Staycation Days 1 & 2

Well, yesterday marked the first day of my vacation and the first day of my first every "staycation". I am taking an EMT refresh course in order to recertify (you have to recert every 2 years). The class consists of 3 Saturdays of reviewing the different disease processes and working on hands on skills. That basically took up most of my Saturday.

Today was a  pretty busy day. I started off with a solo 12 mile run since my sister is home sick. I headed down to the Mokelume River to do my run since it was close to home and gave me a little more recovery time between "appointments" today. I actually felt pretty good for most of the run - the last mile felt really looooong. I headed home to torture myself with use the foam roller. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of foam rolling, here's the definition in a nutshell:

"It is accomplished by rolling the foam roller under each muscle group until a tender area is found, and maintaining pressure on the tender area for 30–60 seconds."

Yeah, that basically reads: "it's meant to hurt". On the upside, I think it is actually helping. I took a quick shower and nap after that and then headed out for the second part of my day. I headed down to Sacramento to participate in the C.E.R.T. We work a lot of larger distance events (the airshow, half marathons, etc) and have found that having EMTs on bikes has been really helpful. We had to do an agility course (cones, circles at low speeds, curb jumps, etc) and a 3 mile ride in under 18 minutes. All in all, it was a good little exercise, but I just had a really hard time getting into it because I was pooped from the run.

I decided to treat myself to some delicious frozen yogurt on the way home from the bike trials - we have a Big Spoon in Jackson now, and it was pretty yummy! Apparently when I run I have the appetite of a four year old because I couldn't get enough chocolate chips, sprinkles and hot fudge. Ok, maybe that's all the time.

Big Spoon. Yum.

Tonight we're just hanging out - Mike is getting over the stomach flu (yuck!) so we're doing mellow dinners (pancakes for me, grilled cheese for him) and catching up on some shows we have taped on the DVR. I tried the foam roller again this afternoon and discovered that it hurts even more now than it did this morning. That's good, right?

Tomorrow is a very important part of my staycation. I have dubbed it lazy Monday because I have ever intention of not leaving the house. I figure I need one of those on my staycation, and it might as well be at the beginning!

Air Show Recap

As promised, here's the post about yesterday's air show... fortunately, it's pretty darn boring. In fact, it was the least busy air show I've worked in all my time with CERT. That's a really good thing when my work equals being an EMT. While I did get some good hands on experience, we actually did not send anyone out by ambulance on my shift... that's definitely a first and the cooler weather played a big role in that.

The air show organizers did a pretty neat thing to commemorate 9/11... they asked the crowd to hold a moment of silence as a C-130 Hercules flew overhead and dropped 15,000 flowers. It was really pretty... like it was raining rose petals. It was a very moving moment at the show, followed by the jets flying in the "missing man" formation.

After a long day, I ended up with a migraine (I think this one was caused by the pressure change) since we had some hefty thunderstorms roll though last night. Poor Shadow was a mess... he sure doesn't like thunder and lightning!

2011 C.E.R.T. Mobex

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in a really fun C.E.R.T. exercise. It is called our annual "Mobex" exercise. Basically, it's our practice for deployment - if we're needed somewhere that we'd have to travel and spend the night. The idea is that our team is self reliant in the event that we head out to help at a disaster.

We practiced everything from start to finish - meaning we packed everything we would need for a 72 hour deployment and headed out to our deployment staging area. There we were issued bins containing lots of cool toys, we packed and turned in our car keys. We loaded up the three vans, the trailer and two rigs to head down to a big open field.

Once we got to the field, we set up our base of operations. I was on the medical team, so we worked on getting a medical treatment area in place. Other areas included Logistics (where we got all of our goodies from), Communications/Command (they house all the radios, TVs, etc), Shelter (where our sleeping and eating quarters are) and the latrines (I don't think I need to explain what happens there).

CERT 1 Functioning As Logistics

The Shelter Team Setting Up Our Cots

These are the wonders called "Brief Relief". Yup, it's a tent with a bucket. However, it's a very complex bucket system, that involves some snazzy bags and chemicals that make biohazards bizhazardous no more. While it sounds gross, it's really way better than the alternative of just lots of yuck in a bucket and is actually way more sanitary than it sounds.

Betty Demonstrating Proper Use Of The Brief Relief

All in all, it was a really fun exercise. We were out for about 8 hours total - which included getting back to the deployment area and putting everything away. I like these kind of drills because we get to practice the whole process from start to finish and have to deal with being hot and tired. Real life at it's finest!

Convoy On The Way Home

Weekend Wrap Up

Holy cow, it's already Sunday and even holier cow, it's already May! I can't believe how fast this year is flying by!

On Saturday I headed out to work at the American River Parkway Half Marathon. It's an event that C.E.R.T. does every year and it's a really fun one. I like working the races because I get to help people that aren't feeling well, but I also get to cheer people on! This year I was assigned to ride my bike up and down the course. I must admit, since my bike accident back in 2006, I haven't been very keen to get back on. I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I have. This was a great event because I wasn't focused on "Oh $h!t, I'm going to crash" and actually had a lot of fun. Next up, climbing Alpe d'huez. Yeah, that's right, Mike's making me. :)

Mike and I went down to check our game camera (we don't really go alone any more... and now we're getting ready to take the pistol with us!) because we hadn't been in about two weeks. More success with the mountain lions! We ended up with two pictures of them and a couple really good deer pictures. The mountain lions seem to be sticking to passing our camera at night (which is when it uses infrared technology). I wish we could get one good one during the day - that way we would get way better detail and color pictures! Either way, these are some big cats. I think they're two different ones in these pics because one seems much bigger and muscular to me:

Mountain Lion on 4/23/11

Mountain Lion on 4/27/11

We also had a couple of pretty good deer pictures:

Deer on 4/24/11

I definitely wouldn't be caught dead in those woods alone (pretty much at any time of the day), but I am gaining quite the fascination with these beautiful creatures. I'm sort of hoping that one walks past our deck one day (when Shadow, Mike and I are safely inside, of course) so that I can see it up close!

I spent the rest of today (ok, ALL of today) laying on the sofa and trying to actually relax. I have definitely been over booking myself lately and need to figure out a way to create some down time. My allergies are kicking my butt, which definitely helped keep me mellow today. We topped it off with 88 Giant Burger for dinner (after all, it is National Burger Month!) and are now headed back to the sofa for some Sunday night mellowness!

Animal Rescue Class

Today I took a really cool class through my C.E.R.T. team. The purpose of C.E.R.T. (Community Emergency Response Team) is to expand the footprint of the fire department during a disaster. Our team is also trained to do non-disaster work such as standby medical aid at events.

C.E.R.T. is near and dear to my heart and in my four years as a member, I've volunteered hundreds of hours (no joke!). Today we took it one step further and learned about how to handle animals in a disaster. It was a really great course that taught us all about how to "read" animal behavior in case we encountered them during a disaster situation (for example, while doing search and rescue). While learning about dogs and cats was interesting, I was really happy to learn more about how to handle the livestock (horses, cows, alpacas), sheep, goats and exotics.

I'm so proud to be a part of this program and so excited to see it continue to evolve (this is the first time this animal rescue class has been offered to us). If you're interested in joining a C.E.R.T. team (there are many in the greater Sacramento area), let me know and I'll get you in touch with the right people!