I remember you....

I remember you, I think to myself as I step out into the blackness and walk toward the carport. When I get to the jeep, I click on my key light and throw my work clothes and backpack into the front seat. I'm instantly reminded of last fall when the fire season was winding down and I started my "off season" training of going to the gym before work started and it gives me a feeling of something familiar and solid.

The pitch black mornings that are still slightly warm are an intermediate step between the chaos of summer and the routine of winter. Winter days begin much earlier when our work schedule changes to a 7am start. It's a harsh reality being as I always think of winter as a time to catch up on all the sleep I lose over the summer. Winter is a time of regeneration, retreating back into slumber, hibernating. Maybe that was when I got laid off during the winters. In order to make it to work at 7am and be able to hit the gym beforehand, I have to be up at 4:15... at the latest. That's early no matter what time you go to bed.

Winter days are filled with darkness. Darkness when I load up the jeep in the morning and drive to the gym- keeping my eyes as wide and alert as possible for little beady eyes that signify a deer in the road. Darkness as I leave the gym and drive to work. And then darkness falls again before I leave work, due to the extended shifts we work. Four 10hr days instead of five 8hr days. Yep, that gives us 3 days off, the first I usually sleep through to try to make up for the lost sleep during the week. It's pretty harsh.

Hopefully this year I will learn to embrace it, instead of driving to work saturated in bitterness about why I'm so tired and how makes it so much more likely that I will hit a deer. I'd like to practice something I've read about in articles on sleep, and that is to get up around the same time everyday and go to bed around the same time everyday. Which is why I'm up this morning so early, even though it's a non-workout day. So for now, because work starts at 8:30am, I wake up at 5am, eat breakfast and go to the gym, and then head to work. I come home, eat dinner and go to bed. No time to stay up late if I have to be up that early.

However, getting up at 4:15am in the winter on my days off might be a hard sell. But it's so much easier to handle when your body gets used to the routine. I don't know what you do with yourself with 4 hours of darkness left in your morning. Maybe I'll finally get around to painting my bedroom.

The Truth Comes Out

I have to expose the truth before my benedryl kicks in and the lights go out....

I just got off the phone with my friend, Debbie. Some of you have met her and I'm sure some of you have found her rather sane. But I knew better. I just didn't want to say anything, but things have gone too far and you must all learn how incredibly insane she is.

Several years ago, she convinced me to run a marathon after both of our doctors said it wasn't happening that year. We ran it, and it was a dumb idea. Her response to that when I brought it up in conversation tonight: "It's a good thing we were young."

About a week ago, she convinced me to do another one, my third. I told her how I was trying to convince my friend Corey to do it with us, because misery loves company. This is when the conversation got awfully suspicious.

"Well that's good! Tell Corey I'm going to run it really slow. I'm actually going to try to run it as slow as I can." She said.

"What? What do you mean?"

"Well, I tried running them fast and it isn't working, so I'm gonna run it slow."

This wasn't making any sense. I mean, sure, if you're pacing it too fast in the beginning, I can kinda understand that way of thinking....

"Whaaaat?" I asked, getting more doubtful by the second.

"Have you ever heard of Marathon Maniacs?" She asked.

Oh no. Whatever it is, it can't be good.

"What? No. What's that?" Dumb question. The correct reply would have been "What's that? I can't hear you, you're breaking up. It must be this freak storm that just blew in. I better let you go."

"Yeah, google it. Marathonmaniacs.com." I figured I would look it up the next day, whatever it was, it didn't sound interesting. "You run 33 marathons in 90 days and-"

"What?! What did you just say? How many?!"

"Three. Three marathons in 90 days."

"Oh, I thought you said 33."

"No, 3. In 90 days." She said.

"Oh my god! And what do you get out of this, a t-shirt?!"

"A t-shirt." She replied. I laughed. She continued "It's yellow". I bet it is.

I got out my laptop and googled it. Geez. People make really bad decisions all the time.

"I can tell you're intrigued," she said, "I'm glad I was able to plant the seed."

Damnit Debbie, I am not running 3 marathons in 90 days.I clicked on a couple links trying to find this infamous t-shirt. Debbie continued on while I searched.

"So there's the LA marathon in March, so we'd just have to find one in February. See, it's kinda bad for you having to come down here, so I could come up and do one up there."

"I don't see the shirt" I said.

"Oh, well it's yellow, and it's really cool. Ok, it's not really cool, but I'm pretty certain it's yellow. Anyway, you'll have to cut out booze and caffeine."

"What?! I'm not cutting out booze and caffeine! No way!" WTF? How could this ever have seemed like a good idea?

"Well it helps you recover better." She explained. "And you won't have to train for each one because you'll get in shape for the first one and then just stay in shape."

"Ok, maybe booze, but there's no way in hell I'm cutting out coffee."

I have some unstable friends. For real. And maybe sometimes I'm not really all that stable either. But geez, this one was getting ridiculous.

"Have you tried Marathonguide.com?" I asked.

"Yeah..."

I typed it into the address bar and started looking for February marathons.

"We should do the Canadian Death Race" I said while clicking on the next month's races.

"What's that?" She asked.

"Google it. It's a 72 mile race...in Canada of course. It's kinda based off Roman beliefs of there being a River Styx when you die. They put you on a funeral pyre with coins on your eyes so that you can pay the ferryman of the dead to take you across the River Styx into the afterlife. If you don't have the coins, he won't take you across and you'll be forced to pace the riverbank for eternity in a sort of purgatory deal" I explained.

"Oh yeah." She said.

"So they give you this coin at the beginning of the race and you carry it with you until you reach this river. You give the ferryman your coin and he takes you across. If you lost the coin you're disqualified and they take you back to the start."

"There's 12,000ft of elevation gain!" She exclaimed.

"Yeah, well you run up three different mountain peaks. You have to finish in 24 hours or they come pick you up..."

"Oh, 24 hours. Who needs sleep?" She said.

"Right. So instead of running 3 marathons in 90 days, you can just run them back to back in 24 hours. Then at the end of the 24 hours, you can just say 'I'm done' and there you have it, 3 marathons. And you don't have to run anymore after that."

"Hahaha!" She laughed. "'I'm done'! Ok, well I'll work crew for you when you do your death race. Anything with the word 'death' in it we probably shouldn't do...Don't you want to do the Death Valley Marathon?"

We discussed a few more marathons and she again proclaimed how happy she was that she had planted the seed in my head. I'm disgusted. I don't know why she thinks I'm so easy like that. I've agreed to nothing. I may or may not look into this in further detail. I still have yet to see the shirt. It's just insane really. Who does stuff like this?

What's Going on?

I was going to post about our latest buggy happenings, then started thinking about how well I'm already failing at training for another marathon, then I decided to just update all of you on what's been going on with my life.

I have poison oak in my butt crack, which is insanely unfortunate. A month or so ago we went to the Shasta National Forest up by Shasta Lake, where we all contracted the worst poison oak ever. 10 of us got shots of cortico-steroids, one of us ended up with 5 shots. Anyway, we all agreed that Shasta Lake has the worst strain of oak known to man. It is horrendous and none of us wanted to ever step foot in that area again.

A couple days ago we got called to a new fire....out by Shasta Lake. Of all places. It was heading towards the old fire which is both fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate because when it hits the old fire, it will stop. Unfortunate because we all knew what was in store for us in that area. All night we cut through bushes and poison oak, worked through until 9am the next day, got a hotel, showered, slept and went back to the fire the following day. We all knew we had oak, but some of it takes awhile to show up.

Let me explain a few things.
1. We all know what it looks like. We are unable to avoid it because we have to do our jobs. We do not get to choose not to be in it.
2. We are all wearing long sleeves, long pants, boots, and in some cases, gloves. Clothes do not protect you from oak regardless of what people say.
3. When you sweat, it picks up the oils from the poison oak plant and deposits it where ever the sweat rolls to and concentrates it where sweat accumulates. Like your waistband. Or your butt crack.
4. When you take off your boots and socks, the bottom hem of your pants that have oak on them will now rub against your feet and you will now have oak on your feet. You will not realize this until you are back to work wearing boots and wool socks and the top of your foot itches.
5. You cannot touch your face at anytime while in contact with "the oak" for any reason, such as rubbing your eyes, picking your nose, etc. And you absolutely cannot blow your nose or wipe the sweat off your brow with a sleeve covered in oak. This last rule I did better at this time, which is why I have a limited amount on my face and my eyes are not swelling shut like last time.
6. If you have never had poison oak, you have absolutely no idea how awful it is and therefore are not allowed to laugh or say things like: don't scratch it, it can't be that bad, suck it up, etc.

So anyway, I'm covered in oak. And it itches.

So today we drove up to Medford about an hour away to bring our buggies in for repairs. Mainly my buggy, which is B-ride. It got dropped off at the mechanic, and we piled into two pick-up trucks and followed A-ride home. About 5 miles from the station, A-ride quit. I pretty sure I blogged about this, but A-ride breaking down in Wyoming was the reason why we spent 3 extra days stranded in Cheyenne. Maybe I didn't blog about that. Anyway, it'll be in the book. So now we have no buggies, and only two pick-up trucks for 18 people.

The government buys vehicles from the lowest bidder. So if Cummings says it can build us a crew haul for $20,000 but International says it can build us one for $10,000 (I'm just throwing out random numbers here, they cost way more than that), the government gives the bid to International. But Cummings argues: they can do that because they're building a shitty vehicle that will break down and need to be towed every 300 miles! Government says: who cares? We aren't driving them! Lowly, underpaid firefighters are. So we buy the shitty vehicle that breaks down every 300 miles and leaves us stranded in places like Cheyenne and Klamath River.

I have also agreed to run another marathon with Debbie at the end of January. I'm cutting it close as far as training time is concerned, but not overly close. This last weekend I was supposed to do my first long run of 6 miles, which isn't much at all, but I was at a fire. So this morning I decided to get up early and run it. Mind you, I just got back from said fire. After taking 2 benedryl and being deprived of sleep for several days, running this morning turned into drinking coffee and staring at my bed. I didn't get back into bed if that counts for anything. But I didn't run either.

I decided I would run after work.

Well, with all the moving vehicles around, I didn't eat until a little late, which caused my stomach to get all acidic and burning, which was only made worse by a large amount of pizza consumed. If I don't eat something every couple of hours, my stomach starts to eat itself. I waited too long, and then once I did eat, I ate all the wrong things. There was no way I was going to run if I was still feeling like this by the time we got back to the station. Two 150mg doses of Zantac later (double the max dose) I was still dying in the back seat of the truck and A-ride was parked on the side of a curvy river road, unable to start back up. No run for me.

I've decided to skip my 6 miler, head back to the gym tomorrow morning, do weights and a 3 miler and then shoot for a 7 miler this weekend. For now I'm going to pour a second glass of wine and take an oatmeal bath, 2 benedryl and go to bed. Tomorrow is another day.

Projects around the house

I'm sitting in the withdrawing room in front of a roaring fire...even though it's gonna be just under 90 degrees today. I got a wood pellet insert for my fireplace and it has to "cure" much like a cast iron pan does, so I've got to run it nearly all day today. It'll most likely be much hotter in here today than outside, so I'll probably get a lot of painting done. Here's a photo of the new insert:

 



It was a fairly expensive investment, so I won't be paying anyone to fix my sprinklers this year, which means it probably won't get done. Fireplaces are pretty inefficient at heat, so in a climate like this it really pays to have an insert installed in existing fireplaces. So this little guy drops these tiny pellets into a dish and then burns them. The pellets are esssentially made of super compacted saw dust. They burn very efficiently. This way I won't have to continually load wood like I do with my woodstove. I've still got that in the dining room. I load up the top with pellets and it'll burn up to about 40 hours without having me touch it again, which means I will not be going outside in my pj's at 6am to gather wood that I forgot to bring in the night before. It also has a remote, so I can set the temperature I want the house to be, and voila, it stays at that temperature as long as it has pellets.... and electricity. That's the downside. If the electricity goes out, so does the pellet stove. The machinery inside needs electricity to run. But that's ok, I have a woodstove that doesn't need electricity, so I'm well covered.

And I'll be choosing a different picture for the mantle....that one's a little small.

I finished sanding and re-staining my deck before this last fire we went on. Here's a couple pics:

I've been working on painting the house and haven't gotten very far, but yesterday I painted one of the walls yellow (as opposed to the boring white primer that I've been doing so far) and am excited to get the other walls painted. It's a bigger job than it looks like. It has to be cleaned, the walls sanded if the paint is peeling or the wall is in bad shape, primer put on....twice on the bad walls, and then painted with the final color....twice I'm thinking, to make sure it's a good true color. Plus wasp nests need to be sprayed and removed, which takes about as much guts as killing spiders. I'm allergic to bees, but apparently not wasps and hornets, but I'd rather not take my chances. There's quite a few wasp nest around my house. I sprayed a few and today I'm going to grow the balls to scrape them off the house.

So here's one of the back walls after I've scraped the paint, sanded and started to apply primer. This is the worst wall I think. You can see the old color is a pale yellow. I really like yellow as a house color but I wanted it to be a happy, warm yellow. That required a little more brightness and just a touch of orange. Like the sun really. When I painted the wall yellow, I was a little shocked and nervous with how bright it was, but it's already growing on me and I'm very excited to get the rest of the house painted.

This little back room is the addition where the jacuzzi is housed, and it needs some shutters. Those will come shortly. After I paint the walls, I'll have to go back and sand, prime and paint all the trim. I'd love to get it all done before the rainy season comes, but usually fire season doesn't end until the rains start, so it'll be difficult.

There's a small tint of green in certain sections of my lawn. I guess it's not completely dead.

Oh, so a withdrawing room: came from the day back when people lived in castles and the women were proper. After a meal, the men would go into the study or whatever to smoke and drink, which wasn't proper for a lady, so the ladies went into the withdrawing (or "drawing") room to drink tea and gossip. There's no smoking in my withdrawing room, but there's certainly the occasional glass of wine. I guess I haven't completely decided what to call it.

Well, the heat from the pellet stove is starting to get a little uncomfortable so I'm going to sign off and work my way outside to get some painting done.

Home Improvement Day

I was granted 3 guaranteed days off after being on a fire for 14 days. Usually we only get two but the regional forester has decided we've had a long season and that it's gonna last even longer. I'm recovering from a chest cold and another case of poison oak, so I haven't accomplished much this weekend besides eating and sleeping, and removing two weeks worth of hair from my body and face. After two days of sitting on the couch watching HGTV, I'm ready to get some work done.

This morning I watered my dead lawn to see what would happen. The good thing about dead lawns is that you don't have to mow them. Somehow, weeds still grow without water, so it needs to be weed-eated. Then I set off to go shopping for all my home improvement needs. I can't believe how excited I get for hardware stores these days. I think there's three very exciting parts of home improvement: planning, shopping and when the project is done and you can see the fruits of your labor. Everything in between is a pain in the ass.

So Ace Hardware has 60 shades of white. I'm all for having lots of choices, but some things these days have been taken too far. Take for instance, one brand of paint having 60 shades of white. Or an entire aisle in a store dedicated to toothpaste alone. Who really needs this many choices? I picked out 5 to take home with me to stare at for the next couple of weeks before I make a decision. The white is for the exterior trim and shutters on my house. Yep, I'm approaching the exterior paint project for my house. I've decided to just take it piece by piece so it isn't such a big job. I've got to wash down the house, sand down trouble spots, fix any rotted or damaged wood, prime the house, then paint it. It's a big job. And being that it's only getting hotter outside (while I write this), I may only accomplish washing down my house today.

I've picked the yellow for the main color, it's called Straw, from Ace Hardware. I was looking at ceiling colors for the front porch and came across something interesting. In the south, people painted the ceiling of their porch blue to ward off evil spirits (called haints). Some people paint the ceiling of their porch blue to discourage bugs. In the victorian era, people painted it blue presumably to always have a blue sky overhead regardless of how gloomy a day it was. Anyway, I've decided to go with blue, but I've got a handful of colors to choose from, so I'll paint a piece of wood with a color sample I got today and hold it next to my sample of Straw and see what I think. If I don't like that, I've got some paint chips to work with as well.

I've also decided to redo the front deck. I did it when it was too hot and it didn't turn out great, so I'm going to do it again. I'll do all the prep work (washing and sanding) while it's hot, so that when it cools down I can stain it.

I bought paint for my bedroom but won't get to that today. I'm painting the ceiling Off-White and the walls Old Basque Brown. The blue I painted it when I moved in seems too childish to me. I'm not loving it.

I have a wood pellet insert being installed in my fireplace in a week, so I had to buy wood pellets. I bought a pallet of them which will be delivered on Tuesday to my wood shed. It's a ton of wood pelllets. I mean literally, it is 1 US Ton of wood pellets. Thats 50 forty pound bags. On a pallet. I peeked at my wood shed and have decided wood needs to be moved around to make room for it. It's a little more than a cord of wood, it's infested with spiders...and it's only getting hotter outside.

I also need to weed-eat at least enough that the delivery guy can find my woodshed.

Well, enough procrastinating. By the way, if I hadn't stood in the paint aisle of Ace staring at chips for an hour, it would be 5 degrees cooler outside. Now it's nearly noon and the only thing I've accomplished is shopping....and watering my dead lawn.