Another Day on the Job

Today was a slow day. As usual, the morning was spent in the gym with the crew followed by a 2.5 mile back to the base. As slow a day as it was, the morning was spent working on various projects around the base. My exciting project was labeling the recycling cans around the base! I actually like minuscule projects like that. They allow me some time to sit or chill by myself and think. You all know how I value my thinking time. After that, I drove over from the air center to the main fire center to take care of some of my certification issues as well as my Incident Qualification Card. After lunch, we started to have some fun. We were supposed to head into a canyon to do some saw work for a fuels project the BLM was going to do but because of the weather (raining and cold), we decided to do a project of our own:





Since the bushes around the helicopter pad can only be so high, our manager thought it would be a great training opportunity to unleash us with saws and cut as much sage brush as our happy little arms could bare. Afterwards, of course, we burnt the product of our "training". The rest of the day was spent talking about our schedules when the helicopter comes on. We start staffing the air center 7 days a week on Sunday. Sunday is a crew training day as Crew A works Sunday through Wednesday and Crew B (including yours truly) works Thursday through Sunday. On top of that, I'm in class all of next week (which I'm getting paid for) and most of the week after next. If you include that with what ever other overtime I could possibly get, my paycheck for this pay period will be looking pretty good considering the amount of debt I'm in for the month of May. Man I can't wait to start running fires...