I've decided that instead of retrofitting posts with photos (which would require a bunch of work on the readers' part, digging back through the blog to see them), I'll just present them sequentially in today's post. My friend Sean did something similar to recap 2008 in his blog.
First and foremost… The Tower. Don't let the heavenly lens flare fool you; she's a harsh mistress. Every day, five stories of brick vaguely reminiscent of war-torn Eastern Europe await us.
Come to think of it, there's an exhibit I went to at the Newseum in D.C. that has an actual East German guard tower, taken from somewhere around Checkpoint Charlie (the most famous of the East/West Berlin Wall crossings). It looks a lot like our Tower.
The stairs on the side. There's 57 (believe me, we've counted) from the bottom to the fifth floor, and each is 12" high.
Don't mind the date/time; I was using a loaned Nikon CoolPix for portability, and didn't have the time to adjust it.
The apparatus bay at the Academy is lined by our lockers, in which we keep all our gear.
Unfortunately, when the truck/engines are actually parked inside, this is about all the space we have to work with when the Sergeant calls a Box Alarm.
Our gear, laid out inside the bay. (No, not all the photos are meant to be practical. Be prepared for a few "artsy" ones.)
The "ugliest warped metal shithouse I’ve ever seen," if I recall the post correctly. I'm not sure how it happened, but the colors on this structure turned out very vivid (this thing definitely doesn't look this interesting in real life).
This picture about sums up our Friday. We cooked a collective lunch for all the instructors and recruits (jerked chicken, Carribbean rice, and greens, if you care), and the grill team were the ones who really came through in the clutch. Wind-whipped, half-frozen, and the last to get a full meal, these brave few stood outside grilling in Nomex hoods and bunker gear.
(For the record, "2 hours" means that they were outside for two hours already when the picture was taken. The grilling wasn't done for at least another hour and a half.)
I'd love to have enough pictures to do this every week—hopefully I can include at least one or two per post. It's probably good that I get these "setup" photos out of the way, so that I don't have to do it every time I describe something new (especially once our actual firefighting portion starts, since that will provide I'm sure endless photo opportunities.)
EDIT: In case any of the pictures appear poorly-sized or otherwise strange, you can click on them to open them at full resolution in a new browser window. I'm still working the kinks out of a multiple-picture post, so please bear with me.
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