I stabbed myself in the backside!

Yes I really did, I'll spare you the pictures that Andrew took of the knife and the wound just in case I need to show them to a doctor!

Actually it's not that interesting except to me and my aused backside, however, for your eddification, one stabs oneself in the arse by eating dinner on the couch, then not noticing when the steak knife slides off your plate when you get up to put plate on sink, then the handle goes down the side of the cushion beside the couch arm so the blade sticks up, and you plop back on the couch and stick yourself in the arse. I tell you all this so that you never need to learn this lesson yourself!

In less painful news, Roo also got this lovely photo of our mate, Thor, and I at Firey Scheds.  I'd say that's the tall and the short of our brigade!

And here is Andyroo summing up our incident management team training on Sunday, and that's me second from left in the line.

I got to pretend to be the 'comcen' person, so I was taking requests for extra support of different kinds, and giving ETAs on those, and asking for situation reports, and in between i was also adding radio traffic as you'd usually hear on the comcen channel, such as brigades calling in that they were turning out to other incidents and so on, and then I also had to act like comcen answering them, which got a bit confusing. 

I tried doing it in different voices so it didn't sound so confusing when I was answering myself, but every time I did we all got the giggles so I had to stop and just use my usual voice.  Those giggles together really made my day!  I do love a bit of a laugh and good comradery, even when what you are doing has a serious basis.  I think it can be underestimated, by some, just how important these things are, and that volunteers need to have a bit of both to make the long hours they spend at training and incidents rewarding enough to keep going.

Saturday night we got to do a lot of both things when we went to the local Shire's Firey's Picnic.  We put our seats down and only came back to them to eat the food, because the rest of the time we were chattering and laughing and catching up with friends from all the different brigades.  I didn't even remember to use my phone to get a photo.  I was too busy gasbagging!  Ross got one of us raiding the dessert table though!  Gluten free pavlova.  Yum!

Loving my lovely Roo and his gorgeous smile in this one! (We won't mention the madwoman next to him!  

And here we are chatting to equally lovely VFRS father and daughter team (and fellow dog lovers and GWP owners) Dave and Niamh!

It was windy as anything.  A chance to wear my snazzy new Darling Range Brigade jacket!   

This morning we went down to the station and showed one of our coms friends the drafting system on the appliances because he missed that training night at his ownfFire brigade and wanted to catch up.  He also got to check out the monitors!  Go Tom!

It never does me any harm to go over drafting water (what you do to fill your tank when there are no hydrants and you need to get water from a stream or dam) because for some reason it always goes out of my head five minutes after I've learned it.  Luckily I have a very good teacher in Roo!

Ah well, a very Firey week, but that is a good thing.  As I am often heard to say: Think your phone doesn't ring enough?  Join a volunteer fire brigade!

Now I'm going back to getting my latest book ready, having sorted the horrible glitches in the latest upgrade of Word for Mac by downgrading it to an earlier version all by myself!  Geez if I keep this up I'll end up an actual tech-head!

Not much else I can do but static jobs right now, since walking hurts my arse.  Yes, I really did stab myself in the ass.  You can't make this stuff up even if you're an author!  :D