Another week down ...

Well, this was been our last week in the Boulder house. We’re heading back to Denver Saturday evening and Transition Week begins on Monday. This last week was pretty nice.

In my last entry I mentioned that my friend Sean passed through Denver this weekend. It was really nice to spend time with him, I haven’t seen him in a long time. On Thursday, we ended up working for Open Space, so we finished work early. I had my team drop me off at the bus stop and I took a bus down to Denver. When I got off, I called Sean and he told me to head up to the ballpark and buy a ticket because the Rockies game was apparently pretty deserted. I guess it was the make up game for the one that was rained out the day before, but not too many people rescheduled their plans to use their tickets or something. Anyway, I bought a $20 ticket for an upper level seat behind home plate but I ended up sitting with Sean and his girlfriend about ten rows behind the visitor’s dugout. It was a great way to start the weekend and I had a lot of fun. Taking a day off was totally worth it.

This past week, we’ve still been cutting at Unit 1. Things were arranged a little differently this week: we partnered up with someone and signed out a saw and that has been our responsibility for the whole week. Joanna was my partner, I’ve really enjoyed cutting with her. Our saw has been pretty cooperative, which is unusual for me because I always feel like every saw I touch, I destroy. Not really; it’s just that usually I can’t get any saw to stay on without throttling it. It’s a little frustrating when you’re trying to make a back cut to drop a tree and your saw keeps dying.

Anyway, on Monday, M Squared and I woke up two hours earlier to drive Ervin up to Estes Park’s fire cache. He was dispatched with a fire use crew – one that sets prescribed burns and such – to Idaho. As a result, I’ve been in charge of the team stuff all week. Ervin went over it with me the night before. I’m pretty much just keeping track of all the logistics – hours, paperwork and so forth. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, but this is what I signed up for. It makes colorguard captain for Surf feel like a walk in the park and it actually makes me nostalgic for it, haha.

We had our last day of Open Space work on Wednesday. All we did was haul bags of dirt left over from the trail we had built in previous weeks using these crawler machines, which were basically motorized wheel barrows. It took a team of us about 45 minutes to make one full trip. Craig and Kristen got us pizzas for lunch, which was really sweet of them. They let us out early and we gave Craig a gigantic bucket of sunflower seeds; he’s trying to quit smoking so we always see him with sunflowers. I thought he would just be amused by the gift but he actually really loved it, it was great to see. We’ll miss Craig, he always made even the most mundane work fun. He was a little like Rory in that respect.

Yesterday, Joanna cut for about an hour before she had to run Blake to Denver to get a new ID. So once she left, I paired up with our supervisor, Chad, and cut for him. The last time that I cut for Chad, I felt like a total failure. Okay, not really. But I had been really confident for a while regarding the progress with my cutting skills. And then I come to find from his critiques of my cuts that I’ve got a lot of work to do and I was no longer confident about getting my A Faller Certification. Well, yesterday was a change because he wasn’t looming over my shoulder and it was much more relaxed. I threw my first chain yesterday, which is when the chain is pulled off the saw. When I went to put it back on, I found out that I had a bent driver (the part of the chain that slides into the bar and around it). Saw rehab will be interesting today.

Around 3:00, Chad had us all shut down and get back to the trucks because he got a smoke report over the radio. We hopped in quick and drove out to Lyons before we heard that the fire was 10 ft x 10 ft and they had “adequate” support. So we were cancelled. Bah. Oh well.