Chocolate Socks
They are finished! I finished binding off last night. No pictures yet but I will try and take some tomorrow after I was the socks and before sending them off across the pond to Emma's house in England.
Fire Class
Okay, we did our first live burn Saturday. And real smoke is nothing like you see in the movies. Once the thermal layer develops, a room is pitch black with smoke. The only
way you can find the fire is the sound and sometimes a faint orange glow. In the movies and on tv, you can always see things. Not true in real life.
We were kneeling and crawling on the floor. I had one hand on the hose line and I was one arm's length from the person in front of me. I would periodically reach out in front of me and either touch his air bottle or his but
t, which ever one my hand came in contact with first. Yeah, you get to grab some one's butt and not get in trouble!
To give you a clue how hard it is too see, we would each take a turn at nozzle and than crawl back down to the end of the line. When the first person in my group was crawling back, I was by the sealed widow so there was a tiny sliver of light. He could not see me. I was at the end of the line. I had my hand out to my side where he could either see the shape or touch it. He couldn't see my hand. I could barely see my hand. I had to reach out and touch him for him to find me.
And surprisingly, it wasn't that hot inside the burn room. And my group was the last group the first time. Because of a minor change in line up, I was moved to the third group for the second burn. At that point the fires had been burning for awhile, but I still didn't think the room was that hot. Not even when I was up front at the nozzle kneeling directly in front of the fire. While not feeling hot is a good thing, it is also one of the down falls of modern turn out gear. We are so well protected that some fire fighters take unnecessary chances.
The afternoon session was when we got to play with the tools. Now for some of the guys in my fire company, one of the scariest things in the world is me operating a chain saw or power saw. I am the person who does not operate a lawn mower. Now I can operate other power tools safely and with ease just not tools that cut. The look on one of the guys face Friday night was really good when he heard that I was actually going to be allowed to operate a chain saw.
One thing about live burns is that you stink afterwords. We burn excelsior because it produces a nice smoke just like the real thing. You get a really nice funk on you afterward though. But that is true of real smoke. To get rid of the smell on your cloths is easy, just wash them on the long cycle. To get the smell out of your hair requires washing it twice and scrubbing your body down with a nice sugar scrub.
But I had fun and I learned that I can do things that I didn't think I could do. But I really don't want to be the one up on your roof venting it with the chain saw. I will leave that to the boys.
I didn't get much knitting done this weekend other than finishing up the socks. Although I did decide to finally check the gauge on the kid's sweater I am making and I need to frog the whole thing and go down a needle size. Why I didn't do this before, I don't know.
I am also posting some more photos of my miniature daffodils. To give you a clue as to how short these things are, I basically have to put my camera almost sitting on the dirt to take a photo
of them. Have fun today, I will be cleaning gear this afternoon and studying so no knitting.
ps - I did not take all of the photos. Everyone was having fun with the camera. And that haze is the smoke not your monitor.
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