23 May 2017

Where am I now, you say?

Well, as was the inspiration to start this blog back in 2007 to begin with, I've started a new chapter in life. Prematurely at that. When I left Utah in August of 2009, it felt like a part of me died. My life was steeped with adventure between my work with Raytheon Polar Services Company and Colour Country Bureau of Land Management while working with Zion Helitack. Whether for work or play, I was constantly on the move and it satisfied my taste for adventure in the interim. However, throughout the 2008-2009 austral summer, the desire to want more out of my career slowly crept its way to the forefront of my mind. So I chose not to renew my contract for the following austral summer with Raytheon, chose to inform the BLM that I would not be returning for a GS-04 Range Technician position again, and decided to lay temporary roots back in Northern VA while I pursued becoming a Paramedic.
My last fire of the 2009 fire season on the UT/NV border.

I applied to work for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in July of 2009 while I was still in Utah. When I moved back to VA, I started working for Physicians Transport Services as an EMT-Basic.....a job that I both loved and hated for the 6 1/2 years that I worked there. My interview, written exam, and physical agility test for MWAA were conducted in October and on Christmas Eve I was given a job offer. I slowly started working my way to becoming a Paramedic while working with MWAA. At some point early in my time with MWAA, I vowed to work at minimum 5 years for MWAA before I even thought about leaving Northern VA. I became an EMT-Intermediate (in Virginia at the time, the scope of practice between EMT-Intermediates and Paramedics weren't really that different. Most of the DC metro area was using Intermediates and Paramedics interchangeably to staff "medic units") in 2012 and continued working towards becoming a Paramedic while gaining more experience on MWAA, Loudoun County, and PTS ambulances. 

My office for the first half of this decade.
So I became a Paramedic in 2013 and started thinking towards the future. I applied to work for a middle-east sub contractor (who will remain nameless until I'm done with this contract in order to avoid the OPSEC mafia) in spring of 2015 with the hopes of quickly saving up some cash to buy a house in Boise. I made a personal promise earlier in the year to be living in Boise before Maleigha turned 10 which gave me 5 years to make it happen. . Thanks to a group of unscrupulous assholes, a hack into the OPM significantly delayed my security clearance being granted. I finally got the ball rolling in October of 2016, finished my hiring process, and was giving a start date of late December. A lot of my friends and family knew this was coming but I waited until I had an actual departure date and travel itinerary before I gave my notice of resignation to MWAA.

Last shift at MWAA with C-Shift at Dulles/IAD
So a week after my resignation, I was driving to Boise and was somewhere in Kansas on I-70 when I decided, fuck it, I'll move to Boise right then and there and rent a place versus put stuff in storage. So I found a pretty cool rental in the North End of the city not too far from down town, and began the process of changing my home base [hopefully] for the next 10 years. I drove back to VA and was on a plane to Kabul, Afghanistan a couple days later. 

Flying over a rugged corner of Iran

So here I sit in a dusty corner of Kabul dodging stray cats while living the expat life with a vacation back to the states every couple of months. The job is utterly mundane and repetitive but the money is good and we're reasonably spoiled. My contract is up at the end of the year at which point I'll be looking for work in Boise while starting part 2 of this chapter in my life. I applied to work for National Outdoor Leadership School's (NOLS) Wilderness Medicine Institute as an instructor...a dream of mine since I took the EMT program in Midpines, CA back in 2008. Other than that, the immediate future involving 2017 is a mystery...