Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Summer, Snow, and Sundries

Summer is slipping away like a greased pig on on water skis. As the curly tail of warm weather is sucked toward the howling mouth of fall and winter, I snatch as many opportunities to fish and boat and campfire as possible (I know, campfire is not a verb).

[Side note: bad similes, lame metaphors, and poor grammar are side effects of the virtual medication I took to treat the Digital Doldrums. Perhaps the cure is worse than the disease. Now back to our irregularly scheduled blogcast . . .]

Idealistically, we'll get a couple months of beautiful warm fall weather. Realistically, we'll break out the snow shovels at least a few times in October, maybe even once in September.

Ugh. Snow in September. If I believed in jinxes and bad luck, I would delete that sentence, run Norton, and burn my laptop at the stake. But I won't because I'm not superstitious. In three weeks when I moan about tunneling to my car after the first blizzard of the season, you can say, "I told you so."

Twice when I was out making the most of what's left of summer, my pager went off for no apparent reason. The first time I phoned dispatch like the diligent fire chief that I'm supposed to be. The second time, I recognized it for what it was: a phantom page. You've heard me ramble about ghost moose and ghost fires and phantom buildings. Now I'm getting phantom page outs. If you think that's creepy (or even if you think it was just a quirky equipment malfunction, like it really was), there are people out there with weird kind of ESP that warns them when their pager is about to go off. I tried Googling "weird kind of ESP that warns you when your pager is about to go off," and didn't get any hits, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I did read about it happening to someone somewhere.

Speaking of weird things, check out this video of a fire tornado:







And speaking of weird and dangerous things, read this article about firefighters that were overcome by toxic smoke while outside a building. It makes you wonder about all the crap that we breathe, even when we think we're safely outside. Check out Paul Combs artistic view on smoke here.

I don't dedicate a lot of time on this site to firefighter injuries and fatalities , not because they aren't important, but because I'd rather laugh than cry. Besides, there are plenty of sites like Billy G's Firefighter Close Calls that do more justice to the topic than I would. If you haven't subscribed to the Secretlist yet, do it now and get ready to cry. Then go back to your hall and play safe with new knowledge you've gained.

Speaking of laughter, they do say that it's the best medicine, you know. Hmm . . . I'd better chuck that bottle of virtual meds that generates bad similes and lame metaphors . . .

2 comments:

  1. I think you hit just about every topic in that post! :)

    You know, a bad simile is like a...oh forget it...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I couldn't decide what to write about, so I wrote everything. Kind of like a squirrel with a shotgun . . . um you know, squirrels are twitchy and erratic, and shotguns are . . . (I'd better follow your lead and forget it :-)

    ReplyDelete

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