Sunday, August 30, 2009

season changes

The last day of summer holidays. Some kids love this day, some hate it. My daughter can't wait until tomorrow, the first day of school. My son can't wait until next June, and the last day of school. Same family, same upbringing, same school, two totally different perspectives on this critical fact of life. Things always even out in the end though. By the last week of of September, Vanessa won't love school so much, and Phillip will at least be uncomfortably resigned that this is his lot in life for a couple more years. It seems almost criminal to have to go to school while it's still August, but I guess everyone has to eat tough bananas once in a while.

Firefighters typically resume their education in the fall as well, and my instructing schedule gets busier. In this part of the country we sandwich a lot training in between summer holidays and December 1. It makes sense. We do enough calls in neck deep snow and minus forty temperatures to satiate any inordinate love affair we might have with with winter operations. Click
here for one of my earliest columns and and my very first published drawing. I did them both as a kind of therapy to get myself out of the dumps after an all night fire in -35 temperatures.

Enough of this talk about snow and ice. Winter will be upon us soon enough, with the Farmer's Almanac gloomily predicting flurries in end of September. They could be wrong though. They predicted thunder showers for the first week of September, but it looks like it's going to be sunny for almost the whole week. I have a feeling they don't know their weather regions all that well . . . anyone that lumps Toronto and Thunder Bay together has got their wires crossed somewhere. Toronto and Thunder Bay have about as many winter similarities as penguins and parakeets (that probably isn't an accurate analogy, but it sounded witty and intelligent . . . to see a witty and intelligent spoof on Toronto's view on snow - included in my April 21 post as well - click here).

Buffalo is organizing a fund raiser to help the families of their two fallen firefighters. Click here if you are interested in helping out.

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