Summer League Men’s Softball

April 30th, 2009

Tonight we had a double-header to start off the Ought-Nine Summer Men’s Softball season. We were playing My Office #Two tonight. They are sponsored by the same bar that our team is. This was our first meeting with them. We also have been in a higher league than them. So we didn’t want to lose to them. We wanted the bragging rights. We ended up beating them by four runs. It was a little closer than it should have been.

The second game wasn’t even close. We all were hitting the ball very well and took a nice lead and beat them pretty soundly. It is part of last season’s Tubbs team. They are now called Sellas/Coug.

Following the games I went back to the FD to complete my shift. I had taken some time off without pay in order to play softball.

During the day we were doing hydrants. While we were going to one of the last hydrants I saw a guy standing in the road next to a cat that was laying on the road. I thought that cat had been hit, then I was a coyote. I knew what had happened.

We went to assist the cat. It appeared that it was hurt pretty bad. It was bleeding and appeared to have difficulty breathing. We got it to the WSU vet school and they worked on the cat.

I learned later on the cat’s owner had been notified. The wounds were cleaned and the cat went home. It wasn’t as badly hurt as we thought. That was great news.

Accident Investigation

April 29th, 2009

I worked the county tonight with Paul. This is my third time with Paul, and I have yet to stop a car. It is not the lack of trying tonight. There was just no one speeding.

We started the shift with a transport of a juvenile to Martin Hall. It my first trip up there. I also got a chance to see where we go when we hit Eastern State Hospital. We stopped at Franks Diner for dinner.

As we were coming into the County we heard a car accident get toned out for the Pullman area. Then they asked for a deputy to back a Pullman officer on a call for two intoxicated people. We were out of position for both of those calls. But we also found out at that time that Pullman Fire was at a structure fire.

We made our way down to Pullman to see if we could help at the car accident. We went to the scene out on SR Two-Seventy. I got a chance to help the State Patrol with measuring the scene and the car in the crash. It really didn’t appear to be a really bad crash, but it was bad enough.

I got back to the office and completed my paperwork for the transport and assisting the state patrol on the accident investigation before going home to get to bed. I was going to get about four hours of sleep before heading to the FD in the morning.

Missing Sweatshirt

April 28th, 2009

This morning when I got to work I found my sweatshirt that I had left on the ambulance was missing. I searched all the ambulance’s, the whole bay, then the rest of the station. I was not able to find it. I E-mail everyone and Heston said it was on an ambulance and he moved it from the ambulance so it would not get lost. It was set on the hydrant maintenance bins. But it wasn’t there. So I had to work the shift without it. With the cooler weather, it would be nice to have it.

Buying a New Boat?

April 25th, 2009

This morning I went to Genesee to take a look at a boat I found on Craigslist. The guy who owned it was a nice person. I stopped in at his house and looked around the boat. It is old, but it really good shape for its age. It seemed like a nice boat.

We took it to the river. It seemed like it was taking on some water. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I think it did. That was a big strike against it. The boat had a good size engine, but it ran at about thirty miles per hour at its fastest. The steering seemed really tight. It would make a great cruising boat and fishing boat, but it is not exactly what I was looking for.

We went back to Genesee. I rode down with him. We had a chance to talk about about web development. That is what he does for WSU.

I left his place and went home. I was pretty tired because I was up late last night. I layed down on my bed and took a little nap. I made myself some dinner and I was watching COPS when the tones started to hit for calls. Before long they toned for people to respond to the station. I went down there and I was there for about two hours.

I never rolled from the station, but it was close. Today was Springfest and there was a lot of minor calls going on up there. At one point though, the police set up a command and started to call in more cops because it was looking like it could get ugly. Nothing ever happened. I went home and watched some SouthPark before I fell asleep on the couch.

Second Arrest

April 24th, 2009

We got called for a fire alarm just before shift change. So I ended up getting a little bit of overtime out of it. I was also going to be going to the ropes training. We were removing a guy from a crane that is at the WSU Olympia residence hall. I was doing photos and photos during the training. It took about two hours from the time I got there until I got back.

I hurried home to get into my uniform for working the county. I went to the office. I gave Paul a ride from the county shop back to the office. Then Tim and I headed up to Tekoa for a report of an attempt car prowl. We took a report and some photos.

When we went to serve some papers. One was on a house that was going to be repoed. The place was trashed. It will probably cost a lot of money just to throw away the trash from around the place. Then we served papers to someone in Pullman. I also pulled about six warrants from around Pullman that I wanted to try to serve. Most of them were bad addresses. We were striking out on that.

Then we drove south on SR One-Ninety-Five. We stopped several people and I wrote some tickets. We started to head North. We stopped some more cars along the way. Tim said that he wanted to head to the gas pumps in Colfax to get fuel. It was on the way there through Colfax when we stopped a car for not dimming its headlights. The driver was suspended. I arrested him and brought him into jail. I spent the next hour and a half writing the report on that plus all the tickets that I wrote through out the night. I didn’t leave the SO until after four in the morning.

Final Day of SFST

April 23rd, 2009

We had six at the fire department so that meant I was on an ambulance all day. I was working with Tony. I really like working with him. We ended up working the South part of town. As it turned out every call save one was on the South side of town.

It was a pretty typical day around the station. We did our normal morning chores and rig checks. I had to get my EMS OTEP bookwork done today. That was what I was doing in the afternoon. But just as I got done and before I could print it off we got called out on an EMS call.

We got back to the station in time to have dinner. Then I had to run off to training at the CUE. We were doing the final day of the standardize field sobriety testing. We were doing the wet lab.

I have been doing some practice of the things I am going to say if I do the field sobriety tests. I did my practice on three of the subjects. Then I did my final test on the fourth person. I passed it. Now I am certified in doing SFST’s.

After I got back to the station I sat in on the end of the new reserve class. I got some dishes done. I got to the bedroom and I was going to start to get ready for bed. Before I even got my boots off we were called out to the CUB. I actually got to bed following that call only to get another call an hour later. After that call I was able to actually go to bed for the rest of the night.

IM Playoffs

April 22nd, 2009

This IM season hasn’t been one of our best in the last decade or so. In fact three years ago we would not have been in the playoffs, except Intramural’s changed how they do the playoffs. Now every team gets a chance to play and it is based on the record if you go to a recreational bracket or the competitive bracket. Before the change only about sixteen teams signed up to play comp and everyone else did rec. But that wasn’t very good, because a lot of competitive teams would sandbag.

Now everyone is all in the same league. Then based on the record they break the playoffs down. We were only one and five on the season, so we are in the rec bracket.

Tonight our big hitter was not there so we were going to have to do it ourselves. The first game the other team did not even show up, so we got a first round FFT. That gave us a second game. In the second game we were going to be down a player so I called up Heston. He came to play with us. We had ten guys and we hit the ball well enough to score eighteen runs. It was our biggest output of runs on the season and we won the game.

We will play again on Sunday.

Only Calls While on Ambulance

April 21st, 2009

I was supposed to be on the ambulance. But because I have training for the SO tonight I was moved to the engine to make it easier. But for a short period of time in the afternoon I was put on the ambulance with Tony so some of the others could do some drive time training on the engine.

During that time we were doing hydrants. As luck would have it we got one hydrant done and then got called out on an EMS call. That was followed up was followed up with a second call. So the afternoon was shot. I got back to the station and then it was off to SFST training on campus.

I stopped to get some pop and headed up to training. We were doing our final day of classroom training. We watched some videos and worked on grading what we saw based on the videos. We also did a written test. I missed two on that test.

The rest of the evening at the fire station was quiet.

Looking at Property

April 20th, 2009

This afternoon I met up with Craig at ReMax to look at a piece of property on banner Road. I am not impressed with the dirt road. Plus the house sites there would leave me close to two other house. Having ten acres you should be able to have a lot of distance between houses. Plus I would have no place to shoot a gun. We went to lunch at The Emerald.

In the afternoon I went on a ride with Zehm. It turned out he had a call before I got there. I got the reserve call fueled and washed. But I never ended up going out on the road because by the time get got to the office he had to write it up. I spent the time doing my FTO book. I got several things signed off. It sucked I didn’t get on the road, but I got a lot done in the FTO book.

Change in Status at MH

April 15th, 2009

I got notified recently that our benefits will be administered by simply buying them ourselves and then getting reimbursed. So I have been working on finding health, vision, dental, short and long term disability, and life insurance. I have worked with AIA for my car and house, so I thought I would go to them for this.

I am getting situated on my insurance needs. But today I also found out that I am not going to be a real employee. I am going to be a contractor, but it will be hybrid. Due to the Canadian company wanting to overhead me and the other American working for the company will be contractors. But we will have full company benefits as well as vacation, holiday, and sick time. This is an interesting change. I am also getting a small increase in pay to cover the additional taxes I will have to pay.

I went to see a CPA about my taxes. I had a brief sit down with Milt in Colfax. He is going to meet with me on Friday to cover my taxes situation. I also need to find out about my retirement options as the Four-Oh-One-K program is going to be gone too. That is probably a big one. I could do an IRA but you cannot put as much away.

After meeting with Milt I went to the Coroner’s Office for our monthly meeting. We covered the cases we had recently and other discussion covering the budget situation.

SFST

April 14th, 2009

We hit the floor running at the fire department today. Within five minutes of the start of the shift we were out running on a call. Then we went from that one directly to a second call. We had some time but ran a couple more back-to-back calls in the afternoon. None of them were very big.

We were having sloppy joe’s for dinner. Tony and I bought the food for it and I started to cook it when I got back. I had to leave around five-forty-five for training class on campus. We are learning standardize field sobriety tests.

The class lasted about four hours. Matt is teaching it. All the recruits from my academy are in the class on top of a couple older reserves.

When class was done I hurried back to the station to go back on duty. I also watched Rescue Me after I returned.

The Graduation Ceremony

April 11th, 2009

Today was a stressful day. It reminded me of the days when I lived in Stephenson. I was the hall president or some other elected position. I usually was in charge of the Mom’s Weekend Talent Show, as well as being a big player in the Mom’s Weekend Comedy Show. Saturday during Mom’s Weekend was always a stressful day for me. I was always worried about the various things that could go wrong, whether it was the audio, performers showing up, the set up, people actually showing up, and more.

Today was a flashback. I spent the morning working on my speech and getting my laptop set up with the class video. But after I copied it to the laptop I came to realize that it wasn’t a complete video. I had made some changes to it, but I never had it completely exported. So I had to start the export of the video from the video project, then I had to copy it over to my laptop. But it takes a couple hours to export such a large movie.

In the process of doing that I decided that I needed to figure out how to make the sound loud enough to be heard by a room full of people. I plugged in the old speakers that I bought about twelve years ago. They didn’t work, but I figured it was because they were not plugged into power. I had to look hard for a power cable, but I had a hard time finding one. I gave up for a while and tried a different pair of computer speakers. But I found that was a problem as well.

I looked more for the power cable for the other speakers. Finally I tried the power cord from my old Zip drive. I found it fit. So I power the speakers only to find they still didn’t work.

I then realized that I could use my old stereo and speakers that were in the living room. So I went to look into that working while at the same time looking for a microphone to use. But the only real mic I had was an small mono mic. It only had a two foot cord. I thought I could couple it with a longer cable to make it longer. But I needed to go from a eighth inch jack to RCA jacks. I went to Radio Shack and found a coupler, but then I wanted to look at their microphones. I decided to get a new one all together.

I went back home and plugged it in. At first it wasn’t working. Then I tried to plug it into a different input and found it was working. That was something going my way. Now I had a way to use a microphone and play audio from the video I made. I was also trying to create eight DVD’s with the photos and video from the academy class for all my classmates.

The clock was still ticking. My mom and Bill were on their way over to watch the graduation. I contacted my Mom to get an idea where they were. I had to be at the Pioneer Center at three to work with Macy and Malakowsky to get the room setup.

It was about one in the afternoon and I talked to Jessie. She was in charge of the cake and food supplies. I went to Colfax with her to get the cake and also so I could pick up the video projector.

We got back to my house just in time for me to pick up my rig and head up to the Pioneer Center. Once there Macy was waiting and Matt was right behind him. I opened the door to find the room empty of chairs. That caused me some concern, but I quickly found they guys were able to get everything set up quickly.

I worked on getting the computer, screen, speakers, microphone, and other A/V equipment set up and tested. The guys really wanted to watch the video. I finally relented and let them watch it. When it was done we left to get ready. We were supposed to meet up again at the old school building, the Pioneer Center, by five o’clock.

I got home and cleaned up. I got my uniform put on. Then I made my way back to the Pioneer Center. I stopped at station one to let Foster know about the graduation. He said he would see if they could come up. I didn’t think they would be coming.

People started to roll up and I got everyone their ties. Soon McNannay and Myers showed up. We had our meeting to cover the items that McNannay wanted to cover. We also took the class photos. As people started to file in, I was a little nervous, but I had everything ready, so I felt a lot better about how every thing was working. While taking the photos the fire engine and ambulance showed up. I was very happy to see them come.

We made a plan that we would start at six and as Sheriff and McNannay walked up I would call the class to attention one last time. They made their way to the front of the room and I called everyone to attention. The ceremony started with Myers doing his speech followed by Reavis. When Reavis was up front he called me to the front of the room. I was presented with a plaque for my work as class president. I wasn’t expecting that at all. It was billed as being from the class for me.

Then it was my turn for a speech. I did my speech without a hitch. I thought it went well and it was recited without me tripping up over my tongue. After my speech we did the badge pinning. I had my mom pin my badge on. Then we were sworn in.

After the swearing in we did the class awards. Pelissier gave away a knife to the best shooter, who was Jesse. Melcher got a nice flashlight for being best overall academy. The Sheriff got up front and called me up again. He recognized me for having been in the academy when I was twenty. And for working hard to lose weight. He said that I came to him a year ago about doing the academy the next time he had one. For that he gave me a challenge coin. I am going to carry that coin with me everyday I patrol. After those awards were given I did the awards we voted on.

I showed the class video. That went over very well and it got a lot of laughs along the way. Then Chaplain did the benediction. It was over. It went off awesome. After that Dean from the Daily News, who was there taking photos, got us outside for a class photo. We got several of those taken.

I got some cake and we did a lot of hand shaking and getting a lot of congratulations from a lot of people. My Mom and Bill went back to the hotel while I worked on getting the room cleaned up. I went home to change. I went to the hotel to pick them up and then we went to Cougar Country for dinner. Rhonda gave us the meal on the house. We sat around and talked for a while before I took them back to the hotel.

I went out to Hans’ place on Wheelen road for our after party. Macy, Melcher, and McCleary were all there. Dan and Michele were also there. I said hello to them. Tory came up to me and shook my hand and said hello. I was a little surprised by that because I have seen him many times in the last few years and it seemed like he never acknowledged me.

i was there until midnight talking with everyone and hanging out around the fire. I had plans to meet up with the parents for breakfast so I went home to get some sleep before breakfast and work for tomorrow.

Busy Day and Quiet Night

April 10th, 2009

Most of the day today at the fire department was spent running calls. We didn’t have a lot of downtime between all the calls we were running. But after the four calls we received at this station everything went dormant.

The afternoon melted into dinner then that melted into the evening which melted into bedtime.

Opening of the Ought-Nine Softball Season

April 9th, 2009

This afternoon I spent some time on a telephone conference meeting. We were discussing some of the new code that I will be in charge of and what I am going to need in order to get my computer set up for the dev environment.

Tonight was the opening of softball season. Ryan was coming down from Spokane. I started to make sure my equipment was all together and ready to go. I got my cleats traded out with some new plastic ones. The old ones had rubbed way down. I made sure my uniform was all together and then I started to change into my uniform.

I got the score sheets, the schedule, and drove to the field. I walked down to the field we were first going to play on. I had three new players who were going to meet up with me there.

Our first wasn’t the greatest. We scored two runs per inning as they were. Then one inning we only scored one. But in the final inning we took a nice one run lead. But we were not able to hold on to it and lost in the bottom half of the inning. That did suck as they had their bottom three batters coming to the plate. The first two got out quickly. Plus they only had nine fielders.

The second game was worse. The team was good and crushing the ball and our outfield struggled to make all the outs that we were able to make. We had one guy with no cleats. He did some good slipping and sliding.

We ended up losing both games. Ryan and I went to my place and talked about life in general. We were going to go see the Fast and Furious around ten o’clock.

We headed to the theatre around nine-thirty. We got to our seats and the movie previews started within a minute of us walking in. The movie was good. It was great to see Paul Walker on the screen. He is looking great still.

The Secretary, I Am

April 8th, 2009

We had our monthly reserve association meeting down at the SO. I was going to be riding with Reavis after the meeting.

I went to the SO around five in the afternoon. I was going to spend time working on my speech for the graduation ceremony. But I never got to that. I was doing a couple other things along the way to the start of the meeting.

We met up at six o’clock in the basement. We had some pizza and went over some things. One of the first things said was by Jordan. He was that we need to have a new secretary. He said that we should nominate a new reserve for it. He looked right at me and nominated me. Then they voted and it was unanimous.

So I was handed the yellow notebook to start to take notes. We covered the topics of the meeting which was pretty brief.

Following the meeting I typed up the meeting minutes and sent them out to everyone. I was riding with Reavis. We didn’t hit the road right away, but we finally went out. We were heading to Pullman watching traffic and chatting along the way.

When in Pullman they were getting sent to a person who possibly was involved in a robbery earlier today. But before we got there they decided the person was not involved. But we then heard about people breaking into the Armory. We were at the other end of the viaduct from the building.

We pulled into the gas station parking lot and waited for the Pullman cop to pass us. He was just up the road. We followed him in. We then learned the suspects were around the corner. We ran around the building and stopped them. I pretty much acted in the role of a cover officer.

After they were taken in I went to the Police station and got my handcuffs that were used to cuff one guy. We cleared the PD after hanging out for a little while and went back to Colfax.

BBQ and Game Night at Matt’s

April 7th, 2009

I worked on moving the Bumblebee from the street to the driveway so I can take a look at the waterpump. I was having a hard time doing it because the truck will not start.

I used the quad and winch to move it around for the most part, but being by myself posed challenges to not run it into other cars and the house. I worked that for a while and finally got it in a funny position on the driveway.

When BKoe got home he helped me get it better situated. He steered while I used the quad.

BKoe also said that he was going to Matt’s house for a BBQ and game night. He invited me over to it. I decided that I would go. We went to Safeway first to get some meat and then to Matt’s. At Matt’s we got there as the food was getting ready to come off the grill.

He said that he had enough food so we didn’t need to cook our stuff. We had dinner and conversation before going inside and playing a game. It was one where you had a word to get people to say. But you had to do it without using the word nor acting it out. The other part is that there is a timer that keeps counting down. If it was in your hands when the timer went off you would lose.

We played that for several hours while having a great time laughing. The first three rounds I was the first person out. Everyone was laughing really hard about that. It seemed to tickle their funny bone when I got out.

We left just before eleven. I hurried home to watch Rescue Me. It was the season premiere.

My New Durango

April 2nd, 2009

After I got off work I went to Lewiston to pick up my new Durango. I worked on getting the things transferred over to it. It has leather in all three rows. That was nice to see, because I only negotiated the first two rows. It must have cost less to do all three than they thought it was going to cost to do the first two rows.

I have lifetime powertrain and bumper-to-bumper warranties. It has a DVD player built into the radio. I have a rearview camera and backup sensors. It has the Hemi with MDS so it shuts down some of the cylinders when they are not needed to help save fuel. It seems to have some get-up and go. It feel great to drive it. Plus it has the newer traction control system so I feel better about driving it on the bad roadways.

When comparing my Ought-Seven vs Ought-Four it was night and day. My rig has traction like the Ought-Seven. The Ought-Seven was one I would try to put sideways on the snow covered roads and soon as it started to move sideways it would straighten out. I was easily about to put the Ought-Four sideways. I didn’t like that in terms of safety.

It looks very nice. I also have the navigation system installed. I have a huge hard drive so I can input songs and play straight from my hard drive. It also have satellite radio. I have enough space to put all my music on the hard drive.

I decided that I would find an application to update the ID3 information on all the songs. Then I am going to go through and clean the directory. I am going to work on properly naming all the songs and fixing the errors in naming of the songs. I am going to get rid of all the duplicate songs as well. I expect this project to take many hours.

After getting the rig I went to Costco to get some groceries. I hadn’t been to Costco in a long time. But I was able to get several things that I needed including paper plates, a push broom, and a sixteen gig thumb drive. I spent nearly four-hundred bucks in all.

Nathan came over and we watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith. We were not able to watch the whole thing because he had to go to a meeting, but we were going to get together after his meeting.

My softball games that were planned for the afternoon were cancelled so I didn’t have to worry about those.

A call came in for a transfer to Spokane. I decided to take the call. I went to Spokane with Blake. It was an ALS transfer. Following that call I went home to continue to working on my music. I ended up staying up until nearly two in the morning.

Old Fire Photos

April 1st, 2009

Other than our normal things at the fire station, we didn’t have a single call all day. We pretty much left to go to EMS rounds. We also went to get dinner. But other than that there was nothing going on there.

We did a couple inspections in the afternoon but that didn’t take up a lot of time. Then I spent the rest of the work day helping Rich go through a bunch of old fire investigation reports. I was pulling out photos of interest to work on scanning them.

I have a box full of them. It will be my project to work on during the days where we have time to work on projects. I hope to get through one case a day. If it is a smaller one I can get through more than one. I am going to put them onto the website under the department activities.