FireCourse

The car is going to make me broke - lol Oh well. My buddy is fixing the wheel bearings and is changing tie-rods.

I am on a fire course all weekend. A requirement is we have to go back and re-qualify on the basics, per  NFPA. This is a course in the 1001 - I think I have three courses left to be a fully qualified Fire Fighter, with a card and all.

So this course is about the basic equipment and knots. The basic equipment is fun. Getting into and out of bunker gear fast; putting on the air packs and masks. This all has to be done in 2 minutes. A lot of practice. One cool thing is practicing doing searches of buildings. Despite Rescue Me and Backdraft; you cannot see inside a house with a lot of smoke. In order to replicate this, they put garbage bags on our heads, to black out vision. Then we had to search for stuff. Try it. The officers were putting obstacles in our way.

Did the knots, I hate knots. With practice I can do them, I stumble at the start. But I get there. We lift various things with ropes and knots. The clove-hitch and bow-line are the most common ones used. But we have to know others.

I was pretty wiped out today at the end. Not having the car I rode my mountain bike there. As we were cleaning up we had to put equipment back where it came from. A fellow firefighter on the lazy side decided to put her air pack back in the truck where I took mine from. So i put my pack down, to look in a ll the trucks to figure out where I should put it. When I found the truck she was lippy. She didn't see what the big deal was. I told here and she basically thought I was a jerk. Why am I fly paper for these fucktards whenever I have a good day? It sucks.

I came home, it was a nice day. I had to go back to fire hall to get the book and some extra clothes (it is cold in the morning). I was going to ride motor bike, but the motor wouldn't turn over. I am going out in about an hour to see if it will start. I have a trickle charger on the battery. I think it has something to do with the fuel/air mix.

I got a big knapsack and rode back to fire hall to get the stuff. I went to a restaurant to eat supper.

The ride home wound out some of the anger I had built up. But still.

A member of the EMTs in our hall was basically let go. He is a Type A kind of guy that doesn't like cops. He likes to bait them and embarrass them. He drove after drinking more than once, although to be fair, this guy was an easy drunk. 2 beers and he was basically non compis mentis. So then he'd go drive, get stopped, do the breathalyzer etc. He had a lawyer that was good and getting the case dropped due to procedure. These cases caused the police to hunker down on training. Then they wanted to practice, so any firefighter leaving a bar was subjected to a test. I had one.

Long story short, word on the street was I was a drunk and I'd be easy. I passed the test. The cop was kind of pissed off. He still is.

EMT got caught one too many times and he lost his license for a year. I saw him walking to the beer store, I thought he was just trying to be healthy. The EMTs told me all about it. It sucks but more than one guy try to talk to him about his problem, but he wouldn't listen. He has to apply for a job to come back.

Social life still sucks. Getting used to doing everything by myself. Nobody needs no-one, right?