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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
marathoner452: (Default)
Another day, another fire call. I wonder if it gets any easier to watch after you've been on more of them. Somehow I doubt it. And what always gets me is that they want you to save the money, clothes, teddy bears, whatever for people "who really need it." Even after having lost pretty much everything they owned, they stop and think of others. My first fire call was about a month after Katrina-we had to convince them that their needs were just as great as those of each family affected by the hurricane. The main difference is in the scale of the disaster, not in the amount of need each person has.

Yeesh, that house was still burning when we got there. I swear it takes days for me to stop smelling the smoke. I don't know, maybe you get used to dealing with that for awhile.

On the other hand, I had a lot of fun with my flood safety presentation yesterday. What I did NOT have fun with was the accident-induced traffic on 15 on the way home. The plus side of that was that I had lots of extra time to listen to The Grapes of Wrath (which is further stoking my sense of social justice, but more on that when I finish and post a review).

~Bethany

PS-We're having California Tortilla for lunch. I love that stuff. Esp. the Havana Chicken burrito.
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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
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The mission for the next few days is to tear the house apart in search of my steel-toed field boots I wore on an Outward Bound Swap-Ya two years ago. And why? Because I'm too cheap to buy new ones and I need them to go out on daytime DAT (Disaster Action Team) fire calls. I'll be putting all I've learned these past couple of months to good use to help people who just lost everything, in addition to giving CDE presentations. It's a rather scary thought, to be the one people will be looking to in such a time of need, but it's a good kind of scary. A personal growth getting out of your comfort zone kind of scary.

In other news, I hate marathon recovery. It's taking forever. I feel as stiff today after 5 painfully slow miles as I used to feel after 10 or 12.

~Bethany
marathoner452: (Default)
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

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