAT.” In 8 part harmony was the response, “you gotta be shitting me.” Imagine the vertical distance of a typical car door window, and that’s what we had to get through. I know I could do it in turnout gear because I’ve done it already at a couple fire scenes, but that was without a 35 pound tank on my back that added about ten inches to my thickness front-back.
Well, by Og, I did it. it wasn’t easy, and the trick was to get on my back and use my weight to push the air pack to one side to make me a little thinner. Despite my sveltification, I still was the thickest guy there, and I got through faster that a couple of the skinny runts. Thus ended day 1.
Yesterday was even more sadistic. We had to bring an extra bottle of air with us so we could change out an empty. Suit up, put on your air pack, and let’s play basketball until you run out of air. So we did. It was not pretty. A couple of guys were OK players in gym clothes, but 50 lbs of fire gear gets in the way. We all sucked, and decided that we need to tape this next time for America’s Funniest Videos. When everyone had run out, we were dripping sweat, winded, and exhausted. “Congratulations men, you just handled a structure fire.” He was right, because it is about that much work.
Take a break, change your cylinders, and suit up again. We’re going to practice extrication this time. Put your hoods on backwards. Same search techniques from the day before, and we had to navigate the hallway and find our way to the same benches. We practiced harnessing up a fallen firefighter, and dragging him out. We regrouped, and then came the big exercise of the day. One guy was hidden, a hose laid out, and we had to find the guy in distress, with our hoods backwards.
We followed the hose, just as we were supposed to. It ran through the area where the benches were, and someone put a loop in, just enough that we thought it ran under. Since we couldn’t see, some went under; others felt the loop and went around. The end of the hose was in the men’s room, and we searched it until the instructor said stop. Our guy was off the hose, in the women’s room, and was dead because he ran out of air. We got praises because we did everything right, and also reiterated that like CPR, real-life extrication has a poor percentage of happy endings.
It was a good class, I learned more than I expected, and I was out cold for an hour with my Sunday nap.
My other 2 classes are the last 2 weekends of February.
My location is my location too. Most people who come over to the house think that I live in the much tonier South Elgin IL, but I happen to live in the very furthest limits of just regular ol’ Elgin IL. Suburbs represent!
Beebs, what a terrific idea for the OP!!! I love it! I am in Longwood, Florida.
My weekend excitement was limited to finally hooking up my new DVD player so I can watch movies on the HDTV. Lil Lestat[sup]TM[/sup] and his friend helped me find the cable I needed and I laughed myself silly at their verbal antics while we shopped. I rented two movies: The pursuit of Happiness (SNIFF!!!) and the latest Harry Potter movie. I really liked them both.
It is cold again this morning. Not bone-chillin but “my-hands-and-feet-are-cold-and-won’t-warm-up-no-matter-what-I-do” cold. I HATE that!
Tupug
Hi! I’m here and smiling in Lexington, Ky., Monday though it be.
It’s cold, again. I was promised 56 degrees today and I want it. I WANT MY 56 DEGREES!
Ahem. I’m just sick of chapped hands. Brr.
See my location field. Well, Ok, that’s vague. I’m outside of Albany. Cohoes, NY if you want to be precise.
Happy Monday.
Woooo.
I’m near the Terre Haute, Indiana area.
Of course, the tiny town I live in isn’t listed on most maps, so Terre Haute will have to do.
I’m getting prepared to head off to another ENT appointment today at noon.
I do not like going to the ENT.
He frightens me…at least this one does.
I call him Dr. Mengele.
For good reason.
I’m in the southern suburbs of Chicago, so just make it Chicago for me.
[sub]my husband’s car won’t start this morning, so he is stomping around kinda pissed. Don’t blame him, really–I’d be pissed, too. And then his computer turned itself off. Yikes…[/sub]
I’m having a good morning. I need to read 4 chapters (yeah, like that’s gonna happen. More like skim) and install Roman shades. This involves my using a power drill–never a good thing. I’m good with tools, except the drill.
Kids are all off to school and it’s nice and quiet here. I like it that way.
Good morning everybody! Hope you cool kids let me play with you. I’ve been reading the MMP for over a year now, and I think this may be my first post. **bbs2k ** this is a great idea. I’m in Apex, NC. I didn’t do anything really interesting this weekend. Carry on. 
Good lord, that is Cottonfield County! runs to the mountains
(I grew up near Salisbury. All this flat, sandy ground scares and confuses me.)
'Long bout October 2001, I was driving up 40 to go back to school after fall break. (Yeah, I got my undergrad here too. This year marks my tenth year of flat sandyness.) I saw the exit signs for Apex, plus a very interesting one. “World Trade Center.”
“Well!” thought I. “We had a spare! Who knew?”
And that’s what I think of whenever I see Apex.
SpazCat: Providing pointless stories for about two decades.
Wow. They closed the schools today. It must be a horrible mess out there. Getting to work’s gonna be fun. Not.
A pipe downstairs that has something to do with the pool broke last night. There was a couple of inches of water in part of the parking garage, and running down the driveway. The worst part was them making horrible noise cleaning it up, at midnight. After they’d stopped making noise for an hour, so I figured it was safe enough to go to bed, since my room is right above the garage. Bastards. But better the noise than a couple of inches of ice on the driveway…
Cool idea. Oswego, Il. Right behind the big farmhouse with the silo that you pass on Plainfield Rd. on the way into town.
It’s a gray house.
Which MMP had the year end summary? “MMP” is too short of a term to search on…
Geez, there’s quite a clump of east coasters. West Coast, checking in! (see my location)
Here you go.
I just went back about 11ish pages.
It’s been a sorry morning here, cramps and a visitor.
Hi, all. I’m still not feeling anywhere near 100%, and alas, neither is Isaac; he’s definitely got some kind of intestinal bug going. Not that that slows him down as far as food input, mind you, but it definitely speeds up, er, the output. If you know what I mean.
Anyway, great OP idea, bbs! You can mark me and the pooping dog in Edgewater, Maryland, which is an unincorporated suburb of Annapolis. Betcha didn’t know Annapolis was big enough to have suburbs, did you? It really isn’t; we’re in a subdivision/former village which used to be a beach community, hence the small and poorly insulated houses. And also means that houses vary from crappy inland models (like ours) to insanely overpriced waterfront models (like the one-bedroom shack with 1/2 acre waterfront lot that sold recently for over a million dollars, I kid you not!). In any case, I’m about ten minutes south of the Naval Academy, if you really care. (What that mostly means is we see the handsome midshipmen around town occasionally in their blindingly white uniforms, looking far too young to be ready to head out into the big bad world as our Leaders of Tomorrow!)
Anyway, I should probably try to do something constructive today. Not that I’ve figured out what that might be, beyond getting another cup of coffee. That’s always a good way to waste a little while, right?
Gah, I’m relocating you to the park for some relaxation.
I think I found your place. If you want it corrected, say so.
All caught up for now. This thing will be blast on Google Earth. G’night though.
For the mapping - my “Location:” is where I’m at. Looks like I’m just about the only one here from California.
**Bobbio ** - Good to see that you get lots of training and drilling on all of that life-saving stuff and PPE. There’s been a video clip showing up here and there on the “extreme videos” TV shows of a firefighter that was approaching a house (think there was a gas leak in this one), and just as he turns to enter or look into a window, he pauses a fraction of a moment while his training kicks in, flips down a face shield and then the house promptly explodes.
I cringe every time I see these young macho guys on the various vehicular building/repairing/restoring shows grinding and welding without any PPE whatsoever. (American Chopper is a particular offender) They think a squint or looking the other direction will save them - I predict true color blindness (as in they will only see grays) by the time they hit 50. This is the approximate age my ex’s father lost color vision after a career of Heliarc welding in an era when eye damage from arc exposure wasn’t very well understod. It’s understood now, so there’s no excuse for trying to watch what you’re welding through your eyelids. And then there was my grandfather, who had a grinding wheel shatter. Glasses saved his eyes, but his face was pretty well scarred.
From The Gospel According to Norm, “There is no more important safety rule than to wear these, <tap, tap> safety glasses.”
Yesterday was mostly occupied with getting the “guest room” ready to be the “tenant’s room” as we’re renting out the room to someone starting this weekend. As much as we like having the house to ourselves, we need some more income incoming, especially with DH being unemployed for nearly two months, if we want to have the house at all. In a similar theme, we’re about to launch another wave of herd-thinning on eBay.
If I seem more distracted than usual, I probably am. In Mid-February, I’ll be taking a week-long business-related trip which will culminate in me taking the CISSP exam. The scale of it is a bit daunting - you get six hours to sweat your way through 250 questions. **Hard ** questions.
Evening all. Great idea for an OP, beebs! Mark me down in Al Muharraq, Bahrain (next to Saudi Arabia). We live about 2 minutes from the airport.
I am home (thank Og) from the Tragic Kingdom[sup]TM[/sup] - there was no afternoon flight from Riyadh back to Bahrain (just a night flight at 10:30pm), so I got a car and driver to drive me home. It took about 4.5 hours all told and I am totally ezzzzausted now!