Happy New Year!

Well I hope everyone had a great new year. Mine was pretty good. I went and saw Royal Crown Revue which is a big band style band. I wasn't expecting to spend my new years at a big band concert but it was a lot of fun anyway. I wish that I would have come prepared for it though, i.e. a date and prepared to swing dance (which means I would have to learn). Anyway, all in all it was a good show and the drunks and crazy people were very entertaining.
Good fortune in the coming year!!

I went snowshoeing by myself today. I think that I went about 2 miles and cut the trail the whole way. Very tiring! Anyway, if you couldn't tell this is me in the snow (Left) and this is the trail I cut with some animal tracks next to mine (Right).




This marks the farthest I have ever gone before.

This is this years fire season slide show that I made. I didn't do the music but I did everything else. My boss didn't like the music from last years video so he wanted me to use his picks which I think sucked for the purpose of making this kind of video, but whatever. It was nice last year because me and another guy making the video had complete creative control. Anyway, to start out we did some tree falling videos to show some of the project work we did and this years video goes in some chronological order. First project, then Nor Cal, then goes on to Washington. It briefly goes into our Utah and Idaho runs which were not long ones. Most of our time was spent in Cali and then Washington so we devoted most of the time to those two places. So thats the video, shorter than last years as well. I noticed when I showed people the 07 one, around 5 min they lost interest so that is why I made this one that short. I would love to get your feed back on this and any suggestions for next year. Oh and be warned there is swearing in the music. The only one that I noticed is during the Washington portion (it has a digerydoo at the beginning of the song with helicopter and plane videos). Its durring the second slide after the close up of a guys face who is smiling and has red retardent running down his helmet. Now you are warned. 

(For a larger version its also on youtube under UFRA 2008)

The fire season is almost over. I thought it was done but today they (lone peak) called me and asked if I wanted to stay on call for the next 30 days in case Cali could use us and I agreed. I don't think that we will be going and in like a week or two they are going to call us and tell us that they aren't going to need us. Well now that things are done for the most part what's next for old Geoff? Hopefully some traveling. I haven't really gone anywhere in a while and it would be nice to see something new. I hope as well to do some backpacking. Get away from it all for a few days. That would be nice. Well thats my update.

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.

Long Line Training

Last week I did a long line training class for firefighting. It teaches the proper way to hook things up to a helicopter. On monday we got to perform the skill by hooking things up to the helicopter. Actually it was a two part thing, one person talked to the pilot and guided him in and the other person hooked up the load, and everyone had to do both things. It always fun dealing with the helicopters.

Out of gas...

This morning as I was getting ready to go to school I decided to take my motorcycle because I knew that it was going to be a nice day. I knew that I was low on gas because my odometer was a 115 and thats about the time that I need fill up so I checked the gas tank and saw that it was pretty low but I thought that I shouldn't have a problem getting to school, and I would fill up after school. Well all was going well. I was happy in my little world singing songs to myself on the freeway. Just at the peak of my contentment thats when it hit... A sudden loss of power and immediately I knew what that meant (from a previous experience that I had). I quickly got over to the shoulder and slowly came to a stop. After many failed attempts to revive my starving motorcycle I was forced to push my bike the 1/2 mile to the next exit. Between the half and 3/4 mark to the exit some one stopped to offer a ride to the gas station but since I was so close I opted to just push, but I thanked him for the offer and he went on his way. Well to make a short story shorter the end result was a very tired Geoff. But it wasn't all bad, I did learn pretty much when my bike is out of gas, and I was a little cold on the ride. As well, when I got to school they did have a free BBQ. So it wasn't all bad, besides I needed the exercise.