My poor hands and feet.

First of all, Happy Mother's Day to the best Mom and Grandma ever, and also Happy Birthday Susan!!

I have blisters on my feet and blisters and cuts on my hands... from my work boots and the pump, mainly the recoil whipping me in the hands.

Luckily I'm starting to get the hang of starting the pump... and everything else that comes with setting it up.

I've been with my crew for the past two days- they're awesome. My crew leader is 30 and always has a smile on his face. He grew up in the Fort... he's taught me so much already in only 2 days. He's always quizzing me when we're driving around about different pump scenarios or types of trees or fires. I feel like I'm always on Jeopardy.

My crew boss is 24, he's really animated and tells all his stories with his whole body. He's from Southern Ontario but moved to the Fort 6 years ago for fire and hasn't left. He's also teaching me a lot, telling me little tricks for everything. At the end of the day today he was parking our truck (beautiful F-350) and he didn't take the corner wide enough, scratched the whollleeee side of the truck on the warehouse and popped the back tire as well. There wasn't a huge dent, just paint transfer mainly so they changed the tire and it should be alright to go.

My other crew member is a character, 50 something guy born in Toronto, lived Northwestern Ontario for ages, been fighting fires in the Fort for like 30 years. He has sooo many stories (I don't know if half of them are true) but they're certainly entertaining.

The rest of the week we'll continue to train; pump set ups, hose lays, chainsaw and helicopters. There is a whole booklet of stuff that we need to be trained on before the middle of June. Basically we just train and do odd jobs until fires come around.

Every morning the crew leaders have a meeting with the main management guy. All the other crew members sit in a different room and we listen to the meeting over a speaker and can see everything on a screen. It's pretty interesting. They talk about the current weather, the predicted weather, the systems coming in... not only for the Fort but for all the surrounding West bases (Thunder Bay, Sioux, Geraldton, Red Lake, Pickle Lake, Kenora and Dryden). Then they tell us which crews are on which type of alert, and their jobs for the day. And they also tell us which machines are on which type of alert (bombers, helicopters). Today a few crews were on yellow alert which is kind of exciting. It's supposed to rain at the end of the week though so that probably wont last long.

Will keep everyone updated about the rest of the training for the week and how my poor hands and feet are doing. I'm hoping I'll get used to my work boots and the blisters will go away, otherwise it's gonna be a long summer. Oh, and I bought a pair of work pants from Marks Work Wearhouse before I left and when I went to put them on there was a huge whole where the zipper should be sewed to the pants. Apparently they forgot to sew the zipper on. Greaaaaaat. My roomie has needle and thread so I'm going to do some stitching after work tomorrow.

Hope everyone is well at home and survived the crazy winds I've been hearing about.

Love.