marathoner452

Apartment complex fire call. 2 units destroyed and 5 evacuated. One of the renters didn't have insurance. Hence the reason why I have just a little more incentive to work on getting renter's insurance/fire safety/emergency preparedness info out to local apartment complexes. Just a little.

I got jambalaya for dinner tonight at the emergency services meeting. It was spicy but it still needed hot sauce. I've been unofficially contracted by the Health Department to get these cards with basic health info out to the kids in my presentations. Yet another good deed to be done for the people of Frederick County. And apparently I've reached 211 kids in my tornado presentations this month. Pretty cool, but also quite a ways away from my goal of 700.

To do list for tomorrow:
Xcall 5 more apartment complexes. Hey, those are easier than I thought.
Xbookmark tornado facts and pictures for easy access in my presentations. Presentations start back up Wednesday.
Xpick up Frederick paper on my way into work.
Xlisten to Jarhead en route to and home from work.
Xmake beans and rice for this week's lunches.
-write to the St. Bernard resident who helped us fix the ERV. I think I can get away with doing that at work.
-run a few miles in prep. for Main Street Mile Wednesday.
-request off for the first week of July, then start researching nola options for that week.

~Bethany

Yesterday afternoon, not an hour after Judy got back with our new response vehicle (which conveniently decided not to work just recently), we got a fire call. A really bad one too. I'm not sure how much I can tell under our confidentiality rules, so suffice to say there wasn't much left in the kitchen and it smelled pretty powerful in there. The whole back wall was knocked out too. I think the smoke got into my pores or something because I could still smell it by the time I got home hours later. Smelled like a campfire gone crazy, only worse.

Whatever you do, don't try and put out a grease fire with water. Take the pan off the stove and put the lid on, and if that doesn't work get the heck out of there. Not sure if that's what happened, but it's always good advice.

As for today, I have a presentation this afternoon and a grant proposal to finish, then handbells to practice, Christmas cards/gifts to write/wrap and Caribbean short stories to read. At least I'm not bored.

~Bethany

So let's see, what's new around here since I last wrote?

Erin came up and spent the night last weekend. We went to a film festival for hurricane relief called "Sights and Sounds of the South." We saw A Streetcar Named Desire, then went out to dinner at Harry's in Westminster. I bought tacky feather boas and perused masks for my Mardi Gras Halloween costume, then we went back to the film festival and saw The Big Easy. Sunday morning we got up early so I could run in the Bachman Valley 1/2 Marathon (finished in 2:04). In the afternoon we headed down to Baltimore for a Little Italy Pasta tasting. My favorite was the pesto pasta, and I had my first canoli.

This past week at work has been pretty wild. I took Community Services on Thursday morning, and I'll take Family Services (client casework) tomorrow, all day. I found out yesterday that I will after all be giving disaster education presentations all day on Tuesday. :O Good thing I'd been working on those presentations in amongst all my pre-deployment screening. I went out on my first disaster action call today too, and it was pretty intense to be even partially responsible for interviewing someone who just lost everything in a fire two days ago. Intense, yes, but also very satisfying.

And in other news, the Baltimore Marathon is in 2 weeks. Surprisingly, I'm not nervous at all. Part of that is because I'm running it as a training run and not a race. Most of that, though, I think, is because I've trained like crazy this summer. The race will be easy compared to running 54 miles in a week in the heat of summer, without crab soup at the end to boot.

(Oh, and I just think that mood icon is cute. It has nothing to do with anything.)

~Bethany