Just some pictures

From today when we sprayed the kids at a local church again. It was a blast. I got up on the aerial and soaked em pretty good. There was a little girl holding a cup on her head trying to lean over and fill it up. I adjusted the stream and filled it for her expeditiously. There was also a little boy who kept running up to the girls around the mud puddle and kicking mud on them. I caught him mid charge one time and then followed him around for a bit with the water to help him clean up his act (haha! turnabout is fair play). Everyone had a great time (especially me!). I can't believe they pay me to do this!

No Dad

I will not ask for an autograph =P

A whirlwind of a posting

Ok, few things here gang, nothing exciting.

I'm not sure when our wireless router went out, but we've been having problems lately with our internet, and I felt that part of it was likely the router. I had internet when I went to bed last night, nada when I got up today. April was kind enough to ok a new router, so she grabbed one for me on the way home tonight.

As I was setting up the new one, I realized that the network that we had previously been using was still showing up as an option, and it worked when I connected to it. So there. Apparently we've been squatting on someone else's connection. When I picked up the old one to move it, it rattled like it was broken. Guess that's that. I did encrypt this network (I hadn't done it on the old one) so we should be better protected. The lovely Indian Woman at tech support was kind enough to sing to me while she waited on everything to process. It was... interesting.

Also, April did me another favor yesterday. I was having a pretty rotten day. I was exhausted and trying to deal with 2 things that I don't ever like to deal with... the IRS and my previous employer. That's a topic for another blog though.

April knew that I had been looking for a socket set and some crescent wrenches, but I hadn't pulled the trigger on a set yet because the cost was a bit high, and I figured I'd just wait until I actually needed them for a project, thus using the 'I need it so I have to buy it' theory of purchase justification.

She brought this little gem home for me from Wal*Mart. The Black and Decker 12volt Total Project Kit. It was about $45 at our local store, and came with a drill, a ton of bits, sockets, crescent wrenches, and a few other assorted tools (stud finder) plus the handy case(it is 3 sections!). So essentially for the cost of a socket set and wrench set I got the whole shebang. It is duplicates of some tools I have (like a cordless drill), but it is really handy to have it all in one place and now I have 2 drills so I can have a helper working too. So yay. It was a very thoughtful gift and helped to brighten my day.

Anyhow, that's that. Talk to you guys later. Oh yeah, we may get to go back to the church and spray the little kids tomorrow. If we do, we plan to make a slip and slide out of a tarp for them too. I'll try to get some pictures.

This is for Katie

It goes with my comment on her blog, so read that part first.




















Did you read my comment first?


















I hope you did or this won't make sense....




















Last chance!!!



















Hope this doesn't show without scrolling....



















It's so she can rake it across the bars to request a meal! Just kidding, hope you thought it was funny and not insulting. If you did find it insulting, it was Dad's idea! Just kidding again. Love you Katie, looking forward to seeing you. Let me know if you get a better idea on a date, ok?

Busy day

Well, today was like working for a real fire department. I had to ride in the ambulance to the hospital with a poor little 2 year old boy who fell off the swingset and broke his leg. He was a trooper though, and so was mom, so it was much better than it could have been. She got him going on about Stuart Little and he forgot all about his leg!

Going on that call led to me missing lunch, then before I could eat we were out making more calls. I grabbed some fruit salad at Publix and had that at about 3pm to tide me over till dinner, which I was cooking (I made homemade meatballs and put them in sub form, it was really good). Or at least it would have been good had we gotten to eat it. I put the first bite in my mouth and we had another call.

It turned out to be a housefire. Someone was cooking french fries in grease in a skillet on the stove and it got away from them. Unfortunately the husband did not know that the absolute worst thing you can do with a flaming skillet of hot grease is try to move it (the better options is to cover the pan with its lid or soak a towel in water and put that over it to smother the fire. You don't ever put water on it (it will explode) and you don't move it). For his troubles the poor guy got to ride to the hospital with badly burned arms, and he spread the fire down the hallway from the kitchen to the front door. The first in engine company put the fire out without any trouble, so I still haven't been inside a house fire he in Brentwood, but that's ok. It'll happen eventually.

Anyhow, we had our cold meatball subs at about 9:00 tonight, and they were awesome, even cold. It was pretty much the perfect meal to come back to since it didn't really get any worse while sitting out.

Alright, enough out of me, talk to you guys later.

http://cms.firehouse.com/web/online/Photo-Stories/Tennessee-Crews-Respond-to-Structure-Fire/45$60304


I may try and post more pics of this tonight. I told you the place was huge!

Typical Brentwood Fire

I got called in to this today on my day off. We are so small that we have to call in people from home to come back in and help out. I got there about 90 minutes after it started and used a hose from outside to put out the last of it. I got there about 4pm and left about 9:30. There are still guys sitting there tonight to make sure no one goes in and that it doesn't catch fire again.


http://www.newschannel5.com/global/story.asp?s=8679983


I don't know how long the link will be up but there ya go.

Sunday is Funday!

Well, another day is almost in the books. My shift treats Sundays a little different that most other shifts I know of. Most guys like to take Sunday as an easy shift, relax, get caught up on little projects, etc. My shift uses Sunday to do big training that all the stations can get involved in together. Sundays are traditionally pretty slow around here, so that is the reason.

Today's training was scheduled to last about 2 hours, but wound up running 5! It was fun, but by the end we were starving and ready to get out of there.

The short version of what we did is as follows:

Each engine company was led into a completely dark room. You were wearing your pants, boots, and coat, but the rest of your gear was strewn about in the dark. You had to find it, assemble it, and put it on properly. This was easier for some people than for others...

As you can see in the pictures, this guy came out with his helmet on backwards!

Once everyone had their gear on, you were lead outside the room to a waiting ladder (everyone had wax paper in their masks so that you couldn't see). Now the fun begins! For the next 8 minutes you would pick the ladder up, then put the ladder down. Sometimes you would have to hold it overhead for a little while.

The point here was to get you tired and use up all your air. After your 8 minutes were up, you put the ladder down and had to assemble some items, get some hose unrolled, and spread out a bit without losing each other. They had fans and chainsaws and generators running so it was hard to communicate. Some groups really lost a ton of time here, and some groups got their stuff so spread out that it took a very long time to get everyone back together and ready for the next part.

My group did pretty good, we had seen the other go though, so we had an 'unfair advantage'. I kneeled on the hose ends so they wouldn't get lost and we made sure everyone had their stuff before we spread out, and me also made sure to keep good communication and contact throughout. Here I am putting the two ends of the hose together.

From here you had to crawl around a while and advance the line, then they would tell you that it was time to get out and you had to head back. When you got back to the room you started in, they would tell you that the roof had collapsed and you had to try and make your air last until help came. Several people ran out of air, but 2 out of 3 guys on my engine made it, so we were pretty pleased. My Lt. ran out, but he ran out right at the end, so it wasn't that bad. We had some people running out while trying to assemble the hoses.

(That's me in the middle again. I was the 'short' one in our group so I wound up in the middle!)

So that was pretty much my day. Hope you guys had a great weekend. Talk to you later.

I'm going to do this while I can

For a day where no one in the entire city ran any calls, this sure has been a busy day. We didn't eat dinner until almost 8pm.

We started out the day with the usual truck checkoff and then went to work out. By the time we got home it was lunch time. A little after lunch we went and sprayed some kids at a local church camp with the ladder on our truck. It was a blast. The kids were going bonkers. We also put out a small hoseline and helped them spray each other. One of the guys I work with put it best; I would probably spray kids with the fire engine for free. It's just that much fun. It also worked out perfectly that the rain stopped right when we got there.

Well, right when I wrote that line we ran the first call of the day for the FD. I'm back now though, sorry for the wait.

The other thing that took up a chunk of our day today was taking departmental pictures. They are making a book about the first 20 years of our Dept. and including pictures of all the current members. On Saturday I'll be going back to take a picture with April. They are offering a free family portrait to us as part of the deal, which is pretty nice of them. They are also giving us one of our pictures that they took today for free. We did 2, one of us in our dress shirt and one of us in 'hollywood style' coat and helmet. It is one of those pictures that looks good but doesn't really fit us. On second thought, the picture of me in my dress uniform doesn't really fit me either haha.

All in all a pretty good day. Oh, and Katie, we had 'WELCOME TO MOE'S!' for dinner.

I thought I had some pictures from today but I wasn't able to get them. I'll try and add them later. Talk to you guys later.

This weekend we went from EWWWWWWW

to WOOO-HOOOOO.

Unfortunately both of us spent the whole weekend in the bathroom. Fortunately it was by choice (sort of). Saturday morning I came home from work and we tried to figure out what we were going to do with April's last 2 days of vacation. We really wanted to go canoeing, but has just been too dry so I was against that idea. We finally settled on going to lunch, and while we were out we decided to hit Home Depot and pick up some stuff to do some landscaping with. Our yard is looking a bit rough and we wanted to fix it up some.




As we were going in, April told me that the ceiling fan in our bedroom was making an awful racket and needed to be replaced.





They had a nice 52" Hunter on sale, so we put it in the cart.

When we installed the fan, we put some special over the blade filters on it that are supposed to reduce the amount of dust that collects in a room. Since we both have allergy problems, it will be interesting to see how effective these are. If you've ever cleaned the blades of your ceiling fan, you'll know what I am talking about. You are supposed to replace them every 3-4 months, that'll be the hard part, remembering to do that!



While we were inside, we wandered by the clearance isle. That's when we found a faucet for our bathroom that we liked. Ours was dripping and I've replaced the gaskets in it but it was still leaking. Nothing I've tried stops it, so we figured we'd replace it with the nice new one we found.

Our master bathroom was done completely in wood accented stuff (even the handles on the faucet), and we didn't really care for it anymore. We liked it when we moved in but it looks very worn. Since we were getting a new faucet, we figured we'd get a new towel rack, etc. to go with it.

Our discussion then turned to the fact that it now seemed like we were remodeling our bathroom, so we should buy that stuff to paint it too. And that is how we went from doing yardwork to remodeling the bathroom!

This is a sample of the finished product. The new faucet is here, and you can see the new paint as well as one of the new towel holders. We replaced all the wood stuff with brushed nickel. All that remains is a new vent register and the doorknobs. We are really pleased with how it turned out. It is tough to see in the pictures, but it went from a cream color to a color called Mountain Haze, which is a kind of blue green color. It was one of those deals where as we put it on, it looked good, then as it dried we were a bit concerned, but the final dry color is what we wanted. They also mixed it up as a special kitchen/bathroom paint that is supposed to resist mildew and water spotting and be easier to clean.

I'd like to take minute here to mention Tim 'the Tool Man' Taylor, who apparently lived in this house before us. A previous owner seems to have styled himself as quite the handyman, and while I'm not the greatest, I at least recognize shoddy work when I come across it. It seems like every time we do a repair to our home, I have to correct this guy's poor workmanship to do my task correctly. He is not a fan of the 'measure first (and twice!), drill (or cut) second (and once!). In the past when I put in mini blinds, he had done so much damage trying to hang his that it was a real pain.

He apparently was also a fan of stripping his screws so that they are next to impossible to remove. In the bathroom he managed to drill 3 complete sets of holes in the side of the cabinet to hang the toilet paper roll (then he made sure to buy a big enough holder to cover them all, mine was smaller so now they show).

I was particularly proud of the patch jobs I did in the drywall in the bathroom. This is not something I have much experience with and it took a long time, but the end result was better than I had hoped (not perfect, but much better than it was). Tim apparently had attempted to patch some holes, and I'm not sure if he used toothpaste or wasn't familiar with the concept of hiding holes, but he did manage to do a spectacular job of coating the walls in plaster, perfectly highlighting all the imperfections from old nail holes. For the most part I took care of that.

It also bears noting that rather than remove the old border at the top of the walls, he added not 1 but 2!! layers of border over it. That was fun to take down. The really scary part is that the middle layer was golf clubs and golf balls. Who uses that for the border in their master bath?

My favorite (and last story for today) is where he ran power for an outbuilding that is no longer there. He decided his 10X10 shed needed power, so he ran electrical for an overhead light and 4 outlets. Seeing as how the outlet on our back patio was closest, he just tapped into that to power it all! The home inspector was very pleased to find out that the power to that had been disconnected before we moved in. He is lucky he didn't burn his house down. I wonder how many times he had to replace that breaker. In fact, now that I think about it, I need to go check and make sure that the one that is in there is the correct size and not a bigger one.

Anyways, back to the story at hand...


While we were in the bathroom section at Home Depot, we found a showerhead that we liked, and since our old one was nasty and somewhat non-functioning (cleaning it would probably have solved it, but we didn't like it much) we grabbed that and stuck it in the buggy as well.




It has 2 settings, 1 that is like rain and 1 that is a bit more forceful. It has pretty good pressure, even though it is a watersaver, and that is the important part to me (plus it's so shiny I could shave in it, but that's just a nice bonus hehe).



For as long as we have lived in our house, I have hated this light fixture in our kitchen. It is right over the sink/dishwasher, and it is just high enough that I won't hit my head but just low enough that I still flinch if I turn into it too quickly and I am not paying attention. Plus it collects grease from the stove and is just plain ugly and nasty.





So we replaced it with this one we had picked up at Lowe's a few weeks ago for $5! It was a breeze to install, and looks so much better. Again, it's hard to tell in the picture, but there are cutouts of leaves at the top that light up when the light is on. It also has 2 bulbs (we put in halogens) so it is much brighter.



Shiloh, of course, contributed to the whole process by enjoying the new ceiling fan and making sure that the bed didn't fly off into space.




Oh yeah, then for dinner I made some ribs and April made strawberry ice cream. How's that for a busy weekend!





We've been talking about doing some updating to our house for a long time, then we were going to sell it, but with the shape the economy is in it looks like we'll be here for a while, so we have decided to get started on the house. We've been here for 3 years now, and haven't done much, so it is time. We've started in our bathroom and figure we'll expand outward from there. Next up in a few weeks will be our bedroom, then the kitchen, etc. We'll be sure to add pictures as we go.

I did learn a few things this weekend... I don't know what God's plan for me is, but I am fairly certain he did not intend for me to be a plumber! It was very difficult for me to squeeze into the space under the sink and still have enough room to move around let alone get any muscle into loosening the connections. I did also have a little boo-boo that came very close to being highly embarassing. When I took out the old faucet and put in the new one, the new drain wasn't the same size as the elbow. I was racking my brains trying to figure out what was wrong. I finally decided to just measure the elbow and measure the drain and go to Lowe's and ask them to find a pipe that had both sizes so I could get my drain working again. That's when the lightbulb finally lit up... the drain wasn't threaded, so how was I going to make the connection? I realzed that I had probably thrown out something with the old faucet that I would need. Yeah, the connector and gasket were still attached to the old faucet. I fished them out of the trash and now it works just fine. Oh well, lesson learned! We had a good laugh, and I'm sure that had I made it to Lowe's, they would have been telling my story at the staff meeting for a long, long time.

Oh well, sorry for the long long post, but I wanted to make sure I included lots of photos for everyone (and I wanted to share the funny stories with you guys). Take care and talk to you later.

Chris and April's Excellent Adventure

Cue the air guitars! Ok, enough Bill and Ted. As you should know by now, April had some time off from work so we did some vacationy things this week. Our first trip was to the Jack Daniel's Distillery in Lynchburg, TN. This picture is lifesize of Mr. Jack, only he is about 4 inches off the ground here. Yup, April is the taller (and prettier!) of the two. The picture of the statue I am standing next to that she posted is about 6-7 inches taller than he really is. He was only 5'2".



Legend has it that in a bout of frustration at not being able to open this safe, Mr. Jack gave it a mighty kick (it still didn't open) and broke some toes. He wound up with Gangrene as a result and lost his left leg up to the knee! He actually wound up dying from complications from this injury some years later. Here's Fearless Leader tempting fate with a kick of her own.




On the tour they show you how they make the charcoal they use to filter the whiskey, and here is the raw whiskey dripping out of these tubes and draining down (about 2 stories) through the charcoal. They use 180 proof whiskey (that's 90% alcohol) to light the wood to make the charcoal. They leave it outside to cure, and they say that no matter how wet it gets, that still lights it right off. I'd be inclined to believe that!




This was taken inside of the barrel houses where they store the whiskey while it cures. I believe they said they have something like 70+ of these things spread out around the surrounding countryside. In the 'good ole days' they would actually rent employee's and local farmer's barns to store the whiskey in! There's no way you could get away with something like that these days.



Way up in the background that whiteish building is a barrel house. I bet the view from up there is phenominal. They leave the barrels in there for at least 4 years before they test it to see if it is ready. Also, most of the barrel houses are 7 stories, though no one knows why, and it seems to be co-incidental (BTW, J.D. is known as 'old no. 7, and no one knows why that is either, so maybe that was Mr. Jack's lucky number or something. There are all kinds of theories and rumors, but no one knows the real reason.)



We also saw the official Jack Daniels Fire Trucks. They used to rely on these for all their fire protection needs. There are two trucks here, and the one on the other side is actually an R.E.O. Speedwagon. I had no clue that's where the band got their name from (that is according to the tour guide, that they took their name from the automanufacturer).



Yesterday we went to a local park (Chickasaw Trace) and did a little splashing around in the creek. The water was very low for the most part since we haven't had any rain. There were even a few parts that were a bit stagnant, so we tried to go around them (the water was low enough in some sections that it didn't really flow much, or maybe one side flowed and the other was dammed up).





We had a great time, and Shiloh always likes splashing around. The first few times she really didn't care for it, but yesterday she was gung-ho. She was splashing around and jumping off rocks into the deeper parts. The biggest problem is that she has to stay on a leash, so she and I are tied together. She would navigate a tricky spot, then while I was trying to scramble over moss covered rocks or wade a deep part she would make it to terra firma and take off! She nearly toppled me once or twice.

As she got a little more tired, she took it easier on me, and I was grateful for that. We finally reached a point that was knee deep on me, and that was far enough. Shiloh was already swimming to the next part, and I didn't know how much deeper it was going to get (it was 50 feet or so to the next shallow part that we could see) and I wasn't comfortable trying to swim and hold on to her (the leash is one of those retractable deals, and I was concerned about it getting tangled or her getting into trouble and me having to deal with it without being able to stand). Plus I had car keys and April had her camera, so we didn't really want to go swimming if we could help it!

Unfortunately April isn't feeling well today, she got sick to her stomach last night and didn't get any sleep, and is still feeling pretty poorly now, so the canoe trip we had talked about for today has been cancelled. We weren't sure we were going to go anyhow, since it has been so dry and I didn't feel like carrying a conoe for 5 miles! I have to work tomorrow, so this may be a rather anti-climatic end to her vacation, but I think she had fun. I'm sure she'll blog more later.

Talk to everyone later, be sure to share any summertime adventures you have as well!