Being Back with Something Missing

It's been a little over 10 days since I've been back and I haven't once gotten use to sleeping in Eastern time yet. My body still thinks it's in New Zealand. I've spent the past week and a half taking care of errands I've put aside while I've been out of the area. I've also spent a lot of time visiting old and recently new friends. It's been relaxing being back but I still feel a little off. Like I described to a friend, I'm glad to be home but I wish my home were somewhere else. I dunno. I think it was the wanderlust talking when I said that. I didn't realize how disappointed I was over not going to Africa this year until I got home and picked up the books and climbing guides about Morocco and Algeria. It wasn't until I started thinking about traveling again that I got outside and started climbing again. At first, my stuff was still in transit from New Zealand to here so I had to use only what I had shipped back in January which was primarily all of my aid climbing gear, my iron rack, and my hauling gear. This actually turned out to be nice because I didn't have my climbing shoes or harness but I did have a spare harness, belay device, and more carabiners to shake a stick at. So up until Saturday I spent a lot of my time practicing aiding, hammering, and hauling. Tomorrow morning, I head to Maryland Heights with a climber I met on Rockclimbing.com. Thursday probably with a firefighter from the station.

And what can I say about the Ashburn Volunteer Fire & Rescue Department? I've been a member there since December of 2002. Everything I do in life right now I owe to that place. I wouldn't be a firefighter or EMT if it weren't for that place. I wouldn't have met the people I know now if it wasn't for that place. It felt incredible to be back with my family there. My first night back landed me an oven fire in the souther part of Ashburn. The next night brought on a two-alarm townhouse fire. Subsequent nights after that brought us various types of calls ranging from several inside gas leaks to multi-patient auto accidents to brush fires. Usually I was a black cloud for my crews where I could show up to the station and not run a single call in a 12 hour shift. Saturday night alone Truck 6 (on which I was the officer) ran 6 calls asides from the 3 or 4 more the medic and ambulance ran that night. Since I'm planning to come back for a while in August, I decided now to start working for the Virginia Department of Forestry again as an on-call wildland firefighter. I'm hoping with the certifications I have now and whatever other certifications I'm planning on getting this season (PLDO, FFT1, ICT5 [hopefully], FALB) I'll have a better chance of getting called out than I would have just being a lowly Firefighter Type 2 (FFT2). The complexities of my jobs sometimes make them more fun than the jobs themselves...

It's great to be back with my friends, family, and career but something else is missing. I don't know what but then again, most of the fun in my life comes from trying to answer those types of questions. When I do find them...I don't know what I'm going to do.