It had to be done...

...as the fake Christmas tree was shedding on the floor and combining with the dog hair so that little balls of static electricity were snapping their way across the floor and clinging electromagnetically to my socks.

My sister is the queen of eclectic decorating. Her kids have whole walls of painted trees, chalkboards, and she has upside down Christmas trees and trees in various colors and themes. They are awesome and they don't look weird or smack anything of, "Well, I would have more cats but they would get in the trees." She even had a sign saying, "Cats stay out of trees!" Her cats are obviously smarter than mine. I loved it.

Anyways, I cleaned today. Bathrooms, kitchen, floors, rugs, dusted, rearranged, updated the calendar, took down decos and are getting ready for Valentine's. Which promises to suck ass if Christmas is anything to go by (but I was ready for that) so instead of waiting for anything stupid like a Valentine I am going to go with a cake-theme. Seems only fair. Like a Marie Antoinette Does Cupid sort of deal. I will get my sister to help.

OT is worth it...

We just returned from an apartment "fire" (origin formerly bacon, now charcoal). Caller called it in and then when we got there, sending the entire complement of HFD resources to address an apartment fire, the apartment dweller couldn't be bothered to come to the door with PANTS on to talk to us. She was yelling at us from the back bedroom. She finally deigned to struggle into a pair of velour pants to cover her dirty underwear so as to come talk to us.

She stomped into the kitchen where the scene of the "disaster" was and screamed back to the back bedroom, "Jhermain, is this all you burned?!" Jhermain couldn't be bothered to even take out the smoldering remains of his lackluster culinary efforts and never made it away from in front of the TV to address the issue. She then said to us, "Youse needs to get a fan and clean out my house." I told her we would be happy to open the door and a window but that if she and Mr. Jhermain were not bothered before by the actual smoke then all we could do was turn the knob for them.

I swear. Sometimes I wonder at people. I am sure a sociologist has some over-studied reason for this sort of behavior and one of the guys on my pumper maintains "it isn't their fault", it is all they know. I pointed out that no one teaches anyone to pull a splinter out of their finger but you do it so as to lead a better quality of life. If your idea is to watch TV while roaches crawl over you, the cat pisses on the couch you are sitting on, and the best you can do is get your trash CLOSE to the room with the trash can that isn't a psychological disorder... that is just lazy and willfully ignorant. Nothing fancy, no repressed anger at a mother/God/father/misguided childhood, just plain worthless.

Sometimes I am impudent...

...but for good reason.

I work with a group of people who are 95% hard working and outstanding. There is 5% that really is working overtime to strain the saint's patience. However, our work environment is fast-moving and stressful and we are Unionized. In Texas that is akin to saying, "And I like to club baby seals in my off-time." but what it really means is that your employers have to negotiate with you for working conditions and wages. Why this remains a mysterious concept to people is beyond me... but I digress. You are also afforded certain rights and luxuries like representation in discipline and a sympathetic ear that is on your side... that isn't a hired gun. Hired for zillions of dollars but no certain outcome.

My sister was recently disciplined for "being mean" to another employee, her supervisor. They also alleged that some time ago (that they never documented) that she self-reported that she was talking bad about another employee (why take a break if you aren't going to gossip?). She, probably in a rare moment of passion, signed their document. She will now have to hope they let her take it back. Because this is Texas. And she is NOT in a Union. And she wants them to become a Union... to prevent this exact sort of thing.

In the FD the Union regulary is "responsible" for preserving people's jobs who should be not only terminated but sterilized as well before the damage can spread but rather than blame the Union I wonder that people do not look out and exclaim, "Oh hell n!. The administration is PAID to manage a high-powered fire department. The best in the nation. You mean to tell me some volunteer at the Union hall is regularly able to defeat the concentrated efforts of the Command staff and all the managers below them to preserve a certified loon's job?!?! Fuck 'em. They get what they deserve." The extracted argument to this conundrum is this, though. The Administration regularly in their hand holds what we deserve. Painful thought.

My first line item of business when I return to work is to run amok. In honor of my sister's 3 day suspention for "being mean" to a grown supervisor.

I didn't mean YOUR First Amendment rights...

All the rage right now in Texas is whether or not we should be able to allow for purchase a Texas license plate with the Confederate battle flag on it. The weird part is a Texas politico dreamed this disaster up. Wait... I just thought about that. It is not weird; it is par for the course. I digress...

1) That flag never flew over Texas. 2) The United States of America would no more allow a flag of a country that attacked us be flown than it would admit that there is a problem in the general tax code but we are actually debating this. 3)The Civil War was in part over State's Rights as the pedantic few keep whining about but it was over State's Rights TO OWN SLAVES!! To pretend that this flag is a "proud part of your heritage" or a symbols of Southern charm is clearly indicative that you were not paying attention in history class (any of them).

So it may not be fair and it may not be open-minded but when I see someone with that goofy flag plastered on their bikini, truck, beer koozie I am already in the process of formulating an opinion of them and it usually entails a tattooed rose on a tube-topped boob, a trailer house with some rusty cars out front, and an impoverished teeth to head ratio in the adult population. When I see that flag on something I am already informed that this person is either comfortable with the thought that other people (probably themselves as well) can be used and degraded at the leisure of the wealthy or that they are too lazy and ignorant to explore the meaning of a losing battle flag and what history has told us.

I had a segue into calendar people but I am going to stop this here for now.... one tirade at a time. 

At least she was honest...

...about saying she didn't know.

In the FD there is a strict refusal to adhere to a quality called the Peter Principle which says that people will rise to their highest level of incompetence and no more. In the FD this is frequently seen as a direct affront to one's self-worth and they will exceed this maxim and with full disclosure by the people that put them in those positions, rise far BEYOND their level of incompetence.

Here is a transcript of the letter I sent to my other station captains about some records I have been trying, for 6 months, to get archived.

"Dearest Other Captains,

You will note the bathroom door does not remain wedged open. I went through the records and put the Captain’s Logs by decade. Other than that there is no discernable order, I am afraid. I have piled them out in the bay because they WILL be going away soon.

I called Chief Riley again and told him our dilemma again and how I was looking forward to recycling all this paper no one wanted. He made some calls and shook trees and a nice lady called me from Quartermaster. She is nominally in charge of archiving station records. She freely admits she doesn’t know what she is doing and we would limp through this together. I sympathized. She and I made several researching calls and I was told this…

She asked how many boxes we needed and I said just three at this moment (if someone wants to send their ffers up to above the watch office to retrieve the other records I will sort through them). She was quiet for a minute and said, “But we only send out 25 boxes at a time.” I replied, calmly I thought, that we had two and a half decades of records and it barely filled 3 boxes. I asked her why don’t you put our piddly three boxes with the others that must surely be waiting to go to Iron Mountain so as to make 25. She said she would call me back. When she called back she said that would be impossible because there was no room at Dart to store records waiting to be shipped off (Arson must be hogging up the place.) I said for us to accumulate 25 boxes of records would take 22 more years and I would be close to retirement by then. She acknowledged that that did seem to be a problem. Then she whispered into the phone that she was certain that Logs were probably not being maintained in proper archival security anyways. Of that I have absolutely no doubt. I asked her if she was aware if ANY station records had EVER been sent for archiving and she said she didn’t know. None that she could remember.

So the upshot is she is sending me three boxes and labels. I am going to continue to badger her to take the three boxes and because now it has become less of a mission of caring for continuity of records-keeping and more a mission to see how ridiculous this can get. Lol

FYI – Captains logs are kept in perpetui in this alleged Archiving place. One year’s of Captain’s Logs are to be kept at the station. Watch Office logs go away after a year. I am not even going to tell you how THAT disastrous process works. I had to write it down and look at it and came to the conclusion that civilizations were rendered obsolete with less evil planning than goes into getting approval to destroy a 1984 Watch Office Log.  

KP"

Ye Shall Know the Righteous Because...

...They Will Adorn Themselves with Pajamas After 10pm.

Tonight has been all things full moon/payday inspired. The fine denizens of the area have taken it upon themselves to imbibe and let their hair hang out and then take it out on each other. At no time during their dumbass altercations did it occur to them to rub two brain cells together, "I coulda gotten 'em if I hadn't had these shoes on!" but when HFD and HPD arrive they are suddenly masters and mistresses of hair-splitting the nuances of property and ownership, misunderstandings of warrants, and how drunk is too drunk.

No good comes out of people milling around after midnight. One of the guys in the back said that if you go to withdraw lots of money after 1AM a grandmother-type figure should pop out of the ATM and lecture on how nothing good is going to come out of you spending that money this late at night and you should be ashamed and the odds are great right at this moment you do not have clean underwear on and no girl/guy is going to want someone too dumb to know when to come in out of the rain.

However, the calls we did run that had people respectibly clothed in pegnoirs, flannel pants, and night bonnets though not much brighter than the average 5 watt bulb were at least sincere and genuinely concerned and at no time did I feel their footwear was the thing standing between them moving around in drunken brawl weight classes or at any moment did I feel they were going to start throwing their furniture on the lawn and make the police launch into them in a flying tackle.

Get some PJs. Put them on.

I Do Not Always Go To The Gym...

....but when I do I tell Facebook.

I went for nearly a week without checking my email or FB. I spent time making sure my kid did her homework, ran errands, made dinner on time, and plotted the calendar. What I found out was that I missed two important emails that inadvertantly were rectified before they became important. This happened merely by being engaged in the people around me on a face to face basis. On FB I missed nothing.

Over the past few years I found myself reading the comments on news articles mainly as an extension to reading the editorials. What I found myself feeling was anxiety and despair. Certainly not crippling but it would make me irritated. Then I realized Letters to the Editor went through a filter of checking for spelling, checking for outright ignorance, and a hate filter. News comments are open to anyone that can peck out whatever thought flits through their head.

FB seems to echo this, though tempered by the fact people's real names are on it. People post the most hateful of things ANYWAYS. So my new mantra is if you post anything hateful, willfully ignorant, or persist on being asinne I will Unfriend you. I am not on FB to be held victim to your political views, read your re-posted mentally pre-masticated 'thoughts' or hear how you think the dissolution of the country/religion/education would be better if we all had guns/regular beatings of our kids/God Bless Whatever and Whoever on the dollar, coin, or pledge. I am sure this will cause heartbreak the world over but as the famous quote goes, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."