Monday, January 17, 2011

Oh My Gosh I Almost Stepped On It!!!

Saturday we were leaving the house and getting the kids in the car. It was raining outside and we were taking the kids to the library to reward some good behavior. Jenn started carrying Joelle over to her side of the car, and then she screamed the title of this post. I was puzzled for a moment, but quickly figured out what must have happened.

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This is the first snake I'd seen since we've been at this house. I think it looks pretty cool, and all the kids concurred, even Emery. It just sat there, staring at us. We left it alone and went to the library. Jenn is just going to have to get over being afraid of snakes, I'm sure it won't be the last time she sees one.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Back on the information superhighway... in a Pinto

Blogspot only lets me post 5 pictures with them, so I made a gif out of some pictures that our class historian took. It's pretty cool, and it ends up being a lot better than 5 stupid pictures on top of each other.

Photobucket

You should see me doing an emergency bailout. Lucky for me, there weren't pictures of when one of my SCBA straps got caught in one of the grooves of the ladder beams, and I got stuck up there for a while. This bailout went pretty smooth.

Jenn and the kids moved down with me on Christmas day. Our rental home still doesn't have cable internet hooked up as of today. We've had 5 visits from Time Warner trying to get our home hooked up, and each time they send someone who is incapable of hooking up our home, even though every time I schedule an appointment, I let them know of all the issues we've had and that they need to send someone who is qualified and able to do the specific work that we need. Our home is right near the edge of Time Warner's service area. I believe the line runs out about 500 yards past our house. It's been verified that service is available, it's just inconvenient for them to install it. I finally gave up and am now on Virgin Mobile 3G broadband. I don't know if you can call something that connects you at 100kbps broadband, but it's a connection, and I guess it's all we're going to be able to get.

I graduate from the fire academy in 3 weeks. I'm nervous and excited to get started. It's going to be weird starting a new routine, and losing contact with most of the friends I've made in the past 5 months. We're doing live fire at the academy next week, and after that, it's just studying for the city and state tests, and administrative work. After 5 months of training, I can't believe they're just going to throw us all out there after a 20 minute date with the burn building. I'm praying for good officers when I get out into the field, because I'm pretty sure I'll be lost for a while.

I'm hoping to finally get to post a bit more, now that I do have some form of internet access.