Rain

It's raining outside. Not the nice spring rain that comes and goes, leaving everything all clean and fresh. It's the spring rain that lasts for a few days and causes mud slides, floods, and various other crappy spring disasters.

I was looking forward to a day of working outside. We were planning to flow test some fire hydrants today, maybe paint a few, look dashing in our fire engine; get out in the public and do something that doesn't involve cleaning, washing, or organizing. Alas, mother nature has confined us to quarters.

Few people know this, but firemen only rarely do really cool exciting shit, like save kittens, babies, puppies, grandmas, and other desireable cute things like that. Most of the time we wash trucks, sweep floors, organize and re-organize various things, and do routine boring shit like fire inspections. Fire departments (especially those involved in EMS) have mountains of paperwork that lead to even larger mountains of statistical information that must be compiled and shared with the governement at various levels; city, county, state, federal. At times the amount of paperwork can reach storybook proportions (I can't off hand think of any stories that involve mountains of paperwork, but surely Monty Python has done something of the sort).

I think it's good that most people don't know that. Otherwise, people wouldn't think it was nearly as cool to be a fireman as they do. Larger departments have secretaries and assistants to assist with all this stuff. We here in the middlst of nowhere do not. We answer phones, file, sweep (see aforementioned list).

Anyway, this boring spring day is undoubtedly going to lead me into the dark task of cleaning out 100 years worth of out dated fire code books, training manuals, worthless army surplus shit from great wildland fires of days past, petrified mice, and other useless shit from our massive storage room.

I hope I don't catch the haunta virus or something awful like that.