Our new truck

This last Thursday, four of us from the fire department went to Atlanta to pick up our new truck. This truck serves as both a rescue first response truck and a brush truck. It holds 300 gallons of water. As you can see from the middle picture, it can spray water while we are driving it. We will keep all our first aid and medical equipment on this truck. The seats are designed to hold our air packs so that we can strap ourselves into them on the way to a scene if there is a structure fire.

Got my gun permit

I found it amusing that my in laws had to go to a special school, take a test, pay money, and then wait for their gun permits to come in the mail. Jeff and I recently got our gun permits and all we had to do was walk in the local sheriff’s office and show them our driver’s license. In less than 10 minutes we walked out with our gun permits! The last picture shows you my new hand gun that I carry in my purse. The other one is our new “toy”. I need to take some pictures of me playing with my compound bow. As I am typing this, I am wearing my camouflage pajamas. Can you say Red Neck? LOL

Two Cards

I had a great day today. I did 5 loads of laundry, got a lot of cleaning done, gave Simon TWO baths because he went out and rolled in the dirt after his first one, and I made 2 cards. I thought I would share pictures of the cards I made. One is going out to a good friend of mine in Florida and the other one is for Nikki, my sweet sister in law. I made 2 other cards this month, one for Karen’s birthday and the other for my uncle but I forgot to take pictures.

Spring Planting

We have been doing a lot of planting lately. These pictures show us planting our blueberry and raspberry bushes. We also planted 4 peach trees. The last picture shows some white peaches that are starting to grow. In addition to the fruit, we have planted 12 asparagus plants and several tomato and pepper plants. We cannot do a full blown garden this year because we are about to start adding onto our house later this month and we just will not have time for a huge garden.

ADPH training

Life has certainly been busy for me lately. Life right now consists of things like trying to keep up my house and develop our farm, working on school tours, helping a friend fix up her house, working for the fire department, and going to specialized trainings. These pictures were taken at one such training. This class was on how to handle a situation where we faced mass fatalities. I took another class recently on weapons of mass destruction both man made and natural disasters. That class would have been helpful to have before the tornado hit Prattville 6 weeks ago. Biological warfare is not highly likely here in our part of Alabama. But such things as an avian influenza virus or other such pandemic event are a very real possibilty. The time to prepare for such events is not when they hit but now and the Alabama Department of Public Health has been giving us seminars so that we can prepare ahead of time. We are doing such things as discussing where we would go for immunizations and establishing pods where we would send the general public in such events. We also have to pre plan where we would do mass burials, where we could get refrigerated containers for keeping bodies until the coroners could examine them and other such unpleasant topics. Several counties came together and brain stormed ideas. They are establishing training dates to do such things like stage a plane crash and a chemical spill so that we can learn what to do in these cases. I am planning on getting my hazmat certification in the near future. Yes, I am busy but I am loving life right now!

Busy time of year

Spring is our busiest time of year for school tours and the season is in full swing. I truly love working with the kids. The first picture is of one of my school groups sitting on the steps of the state Capitol building. This building has been donned a national historical landmark. Jefferson Davis was sworn into office as the only President of the Confederacy on the top of these marble stairs.. At the bottom of the Capitol’s steps, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech that led the way for black citizens to vote in the United States. Our city is full of rich history and I truly enjoy my job. The picture in the middle shows the students sitting in front of a display which pictures all the soldiers from Alabama who have died in the war since 9-11. There are way too many pictures on that display!!! The last picture is a view from inside the Capitol looking up at the 197 foot dome.

Arson Expected

We were called out to a huge fire this week. It was determined that about 125 acres burned. We had to call forestry out so they could use their bull dozier and put breaks around the area in order to keep it from getting completely out of control. The fire Marshall came out to investigate the fire and they are pretty sure the fire was set by one of the near by homeowners. It is so stupid to purposely set a fire because they can determine how and where fires are started. The homeowner was telling us that his house was worth way more than he owed because he built it himself. When we found out they were investigating him, we were not completely surprised just because of the kind of comments he had been making to us. If he is found guilty, he will spend 10 years in prison. We were able to get the fire under control and no homes were damaged. We got very dirty fighting this fire. I had on my turn out gear but as you can see from the last picture, the soot gets up under it.

Spring has sprung

I have been very busy and have not had time to update my blog in awhile.

I took these pictures about three weeks ago. I love the colors of spring. The spring green on the trees is my favorite. We have had a lot of Bluebirds and Cardinals around our property and it is so fun watching them. I just love spring time!

Air Evacuation Training

Since joining the fire department, I have had the opportunity to do some interesting training. On this day, the Air Evacuation team flew to our station to do some training. They taught us how to scope our scenes in order to help them find the safest landing zones and much more. Monday night we are all going to a seminar on storm spotting. I am registered to take two 8 hour training sessions this month. The first one is called mass causality incident triage and the second one is fatality management during a pandemic and other emergency events. I thoroughly enjoy working with the fire department. I am glad they provide this kind of training, but I hope we never have to use it. In last night's training, we were given information on what to do if a satellite re-entered the earth's atmosphere. There is a portion of a satellite which is full of fuel that might be re-entering our atmosphere in the next couple of weeks and it could be anywhere in the world but they have to let all first responders know about it so we know what to do under such circumstances.

Color Blind

I really enjoy working with kids. On a lot of my school tours, a few of the 4th graders decide they want to stick by my side during the entire day. This was one such day and these three boys were so cute. They asked their mom to take a picture of them with their tour guide. Since I had really been enjoying these particular kids' company that day, I asked the mom to take a picture for me also. It wasn't until later when I downloaded some pictures off my cell phone that I realized these three boys were from different races. To me they were just great kids and I never paid any attention to race. This is how I live my life. I always say my one prejudice is prejudice people. I will admit that at times I am disappointed with individuals and find that stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. However, I do not think we can judge individuals when we first meet them based on hair styles, tattoos, color of skin or anything like that. Embracing the differences in people makes each day interesting and I love that.

Anniversary Present

My Dad and Step Mother went to Hawaii to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. The pictures they took were breath taking so making them a scrapbook was actually very challenging. It was hard because I didn't want to do anything to detract from the pictures. I wanted to share a few of the pages from this scrapbook. The last picture is a card I made to go with the book. I hope they love it.

Wanna see my bruise?

Believe it or not, this looks much better than it did two days ago. I was shooting my compound bow on Sunday and I snapped my arm when I sent the arrow flying. Ouch!!

Card for David

David is my sweet little nephew. He is too cute for words and so smart.

I made this card for him tonight. His dad (my brother) calls him "silly monkey" so I thought he'd really like this card.

Erosion problems

If you click on the first picture it will get bigger and you can get a better idea of what we are dealing with. Jeff has been working so hard on moving dirt and trying to level out the pasture land. I drive over the area he has leveled with the truck in order to pack it down. We have planted well over $100.00 worth of grass seeds just to watch them all get washed away. We finally bought some very expensive erosion control which was $40.00 per role and did not cover much ground at all. We bought biodegradable posts and made sure the anti erosion material was tied down good. It seems like every week we get torrential downpours of rain and it ruins all the hard work we did the previous weekend. You will see one row of the anti erosion material left on the hill. The rest got washed all the way down and is now buried in the dirt by where Jeff has the tractor in this picture. You can see the large ruts that are now where the erosion material used to be. We are thinking about building berms in the woods and creating something like french drains to see if that will help. I think we will end up having to get a bulldozier in here to do some of the work. It is getting a bit frustrating!

CPR certification class

We had fire fighters from another station join us for the CPR certification class. My certification had expired in October and I would have had to go the Red Cross to take the class again. It was great that a fire fighter from Prattville was able to come to us and teach us the class. It didn't even cost us anything so that was an added bonus. We also got certified to use the AED and we do have one that we take to all the scenes. I hope we never have to use it we all know how now if we have to.