axes, pack tests, spring break!

wow. I'm extremely overdue on a new post on here. Sorry guys!

The latest news is that I'm still spending my weekdays at the same ol' Peck Ranch working on firelines and burning cedar slash... but now I'm teaching people how to use chainsaws (when they ask for coaching) and I've been working on my precision axing skills! Also, the weekend before Mardi Gras, I had my pack test and passed!

The pack test is the last thing I had to do to get my Red Card, which will certify me to fight fires on federal land, or just outside Missouri. Yes, that includes out west. What I had to do was don a weighted vest that weighed 45 pounds and trek around a park a few times until I had completed 3 miles... all under 45 minutes. It's a test designed to make you work really hard for 45 minutes, so that if you're going to have a heart attack, you can get it out of the way safely, instead of on the side of a mountain while fighting a fire. My goal was to finish in 42 minutes and I finished in 42:18! This morning I intend to head over to the park and do the pack test again with the rest of my team because it was such a difficult, but refreshing workout. My goal for today is 40 minutes.


Mardi Gras was a system overload of fun. We saw the parade, got lots of beads, drank plenty of beer, had a dance party on the sidewalk and barbequed in the back yard. Good times, great friends. That Sunday, I spent most of the day laying around the house and finishing up laundry. It was a great weekend... and it got the little remaining bits of crazy out of my system for at least the next 6 months.

Speaking of 6 months, This month marks my 6th month in AmeriCorps! I'm half-way finished!! Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm starting a countdown, because I can't wait to get out of here... it's just that I can't believe I've gotten this far, this fast! I've learned so much and have gotten so much stronger in character and in body... I honestly can't imagine what the next 6 months will bring.

My birthday is also coming up and I will be 22! I can't believe how fast time flies as I get older. When I was little, it seemed like decades passed between my birthdays, and now it's like the years are shrinking into blocks of 3 or 4 months. It's been over a year since I met Mrs. McNutt at the Summit... It's been almost 2 and a half years since I met Cody in San Marcos while he was on R&R... It's been almost a year since Tiffany's wedding, and it's been a year and a half since I adopted Ouizie, my beloved kitty.

Next month, my sister, Claire, is coming up to visit me for spring break!! woot!! I got approval from both my bosses for her to come into the woods with us for a week and do conservation work alongside me! The higher up boss even said we might be able to get her level 1 fire training, so that, if need be, she can help us with prescribed burns! (I don't see when there would be time for that, so it's doubtful, but I'm still soooo excited!!) Claire is pumped too, but she's trying to work out the travel expenses and find out if her car will make it to St. Louis and back without a new catalytic converter. We'll see.

Well, It's time for me to start stretching and getting ready for pack test #2. Much love to all!!

new video!! gangsta cookin with derek!!

hehehe enjoy...

p.s. at the very end, the weird sentence that derek says is, "my seester tahched a monkee... and she eht hees soop."

what it's like manning the missouri winter storm hotline

wow. this winter storm hotline business can get pretty crazy... example:

a woman called about an hour and a half ago saying her mother had many special needs, including being oxygen dependent, paralyzed on one side, has a catheter and is diabetic. she only had 2 or 3 hours of oxygen left, and was heating her home with her gas oven. she called asking for batteries for flashlights and 2 or 3 oxygen tanks. we advised her that she should try to get to a shelter that can handle special needs because it is extremely unsafe to heat your home with an oven, and at this time we had no way of getting supplies to her house. she insisted that they had one window cracked about 3 inches to let the fumes out and they did not want to leave the house.

so i called the only shelter open in that area and asked if they could handle special needs. they said no, and that they were diverting special needs patients to the hospital. the red cross people stationed at the shelter advised me to call the local police to get the woman transported out of her home asap.

i called the police and talked to the chief, who told me that "oh crap" had become a technical term in the last 24 hours. he said that the only place that could take the woman was the hospital. i gave him her contact info and he said he would call her and try to transport her to the hospital.

i then called the woman back, and explained the situation and again insisted that the oven heating the house was very dangerous. she insisted on staying in the house and said that she would not go to the hospital because she would be billed for the visit. she also said that she had been trying to get ahold of her oxygen supplier all day and had not received any calls back from them. I told her that i would call the hospital to check on the billing situation, to see if there was an exception due to the disastrous weather emergency, and get back in touch with her.

i then called the police chief back to inform him that the lady did not want to be moved from her house, but he did not answer, so i left a message. I then called back my contact at the original shelter, and was informed that a new shelter was being opened in the basement of the city hall, and they might be able to accommodate special needs. I got the number, and called city hall, only to get ahold of the answering machine.

So then I called the hospital, and talked to the ER and found out that they, indeed, are billing patients upon admission because they do not have a shelter set up at the hospital. The hospital also informed me that I could dial 0 to get past the answering machine at the city hall, and i would be able to get in touch with someone there. I called city hall back, punched in 0, and talked to another member of the police department and told him about the woman's situation. he said he already had heard about her, and that the only place she could go was the hospital, because the city hall shelter also could not handle special needs. I told him she refused to go to the hospital because she would get billed. He said they had been sending people with special needs to the hospital all day, and he thought because it was an emergency situation, that the people were not getting billed. He then put me on hold, and asked someone else at the shelter about the hospital situation. As it turns out, the hospital had been billing patients all day and would not back down because of the emergency situation.

So then i called the red cross to find out if they could deliver oxygen to the woman's house. the red cross put me through to the disaster management chapter and they told me that they cannot, under any circumstances, carry oxygen, even for a CPR class because of liability and insurance issues. The red cross told me to talk to a different hospital than the one i had called earlier, to ask them about who their oxygen supplier is. So i called freeman hospital, and talked to the administrator in charge of getting their oxygen. The woman told me that their regular line was down- which explained why the woman in her home could not get ahold of them. Then, the administrator connected me to someone at the oxygen supplier and i gave them the woman's contact info and address, and i was told that the oxygen supplier would contact her and resolve the issue.

I then followed up with the woman and told her a very brief summary of everyone i had talked to since my last call to her, and let her know that she should be hearing from the supplier. She then told me that she had already heard from the supplier, and would be receiving 10 cylinders of oxygen soon. she still had no way of getting batteries for the flashlights, but assured me that her mother had been heating the house with the oven for years and had never had a problem. she also told me that they had cracked the front door and turned on the vent above the stove to provide more ventilation for the fumes. (i just realized that the vent would not work without power, so she might have been lying, or she doesn't know how the vent works.) i informed her that the oven might also spontaneously catch fire if left on for too long, which concerned me because of the oxygen and the candles. I also told her if she gets cold, to snuggle up with her mom and to be safe.

so the lady might still blow up, or suffocate from the fumes coming from the oven, but at least she has oxygen. it took me over an hour to do all of this, but at least she is (slightly) better off than she was when she called... (aka not dead... yet.)

sigh... i really hope she doesn't blow up.


p.s. my director just came in and aksed how it was going- and i told him this story and he said this was the sort of thing that needed to be written down. i then went and printed out this blog entry and he was not only surprised but impressed, and is now working on trying to get this woman out of her house. (yay!)

p.s.s. now the director is working on resolving this issue (with special needs patients getting billed by hospitals) on a state-wide level. awesome!

totally stalling before going back into the woods...

but i just had to make note of some wierd things people have been saying lately!

the following are (mis)perceptions people have had about me lately, haha

"But I don't want to have the dinner party at Kim's* house. It's dirty. I want to have it at yours!" -Carmen

"Brynn, how do you get your teeth so white?" -Roice

"You look like you're up to no good." -some drunk guy at a piano bar

"You can fix my pants, right?" -several boys... on separate occasions... with pants that need to be donated to a dumpster

"So what you're saying is, that if I stop saying obscene things about your mom, you'll make me dinner?" -Drew


*name was changed to protect the innocent

food fight video is finally up!!

it explains itself. enjoy!

long time, no write!

So I'm sure you guys have been starving for an update, but before this week, there really wasn't much going on. We spent two weeks at Peck Ranch, located in the beautiful Ozarks, raking fire line in preparation for a prescribed burn coming up. It was a lot of hard, repetitive work, but it felt good, and at the end of last week, we finished the 2 and a half mile stretch through the woods. The fire line we made was about 6 feet wide, and raked down to the mineral soil, so that the fire wouldn't jump across the line. we had to do a lot of lopping (using loppers to trim/cut away small branches and thick undergrowth) and blowing (usuing huge industrial strength backpack leaf blowers to blast away the soggy leaves), in addition to the regular ol' raking.

with all the hard work, came a nearly insatiable stomach. My tummy definitely can tell time when we are in the field. Here's the routine:

6:30 wake up, get dressed
6:45 eat oatmeal and/or bagel with cream cheese and jelly
make two peanut butter, jelly and apple sandwiches for lunch
7:00 load the trucks with tools and gear
7:15 drive to eminence forest service office (sleep the whole way there)
8:00 load the rest of the tools there and check in
8:15 arrive on work site and begin service project
10:30 eat an apple and/or a cliff bar
12:00 eat two sandwiches and the other apple
4:00 load up trucks and head out, (sleep the whole way back)
stop for groceries or gas or duct tape on the way
5:15 arrive back at Peck Ranch and start making dinner
6:00 serve dinner for 10
7:30 clean the kitchen
8:00 finally sit down to read or watch boys play video games or just zone out with hot cocoa
9:00 fall asleep in the middle of whatever I'm doing
10:00 shuffle my feet to bed


This week, my team stayed in St. Louis to do some maintenance around the office and help the education team with an after school program at a nearby elementary school. The kids have been fantastic. I taught a kindergartener to do double digit addition in columns today and he got every problem i put on the board right, even though he still counts on his fingers and writes most of his numbers backwards. I also worked with a girl in second grade who came in with almost all of her homework complete, and then proceeded to write all of the word puzzles on the board for me and had me solve them before checking her paper... which was flawless. I also was given hoola hoop lessons and a jump-rope reminder crash-course, as well as many emphatic high fives.

I love my job.

chainsaw training at peck ranch

Last night we got back from 4 days on a 21,000 acre ranch where we learned how to use chainsaws and the basics of fighting wildfires. It was pretty exciting, except that I had a cold for the first 3 days (a really quick one!), so I was nervous about bucking limbs with chainsaws when I knew that my ears were so clogged up that I'd missed part of the instruction... But it turned out fine. My tidbits of ballet training helped me a lot with my posture while handling the chainsaw, so I was able to make my small amount of energy last a bit longer.

We spent several hours in the classroom with our chainsaw books learning proper terminology for different things we would encounter in the woods and different types of cuts we would be making. Thanks to my photographic memory, I could remember the pictures in the books, but not necessarily the words for them, haha. So bucking limbs went fine. I knew to be careful with the tip of the saw bar so that it wouldn't kick back, and I learned how to sharpen the chain and clean the air filter and put fresh oil and gas in the saw.

The next day we spent a while in the classroom but then we went out to cut down trees. Snags are dead trees that are hazardous because they are going to fall down eventually. Our main purpose in cutting down snags was in preparation for a controlled burn that was coming up. We didn't want snags falling across the fire line, which would carry the fire outside the controlled area. The snag I chose was the biggest of the day, and my leader let me do it because I was patient and waited for all of my other group members to cut down their snags before me. The tree was about 2 feet DBH (diameter at breast height) and about 60 feet tall (we measured it by walking it's length once it was felled). We also attempted counting its rings and figured it was about 100 years old.

My face cut was pretty good, although tough on my wrists; and then my leader, Evan, bore cut the center out, and then I did the back strap. It fell exactly where I aimed it and didn't get caught up in any other trees. Success!