Okay, I played fire photo journalist on Friday night. And Saturday morning, bright and early, I got to play fire fighter! I was at the truck house early to ride. I wasn't even there 15 minutes before we got a call. It was a simple bells & whistles aka an automatic alarm but that is how the day started out. When we got back, the chief was there and they were trying to figure out how to get everything down to the training center for a drill. One of the 2 trucks was out of service for mechanical reasons. So that meant that the 1 truck could not take part in the drill.
Since I am not a full fledged member of the
truck house, I wasn't sure if the chief would let me participate in the drill. The career guys decided to take the truck on down to see what all was going on plus this allowed one of the guys to get some driver's training time in. When we got down there, the chief came over to me and told me to
pull my gear from the truck because I was going to be allowed to play. Actually, the chief and the deputy chief had decided that they wanted to evaluate my skills and those of the other fire fighter there. Okay, the reality was that there were 3 white hats from the truck house and only one black helmet; I made it 2 black helmets. But the other thing is that it meant
I got to play with the boys!
Because we were working without the truck, they had to be creative in what we could do. We threw some
ladders and 1 crew took the hose line in and the other crew performed search and rescue. I was search and rescue with the deputy chief.
Yes, I did save the dummy. And no, I do not mean another fire fighter but the hose dummy. I saved the victim and went back in to start the search of the next level. Except that I realized that I had one little problem; I was becoming pretty dehydrated and that I needed to get out. I passed this info on to my deputy chief and he sent me out with the chief. (We had been 
fully geared up and standing out outside in full turnout gear for about 30 minutes in the full sun before we even got started.) I was okay after drinking plenty of water.
We were only allowed to play during one evolution but we still had fun. And after the drill, we
went to another station for lunch. After wards, my buddy Rob and I headed home to shower and change before heading back down to ride for the rest of the day. We ran a few more commercial alarms that afternoon and 1 box. The box turned out to be nothing. We never even made it to the scene before we were placed back in service. But it was a fun day. And I learned
quite a bit.
And just to help id some 
of the people in the photos, the one with the 3 firefighters together without helmets are my chiefs at the truck house. And the one photo with the gentleman with the silver hair is "da boss". He is one of the head guys at the county level for the 
career guys. He is also a retired battalion chief from Montgomery County.
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