Current Temp = -16

These days I have settled into a pretty good routine up here. Life is pretty much business as usual except sales have started to pick up due to the Christmas season. Mostly I am thinking about getting away on a vacation at some point this winter. I miss snowboarding like its my job so I am gonna go and shread some insane powder somewhere exciting.
Firefighting is going well but there is quite a bit of drama going on at the hall. The boys have been without a contract for about two years now and its starting to come to a close. They had an arbitration hearing recently so they are waiting to hear the decision on that. The city is trying to avoiding adding additional personnel that are required. We are also caught in the middle somewhat because we are neither union or city staff. It definitely makes things interesting.
In other news the major purchase of a trailer closes on Wednesday. I am pretty pumped up about owning a property up here. Its a big investment but an important start to my million dollar fantasies! In due time...
Its Saturday night and I am going to get ready to hit the town. I hope all is well and people are enjoying the Christmas Season!

New Helmet!

So I have finished the training required to obtain my black helmet at long last... Well it actually didnt take much time at all. It used to be that even after completing all of your training it took another couple of months to earn your black helmet. With the new deputy Chief in town we now get the helmets after completing Offensive 1 & 2 courses.
I am pretty excited because now I can respond on apparatus, fire trucks, to fire calls. I would likely not be doing much on scene but any experience is good experience at this point in time.
The firehall is going pretty well and I am starting to make a few more friends with some of the other fellas on different platoons.
Work is starting to pick up a little bit of steam heading into the Christmas season. It keeping me quite busy but afterwards we head into a lull season which will be nice. It will give me time to prepare for next summer. Get the contest all ready for the summer season and take some vacation time. I am leaning towards a snowboarding trip of sorts. I miss snowboarding every weekend. We have a bunch of snow up here but no hills. Its really quite depressing!!!
I am off to bed, stay well!

Christmas Display

One of our accounts in town here approached us about putting up a display in their store for the Christmas season. Well today at work we built one heck of a display! Here are the photos that show the job from start to finish… The end result looks absolutely amazing, in my biased opinion. Ironically our competition elected to not erect a display which can only help my sales numbers for the season!
My boss, Doug, had built a few displays that have won awards for Coca Cola in Western Canada. So this was one of his previous creations with a few additions. He wrote up all the plans and facilitated the building of the display.

This is what we started with, an empty front of the store. We brought in about 8 full pallets to build the entire display. Three and a half of those were the base that you see here.


In order to hang those signs up there I was lifted up on a wobbly pallet jack and given some wire hangers. After I managed to stop shaking atop of the thing I managed to get wires all in place quite evenly. I was pretty shocked cause the jack was shaking sooo badly, or maybe that was me.


Our first "house" Cranberry Ginger Ale with the Coke Zero "Eave". At this point I figured I was in for a seriously long day...

Peak two, our Coke village is starting to take a little big more shape. Along with that shape is a replica of the leaning tower of Pisa. We remedied that as best we could with a pallet jack and some cardboard. *Note to customers - Don't loiter under the sprite roof!!!

Doug hard at work facilitating!


Starting to look even better but still impossible to shop off of just yet. I can't even count how many customers made the joke:
"I want that one on the bottom"
Hardy har har har... Hilarious!
Slowly but surely things are starting to come together for the village people...

Santa makes his appearance atop of the Cran Ale house. His sleigh is over at the neighbours. Just a hop skip and a jump away. Now that the display is built, we need product that is easily accessible to our customers. Plus how are the coke village people going to look outside their houses to check on the weather?

Windows! Beautifully created by one lucky lady... Wink, wink, nudge, nudge! I think they really make the whole village come together nicely. Handcrafted as well... Can't find those on the POS website, trust me, I looked!

The product "waterfall" is being installed. These are the products that we want our customers to purchase. With any luck they will leave our roof tops alone!!!


Here are the two masterminds behind this glorious display putting the final touches on it... We're still missing price signage though.

The End Result!!!!

Start time 7:00 AM
Finish time 2:45 PM

It was actually much quicker than we had anticipated. I think that is because this has previously been built so Doug had it all planned out perfectly.

I am off to bed, tomorrow is the Santa Claus Parade and I am planning on being the star of the show hanging off the fire trucks...

Fire Fighting Photos...

Decked out in full gear. Its hard to even tell who is who once we are all geared up. We ran the stairs about 15 times that day. Quite tiring the say the least! At least with all this working out the six pack is about to return after a beerful absence...


This is probably after one of the many trips were took up the stairs. Somedays I am pretty sure that some of our more experienced Paid on Calls enjoy putting us through the paces. Next year it will be me and I am quite pleased about that! Maybe I'll take it easy on the new fellas, but I doubt it!


My Japanese pose... Peace out homies!


This makes me smile everytime I come into the hall. My own locker with a name on it... Our helmits are still yellow with duct tape name tags but that will all change after we pass our offensive 1 and 2 tests. Black helmits simply look waaay cooler...



This was the evening that was mentioned in the previous post. We pretty much demolished that place as much as we possibly could. A good time was had by all but more importantly, we learned a lot!



Here is Sammy. He is quite an interesting little fella. He actually works for the competition here in town and his mouth is flapping a mile a minute, all the time. His nickname around the hall is Mamma. He didn't remember the phonetic alphabet quite right... M = MIKE, not MAMMA.


Here I am practicing donning my turn out gear. Each time we are timed and we gotta have all of our equipment and SCBA on in less than two minutes. Slowly but surely we're getting quicker at this. It's little things that save seconds and essentially lives.


Here's our favorite instructor. About once a day he comes out with a killer joke that we all have a good laugh over. At that moment everyone loves Ingo. The rest of the time, we are just trying to get through class...


It's a little tight under there. I am still trying to get over the claustrophobia issues... The first time I was crawling under the truck I got stuck and pretty much started to hyperventilate. I have since calmed down quite a bit... I am still sucking back about half a tank each trip!

Fire Marshal Bill, Er... Richard

This is taken from an e-mail that I recently sent out:

At long last someone brought a camera out to our Wednesday night practice. We have been using an abandoned staff housing building from one of the old mines in town to practice on. The land has since been reclaimed by the aboriginals and must be returned to the state it was in when it was taken in 1937. All the structures are being taken down since they haven’t been around since ‘37. Before they are demolished though the fire department has a chance to use them for training purposes...

What did we learn that night?
Every window in Yellowknife is either double or triple paned, but chairs can get through any of them, if thrown with enough force.
BBQ throwing off of balconies should be a sport!
Windows, well they were made to be broken.
Brick walls can be broken, so can sledge hammers.
Chainsaws can pretty much get through anything!

Sadly in this photo my face is not overly visible because of the frost on my shield. It is actually me and I am not trying to impersonate anyone! I am cutting through the outside wall of the building extending the window down to the ground.
That was probably one of the most fun practices that I have been to. Most of the older guys were telling us that the training like that happens about once a year. The adrenaline rush had better last!

Firefighting is going really well. The boys are all pretty cool and I am learning new things each week. Our weekend training will be completed next weekend and I we will all be qualified to respond on apparatus to calls. It’s going to be an exciting time on my first call I am sure. We only get called out on our pagers if there is an actual fire; I guess that’s why all the POC’s are sooo quick to respond to those pages. It’s their best chance at some real “action”. Soon the ice is going to be thick enough that we will be able to complete our ice rescue training. That involves donning some seriously thick wet suits and jumping into the lake after cutting a hole in the ice. Should be an icy good time had by all.

I have really got to start posting a little bit more often. By the time that I finally get around to it so many things have happened its hard to remember them all… I did get one message that requested more photos so this post will hopefully satisfy those with short attention spans that are paying for the internet by the minute. Step up and pay the extra 30 cents and read Tran.

Biggest news first I guess. Last weekend I played, in limited important game situations, in the Western Canada Broomball Championships. The coach told me that he would rest me so that when situations arose where he needed my special skills I would be ripping and roaring to go. Sadly those situations were few and far in between! So needless to say my ass was nailed to the bench for many of the “game on the line” situations. Luckily there weren’t too many of them. So I did manage to get some ice time throughout the tournament.

Right up until the finals when in the last 6 minutes with the game tied 0-0 I took a penalty after getting railroaded by a couple of elbows. I didn’t even look at the bench on the way over because I knew where I was headed the second that my penalty expired… I retuned right back to my spot on the bench for the remainder of the game. This turned out to be 15 minutes into the SECOND overtime period!!! Our team finally scored to win the Championship… Boy was I ever happy that I didn’t cost the team the tournament and I could laugh about what happened afterwards. With the championship victory my drinking hiatus ended as a celebration was in order. Did we ever celebrate, right up until I was taken home by my buddy’s mom and sister. Lifesavers they are!!!

The tournament banquet was a great party. Sadly I wasn’t named to the all-star team. I thought surely I would have been named best bench warmer or water boy…

Here I am right after collecting my medal. Boy did I ever contribute to that tournament victory! A man's gotta pay his dues right?

The CHAMPS! Our boy Ian was absolutely insane during the tournament. He stopped a breakaway with about two minutes left that would have sent us home with the silver...

If it were real I already would have upgraded my "grill". A nice little momento of the north. I am sure I will collect more than a couple more!

The start of the after party. This part of the evening is clear as day in my mind, it gets a little foggy towards the end of the evening!


Matt should have been holding my eyes open not the other way around. His partying antics lasted til 5 AM. I went til 2 AM, stumbled into a cab and likely yelled "Drive Smithers!"


Listening to the coach give us playing advice that didn't really apply to me sitting on the bench. As the deaf guy I was just smiling and nodding anyways.


Practicing that killer swing. If it had been working a little bit better for me I would have picked up at least a few "sure" goals throughout the tourney. Sadly, it wasn't working and my humble self passed the ball off to the goalie, on the other team!


Look at that killer instinct in action... Grrr...


Sin Bin. My home away from home at the rink. Seriously though, I didn't deserve a penalty, my brother backs me up on that one!

YEE-HAW!!!

That concludes our post on the broomball Western Canada Championship. I am sure that if I continue to improve there will continue to be a spot on the team (bench) for me. Hopefully next year's tournament is in a little bit more of an exciting place. I mean, Yellowknife, its cool and all but I live here!

Current Temp. -19

So today it is finally cold. It reached minus 19 on the weather channel. The nostils were freezing with every intake of breath. It didn't even really faze me much because I am pretty sure I have adjusted quite a bit to the temperature.
This past weekend was a busy one for me. I have a project that I am working on and putting a lot of hours in on. A buddy of mine is showing a house next weekend and it needs quite a bit of work before it is all set up and ready to go. So most of my after work time is spent painting and finishing the house so its all set for the open house. Its next weekend and there are loads of touch ups and trim to finish. It was also a training weekend down at the fire hall. So Saturday and Sunday from 8 to 5 we were doing our best to learn as much as we could. We were also donning all of our gear and running the hose tower like it was our job...
I will write more about the weekend tomorrow. I am exhausted and really need some beauty sleep!