Delayed stuff eh?

I suppose longer and longer is the catchword for the frequency of my blog posts.
I’m offline right now, we have to drive places for our wifi. Sitting in a 15-passenger government van with blacked out windows, it’s an interesting time when we park outside a local pizza parlor that foolishly gave us their network password.
If I’ve mentioned our accommodations before, I can’t remember. We’re living in a government house at the pacific ranger station, El Dorado National Forest. It’s a cozy place; one of my teammates is sleeping in the laundry room for lack of space to put a mattress.
The weeks are flying by here. Seven months ago, our first project on Catalina was an eternity of three weeks. Now, we’re moving into week four here at Pacific and I can’t believe fire season (“officially”) starts in six days.
My teammate Pat is convinced that it is the vast quantities of coffee our pro-budgeting has bequeathed us that is to blame for the temporal anomaly. Caffeine, in addition to speeding up a tired body, also speeds up your passage through time, in his theory.
I still don’t drink and don’t like coffee, so it doesn’t really apply to me. A good theory nonetheless, but once he started getting into the quantum mechanics of his theory I gave up following.
Thus far, this is my favorite project. The 4-10 schedule with its three-day weekends, the deadly PT sessions with firefighters, and all the amenities we lacked at one point or another (food, electricity, water that doesn’t taste like the kiddie pool). And within a month I could have a true fire under my belt.
A practice fire is guaranteed as long as I am not sick the weekend of June 2nd. We’ll spend a couple days cutting line, and then they light up a couple of acres of forest and let us maintain the line. Our crew boss is especially excited, because a couple of years ago they did this same live-fire drill. Except, when everyone turned in for the day, the fire jumped the line and they spent the rest of the night fighting a 13 acre fire.
A good fire year for the firefighters is not a year with a couple of minor blazes that are easily dealt with. Firefighters pray for May thunderstorms with multiple ground strikes, for early rain to promote growth and then dry winds to foster fires. A good fire year for a firefighter involves as much overtime as they can handle.
I’m a volunteer, so most of the benefits don’t apply to me. But I still want to see fire. Of course, I don’t want anyone to be injured, or endangered via proximity. I want a fire out in the wilderness where it is a necessary part of the California ecosystem, and my team and I can get a little sweaty and sooty.
I think it would be fun.
Oh and I got to go to Mexico, good stuff that.