It's been a really long time since I last updated this thing and a lot of things have happened. For those who aren't always around me but read this blog strap in and hang in there while I try to summarize the past several months in this entry. Well its really not that bad and not as interesting as I made it seem. Well in June we went to a fire in southern Utah where I developed an extremely intense headache that never went away. Although the fire was ok, and I got to use some of my long line training, the benefits were greatly overshadowed by this pain in my head. We were released from that fire to go to Nor Cal for a fire there. I went to the ER when we got there to find out what was wrong with me since the headache had only gotten worse. There they diagnosed me with pink eye and ignored the extreme headache and released me after the nurse made some unsympathetic remarks about me and my so called "condition". Well then next day we went to a staging area and waited while the unorganized and unprepared california forestry guys figured out what to do with us. Finally they sent us to a fire near... well nothing of significance and we arrived that evening, and again I went to the ER in some small town because my head was killing me. There the told me it wasn't pink eye, thank goodness, but is was migraines. I have never had migraines but your the doctor so ok. At least the didn't overlook the pain in my head, which is what I was seeing the doctor about, and they gave me vicodine for the pain. The next day we finally got on the line and started to put some line around a particular piece of the fire, but because of the lethargic attitude of the california forestry personnel in developing a game plan in a timely fashion they chose to let us sit for an hour before putting us on the line. Not long after we got out there the fire activity became too intense that we had to pull out and sit in our safety zone. Later a new plan was developed and ended up doing a night burn and pulling a 24 hour shift. which was pretty cool.

The down side to the whole night but is that my head still hurt, not as much, and the vicodine was making me sick to my stomach. Well I'm getting sick of telling this part of the story, so to make a long story short I went to the doctors 2 more time before they found that I had shingles, and because of the vicodine I couldn't eat and whatever I did eat I threw back up. so the sent me home from california. The last doctor gave me some better pain killers that didn't make me sick, so the rest of the experience was much more pleasant. Though the pain was better, things ended up getting worse. I got into LAX on alaska air and was leaving on united which are on opposite ends of the airport and to make things worse, none of the terminals connect after you pass though security. So you have to leave one and go to the other and my flights were like 45 min apart. Needless to say, I missed my flight and had to catch the next flight in the morning. So I slept in the airport on the floor because they wouldn't give me a ticket till the morning. What a horrible experience. But I now am better and am back fighting fires again, and I only have a little scarring on my nose to remember this whole thing.

Well many other things have happened but this took longer than I thought and I'll have to fill in the rest in other posts.