Enough with the water already!

Another odd day without work. I woke up this morning to the sound of my pager going off. I only made it to the sitting position before I realized that I was at home. That was a definite change from the norm. I had some coffee and folded some laundry.Nothing really too fun.

I did go and see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie today. I thought it was quite good, although the book was considerably better. I stopped at Wal-Mart to buy more undershirts since my washer seems to be eating them and went home to get ready for class. I put on my long underwear, undershirt, t-shirt, sweatshirt, socks, pants, jacket, mittens, hat, and boots and was ready to get out the door. The only bad thing was that I forgot to bring an extra set of clothing. My gear was already in my car since our training was at Abbott laboratories and not at our station.

I stopped at the gas station to get some chewing gum and coffee (what a combination!), and was off to the plant. It was kind of cool to be able to flash my badge and get through security with no questions asked. Especially now with all the terrorism. Normally these industrial plants are just as hard to get into as the naval base.Anyways, I found the fire station with no problem on the property. They only have one engine, but it carries over 700 gallons of foam and 300 gallons of water. Pretty impressive.

Since tonight we were studying sprinkler and fire protection devices, one of our practicals was to shut off a sprinkler at the head. Pain in the ass. Our instructor would turn on the sprinkler, which, might I add, was outside, so we wouldn't get the station wet, and let us at it in pairs. You had to climb the ladder (A-frame) and put a chock in the sprinkler to stop the water flow. Sounds easy, huh? Not really...at least not with all that freezing cold water flying into your face. I got the chock into the sprinkler head, but by the time I accomplished that I was soaking wet from head to toe. The water even leaked through the neck of my gear and soaked the front of my shirt (or should I say shirts) all the way down. I had to strip down to my long underwear and just have my sweatshirt on over that.

We then looked at a few fire panels and different types of sprinkler systems throughout the building. After that we had to unscrew and rescrew a PIV type valve, and an OS & Y type valve. I can't even express my enthusiasm in words. We also went through two slideshows (69 slides in each show to be exact), while we were all soaking wet. Brilliant.

I was supposed to work at the firehouse tonight too but I found coverage at the last minute. I figure another night in my own bed couldn't hurt.

I ended up at the acute care center after class for my back. My doctor told me on Saturday if my meds weren't cutting it to go there and get a shot to make it through the night. The doctor at acute care disagreed. He gave me a new prescription for Percocet (after about 2 hours of sitting around). Now I'm home and ready to catch some shut-eye. I have to be up at 0530 for a 0645 MRI of my thoracic spine. Yuck. Did I mention how much I hate mornings?