sking

I stuck a new picture on here for everybody. I did go skiing on Saturday and had a great time. I won't disagree that I had the first day of the season apprehension. I had bought myself a new helmet the night before, which I had thought about getting last year. I'd thought about it but I hadn't followed through. I got a neck warmer/head cap with it which made the overall comfort good and warmth too. I went out with Nick and I told him ahead of time that my goal was to not fall and have a good time. My wife would have been big on the no falling part. Fortunately all of those things were realized. My feet were a little wobbly with the skis on but nothing more than the first day of the season, for me, muscles getting used to the whole situation. I was out there about four hours and yes I was tired when I came home. I told my son that three months ago my doctors or myself wouldn't even have pictured myself on this mountain this year. I heard a doctor say once that if your body is used to it before you got hurt, it will do it again. That's sure a positive statement.

Team leader

I see that blogger is available in three more languages; Hebrew, Arabic and Persian. I guess by that we are supposed to get a better feel of how big the Internet is? Well, I'm still just a guy that fell out of a tree and I've been writing about my time after it, for the whole world to read. Officially I'm the team leader at work. We had a group meeting on Monday night and our area manager told the whole group of my status. He has big plans and I hope that he doesn't think one person is going to change the results of the whole team. But I can say that having an extra person like myself working and visiting people/customers will help take care of a lot of loose ends and stuff that wasn't getting done timely before. I hope my personality will help the team continuity and overall well being of everyone in the team. In our business, many times just pulling in the driveway of a customer, being there at the right time, will result in a sale. Since May of last year we have been short on personnel, which has hurt our overall sales in my opinion. If team members have to go to work everyday for 50+ days straight it's diffinently not a good thing. I understand new employees don't grow on trees but, that still doesn't make it right.... We've all had some productive days since and we also now have a schedule through the end of February, so everyone knows when they are working. I'm getting more comfortable with work and everyone is getting more comfortable having me around slowly. Right at the moment, I'm still not the same person I was before the accident. I've had experiences that were not part ofmy life before. The "quirks" are still there but either they are slowly fading or I'm getting used to them being part of my life. I have some tingling in the tips of my fingers on my right hand that doesn't change very much and is more noticable in the evening. Again I don't know if the work distracts me from noticing it or if it is really more prevalant at night? The palatte sensivity has gotten better too, it's not back to normal but better. The balance is a lot better and I'm going to try some sking on Saturday. Hoo-rawh... My kids know I'm going and Carole will be alright with it as long as I wear a ski helmut, that I was going to get anyway. It's one of those things, if you have a $5 head get a $5 helmut, I don't think so.... So stay tuned and I tell you how the sking went.

schedule

I was thinking I need a new picture to add or replace the one in the blog. Maybe a picture with the coveralls and vest from work, I don't know, but we'll see. We're leading kind of a screwed up schedule right now. Nick's bus comes at 7:00 am, but he likes to be up around 6:00 to eat breakfast and get ready. I try to leave the house at 6:30 to quarter of seven because it takes me about 20-30 minutes to get to our first customer. Right at the moment, Carole is working the evenings when the school kids and their chaperone's are at the mountain. So she goes to work around 1:30 pm and stays till the last bus leaves at 9 - 9:30 pm. She's responsible to make sure all the school kids leave the mountain in one mode or another and that nobody gets left behind. The other night the buses loaded and a school was one kid short. The ski patrol did a sweep of the hill and found the kid off the trail and escorted her down minorly inquired. She did ride home on the bus and not in a ambulance luckily. So there are some fail safes to make sure everything ends up as it's supposed to.. So any way, were putting in a pretty full day right at the moment and we make sure Nick's in bed before Carole gets home from work..... And generally it only lasts for about 8-10 weeks, then she goes back to a daytime shift..

three places

Ya know, I've previously had three places that I would rather not go or be during a days time. A hospital, a doctors office and a lawyers office are those places, no offense if you work at one of these places, but today I was at all three. The first two don't bother me any more, but the last one I'm still uncomfortable in. Some days a necessary evil I guess.
The new bull proofs were out yesterday. If you don't know, they're a bunch of numbers showing the ranking of different bulls in our company and the industry. They have just changed the timing so they come out at the same time as the international numbers. The last time they came out was in August and January seems like a long time. We have about 65 bulls and each one has around 25 - 30 different numbers ranking different traits. So it's a lot of numbers and it will take me a couple of days to get a good understanding.
Well today I tried out a new game of Nick's. He just got a Wii and we tried out the bowling. The controller you swing and push a button. Pretty straight forward and a lot like regular bowling, except the controller is a lot lighter than a regular bowling ball. I did alright and it's pretty similar. The last time I tried a video game it was "Halo" on my other son's Xbox 360. Somebody suggested video games would be good, but I was smart enough to hide under a rock and let all the good players run by. Maybe 'Halo" is not for me or I don't practice enough.......

transition

I'm slowly moving myself and this blog to more job related issues. I am not saying that there are not or will not be still some health issues, but I'm not dwelling on them as much. I am getting comfortable with the things we talked about in the last post. The handheld computer for work, for example, seems to be working ok and I am working on a routine on when its good to use it. It helped my skills yesterday, I had an associate ride with me who needed some work with the handheld. In helping him I got better. The new cell phone is another work in progress, but I'm getting used to it, and it will do some nice stuff.
Earlier this week I went to a chimney fire in another town in the middle of the night. I was a hilly back road, with ice and snow all over the place. I called the water tanker that was a mile or so behind me on the two way radio, to tell him the road was slippery. I barely got the mic hung up, and my truck is fishtailing all over the place and I ended up in a snowbank in the ditch. I had some choice words, but I was fine. The tanker stopped to see if I was alright, I told them I was fine and go ahead and continue to the fire. Fortunately for the homeowner, we got cancelled a few minutes later because they didn't need any help. Unfortunately my truck was still in the ditch with a damaged front passenger fender. The chief came by and pulled me out, and I drove it home. The fire department's insurance from the neighboring town will cover it. Life's full of surprises......

Lifes little challenges

It's been a stressful couple of days. Two days ago, I got an upgrade to my cell phone. It's a nicer phone than I had, but it's different. Then last night, the department decided to get out of the cell phone business. Mind you, after they had just received seven new ones as upgrades. Verizon didn't want to keep the same rate for fire departments that they had been offering and for seven people it's not worth the hassle. Oh well I will just join Carole's plan.
Next, we have these new handheld computers for the company. There kind of like the one's the Schwan's drivers have and also the UPS people. We're doing our receipts and invoice writing on them at the farm and nightly we sync them to the mainframe in Shawano, Wisc. The advantage is they provide accurate up to date information about the customer and they make our inventory current on the computer to the day.
And finally, I met with my manager about my job with the company. He hadn't actually seen me since I was in the hospital, but he had kept updated from the blog and we had talked on the phone a couple of times. Aren't blogs wonderful. We talked for a while and he offered me a couple of choices, which I slept on and I got back to him today. Ya, we'll discuss it on here later. But everything worked out OK today, yesterday was just another day in the rat race.

Installation dinner

Carole and I spent the evening at the fire station for the annual installation dinner last night. What a great time with friends.... We recognized many individuals, number of years as members, most calls made in the last year and some individual achievements. We also recognized a fireman of the year and a rookie of year. For sure it makes everyone feel good about the time that they volunteered at the fire department in the last year. The other assistant chief wrote a sort of essay that he read, after a person had asked him why he did what he did. The fires in the middle of the night, people trapped in a smashed car, helping a elderly person not feeling well get to the hospital and finally, loading a injured friend of yours into a helicopter with an unknown prognosis. That's why we all do it.... Believe or not they even gave me a plaque recognizing my determination. That gave me the opportunity to thank everyone in the room that had anything to do with my "situation" if I hadn't done so already. The situation obviously effected different people in different ways. But, we all had a great time and seeing the chief gives out some gag awards I will try not to do anything memorable in the next year...

day off

A nice thing happened today. I talked to the guy from the long term disability company. It was a pleasure to tell him that I didn't need his services. The short term ended on the 25Th of Dec. and I went back on the 26Th of December. I had the day off today and tomorrow, believe it or not, but I'm seeing the doctor again on Thursday for my pinky. I hope that it's healed enough so that they can take out the stitches. It looks ok and it would look a lot nicer too. My day off list was a little longer today, but by tomorrow I will have walked through it pretty well.
Finally, I got the fire department reports caught up to year end. The chief is not a computer guy, so they hadn't been done since the middle of September. They are incident reports on each call that we have to file with the state. After each call we do up a basic report on paper, then we try to do up a more elaborate version on the computer for the state. The funniest thing about it was that I did the report for the call at my house for me.... Well I know everyone to thank....

normal house

Happy New Year! Here's wishing you and yours a happy 2008. Over the last several days a couple of things of note happened. The biggest thing was that we now don't have a ramp at all in front of our house. It migrated to the barn for storage and now our house is looking pretty "normal". It's a small thing, but a milestone. Another thing is, tomorrow will be a week back on the job. The doctors prognosis was significantly longer initially, but they didn't know or did anybody for that matter. I try to not think about the possible negative opinions expressed, I'm just happy to be were I am today. While I'm back on the job, I am trying to not step on anyones toes. They've been getting the job done efficiently and professionally and right at the moment I'm the new guy. I'm a little awkward in my routine, but I realize that most of that is practice. Three months is awhile for sure. I've been wearing a small blue latex glove to keep my stitches on the right hand pinky clean. The glove certainly keeps it clean, but it makes the routine a little more awkward, which slows me down. I know right now the object is to be able to do the job safely, not necessarily fast.... We attended a couple more holiday parties in the last few days. My brothers held theirs at an ice rink, with open skating. I felt that this time around it would probably be better if I passed on the skating, maybe next year? I talked with a lot of people, including a cousin and his family from the west coast. He said that the blog has been a great outlet for my experiences. In this case, I've made technology work in my favor..