Is Anyone Looking?

Thanks for the picture Diana!

New Picture - Our Place From The Air!!

Children's Learning Center Goes Up!

This is to be my Fire Inspector-ing project. I thought it would be fun to document this structure from the ground up! This will be the county-owned Children's Learning Center. Built in a flood zone, water is just below the surface. A huge water-moving project ensued as the foundation got set. The solid wall is a west-facing concrete wall, poured inplace in forms. The 8" fire main was recently tested to assure there were no leaks in the water main.

It's a huge project being undertaken by a county concerned about their revenues in this new, recessed economy.

Building Construction

Insulated Concrete Forms. This is a residential home being constructed in Teton County. It is over 5000 square feet, so it shall be sprinklered (County ordinance). The walls are 6" of poured concrete with a cold roof overhead.Here are a series of pictures from this site through a Flicker slide show.

Turns out, the garage will be sprinklered and the storage area above as well. Notice the steel beams supporting that light weight construction floor. I will try to learn if there will be more than one layer of gyp board covering that garage ceiling.

I also learned yesterday at this site, that the ICF forms have a hard plastic on the inside. This plastic becomes a mounting location for applying drywall directly to the ICF walls. I still haven't figured out how they run the electrical chases.....

AREA OF REFUGE So, I don't know much about this code, found both in the Building and Fire Codes under 1007.6 Areas of Refuge. Having a building presently under construction less than two blocks away, I decided to use this opportunity to get smarter on this code; much to the chagrin of the General Contractor! Here is another series of images from the area of refuge. Note the little silver box with button and speaker. One would wheel one's chair out to this safe area of refuge, push the button and talk to someone......ooops, my building may not have a 24 hour attendant! And I don't think this button will talk to the local phone, which it must do, per code. I also learned code states that each area of refuge must be labeled with illuminated signs, INCLUDING the International Symbol of Accessibility AND tactile signage must be located at each door as well. Tough stuff to dump on a GC four days before his CofO!!(Did you see the nice little sprinkler head at the top of the stairwell?)

Lastly, as you probably figured out, this is my personal blog site. You can get an amusing glimpse into my life by clicking on past posts! It is a great way to combine photos with the written word and pretty darn easy to do, I must say. I will do it again if it proved helpful for anyone. Maybe follow the construction of the ICF home....

Thank You for the Great Party!

Despite the dark clouds looming above, a great time was had by all at Michael and Kenlyn's birthday party. Nearly 40 pounds of giant king crab legs were devoured and a table of dishes brought by well-wishers complimented the meal. Most of the 10 gallons of beer was consumed as well! Just click on the right arrow to watch a fun slide show of the party!

Thanks to our 23 friends who helped make this a real celebration! Kids and dogs added to the festivities!!

What a great picture of Michael and Earl bringing in wood for camp. Earl did great; he's a very good horse! More pictures of camp set-up below!

"I'M HOW OLD?!?"

Here, a picture of the soon-to-be birthday boy (with dad, Earl - picture taken at the recent Trumbower Reunion!!) Birthday party to be held, rain or shine, this Sunday, August 30 here at our Hovel on the Hill!! Addie promises to bring the birthday cake (look for future pictures on this site of that cake and said party!!) and we'll cook up a bunch of crab and drink a half keg of lager! Also celebrating, dear friend Kenlyn Long!! This will be the actual day of her birthday - how great to celebrate together! Yippie!

The cherry pie won't be at the party! Look at the great sour cherry pie we were able to enjoy!! Thanks to a picking of Butch's sour cherry tree, enough sour cherries were procured to create one batch of sour cherry jam and one sour cherry pie. MMmmmmm!! Three springs ago I planted a sour cherry tree at my place in town and I have my fingers crossed that next year will be its year. Makes me think of Grandma Kinzer's tree!

I promised a picture of Mom with her prize fish from our day fishing at Jackson Lake. The picture was snapped just before she dropped him! No harm, no foul - it was dead! Too bad we didn't have the presence of mind to snap a picture up at the most beautiful lake around!! Nice day of fishing; thanks for spending some time with us here in Jackson, Mom!

Look! Four beautiful zucchini!! There are lots more growing too and we have a week of warm weather ahead! Thanks to Michael's diligent covering of the delicate plants during our four days of frost, we have succeeded!!

YIKES!!

Okay, it's been a long, long time since I've done anything to this site. Glad they didn't turn it off on me!! Here is a picture from our wonderful pack trip. I wanna go back!! Check out this batch of jambalaya. Oh man, was it good! Don't ask me for the recipe; I doubt that I'll ever come up with this again! And how can you beat cooking over a wood fire? Delicious!

Life has been crazy busy, like everyone else. The chickens are doing great! Seven eggs out of six hens the other day! The bonus egg! We had a great trip back for the Trumbower Reunion. Lots of Trumbowers to meet! Whirlwind trip. Got to see the Orioles and Reds play in Camden Yards which was awesome! Our flights there and back went well. It was a nice trip!
This weekend is the Hoback BBQ Rib Picnic. 2800 pounds of ribs will be cooked and it will all be done for another year by Saturday evening's end. This year's planning has gone well. Wish you all could come!

"Egg-citing"!!

There it is! The second of the first two eggs!! How egg-citing is that??! We believe the hen pictured is the momma; she was sited on the nest. Good girl!

So, the chicken coop works! Micheal is elated! He had so much fun building the coop, he built this very nice raised garden next.

Planeted; a row of zinnas, some zuccini (sure to get frosted before their time), some lettuces and spinaches. More work to be done.

Gearing up for the pack trip. Time just keeps flying by! Amazingly, this is the last week of June!!

"Coup de Ville"

A friend asked today how the "Pecker Palace" was coming along and why was it not full of "young spring chickens"? He's a retired federal judge; ya gotta love that sense of humor!! We love you, John! Thanks for the laughs! The name of the coop is now, officially, "Coup de Ville". I'm looking for any Cadillac insignias, tail fins, that sort of decorative thing to add to the coop's character.

I celebrated my 50th birthday (yikes!) over the Memorial Day weekend break while taking a two week Fire/Arson Origin and Cause course at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsberg, Maryland, gone from home May 17 -29.

This photo was taken during a Memorial Day Service at the beautiful Firefighter Memorial. It was about 90 degrees and 92% humidity that day.

Anyway, what is key for you to know is that while visiting Michael's brother, sister in law, and nephew I got a HUGE birthday surprise - he flew out to spend the weekend with me!!That is the BABY brother, Steven; he measures 6'7"! Son Taylor (soon to be as tall!) and lovely wife, Victoria. And of course, my dear husband. It truly was a surprise!! We all spent the day walking around Annapolis. Michael was back on the plane Sunday around noon and I was back to Emmitsberg settling in for another week of class. Which, I came home a whole bunch smarter from too!

The coop is project to be finished this week. Maybe a trip to Riverton this weekend for the birds.....One closing garden picture from a lovely spot in downtown Emmitsberg.

Muffins and The Coop!

Update on the Coop. Building continues. Look - walls!! The day started cold and with earflaps down, Michael got walls up!! No work now until next week. This weekend: the fishing derby, the fire department banquet, and I leave Sunday morning for the National Fire Academy in Emmitsberg!! Phew!

I have a wonderful recipe to share now that you've looked at the new coop pictures. Feeling the mood to bake, I pulled this recipe off the internet from Allrecipes , and what do you know, at last, a muffin recipe worth making. I highly recommend this one. Yummy! Enjoy. I'll try to do a post from Maryland!

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Throw dry ingrediants together: 1 1/2c. flour, 3/4 c. sugar, 1/2 t. salt, 2 t. baking powder.

Now mix up wet ingrediants (this is kind of a clever method). Put 1/3c oil in a 1 cup measuring cup. Throw in an egg and then top off with whipping cream (or milk, that's all I had), put in a bowl and make sure wets are all mixed.

Make topping by throwing 1/2 c. sugar, 1/3 c. flour, 1/4 c. butter (yup, that' a half of a stick baby!) and 1 - 2 t. cinnamon. I spun it around in my little chopper thing.

Now, throw wet with dry, don't stir too much, throw in 1 c. fresh blueberries.

Take this rather thick dough, and put in lined muffin tins. Then put a big spoonfull of the topping on top of each muffin. Bake 20-25 minutes (it was more toward the 25 minutes at this elevation).

I'm telling you, these are GOOD!! And look, they call for an EGG!! Ha! We come full circle!

Recipe comes from Allrecipes off the internet.

Trial and error. I have spent WAY too much time fiddling with this today!!



Okay folks, you should see a slideshow on the progress of the chicken coop. I can't seem to get it to play all the pictures, on the blog site, but I think if you double click on the image you should get to a slide show icon, upper right corner. Michael has been delayed by the rain, but the weather is good now! He's planning and designing and thinking all about this coop.

Meanwhile, check out this lovely fava bean salad I made for tonight's "Inspector's Meeting". Found these dried fava beans in the Mexican food sections of Smiths. Soaked them a few hours, cooked them until they were just done (too much and they would have turned to mush), added some great midwestern sweet/sour juice, some red peppers, kalamata olives, basil, grape tomatoes, sliced red onions and salt and pepper. Oh, and I'll be bringing a bottle of chainti too! Ha!!

Check It Out, People!!

You've got to try this; I think it might actually work!! If you click on this, it should take you to a slide show of the building of the chicken coop. The rain slowed things down, but you will see, progress is being made. Michael is a wonderful carpenter to watch work. I just get out of the way!! Meanwhile, I've come up with some new ways to make this site more interesting!

Meanwhile, look what I made to take along to "The Inspector's Dinner" tonight!! I found dried fava beans in the Mexican foods section of Smiths. Soaked them a couple of hours, cooked until just tender (could really fall apart if cooked too much), then added a sweet sour base (1 c. sugar, 1 1/2 c. red wine vinegar, 1 c. water and boil with whole allspice and cloves). Also in this cold salad; kalamata olives, grape tomatoes, red onions, red peppers, basil, salt and pepper. I'm brining chianti too!! Ha!

a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkvY6G1Wf4i1KdCh5bziE4vL7pngW8yRJ8IAUabniqD6Eqfmt3vY92zbH0IkH6OPORT4wz1rbL0EJ7FtoC7MyElUHPb-ZELEra9-15YmQJZU2uT3kE-NESAtdGT-cGsXKr5jQQIJe9aok/s1600-h/DSC00288-1.JPG">

Who knows what will show up in future posts???

The building of the chicken coop!

The run is placed
Originally uploaded by The Ex-Photographer

Thank goodness it quit raining. Work is getting done.

The building of the coop, continued!

The run is placed
Originally uploaded by The Ex-Photographer

This should take you into Flickr to see a series of coop building projects! Nice that it quit raining; getting some work done now!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Crazy Busy!

Okay, I have been crazy busy since my last post. I fear I may have lost you followers; please forgive me. Some really cool things have happened; last Friday a great several hour Civil Patrol training with the culmination spent in the air circling over a recent plane crash on the Continental Divide Pass of theTogwotee Mountains and the great success of finding the plane from the air. Now you need to know, the folks had gotten out of the plane successfully and without injury about two weeks ago, but we were the first to spot the plane from the air. Kind of a nice little badge on my CAP uniform, so to speak.

Then I got the wild hair to hike, by snowshoes, into the plane crash landing site. Michael and I donned borrowed snow shoes and commenced our search. With GPS in hand, we learned we knew very little about our GPS. After some cursing and playing, we found the needle in the haystack! I'd really like to send you pictures, but you're going to have to send me an email to get the specific ones. I'd hate to lose my respect and position in the Civil Air Patrol!!

Then it was back to a busy work week. Tomorrow I will be finishing a ICS 400 class taken up in the beautiful Grand Teton National Park. There are still rumors that the National Fire Academy may cancel my arson class due to the HINI virus.....we'll see sometime next week, I suppose!!

There WILL be a post next week updating you on the chicken coop. Landscaping efforts have begun, but have been hampered thanks to the incredibly lousy weather.

Don't know about anyone else, but I sure am looking forward to the weekend!!

Fire Science Education

Many of you know I am working on a Fire Science Degree through Casper College. Although somewhat reluctant to initially believe this type of education would be very valuable, now finishing up my first semester, I confess, I was WRONG!!

I'd like to share my latest assignment with you all. It was so profound to learn about the fire disaster and the 9 NIOSH firefighter fatalities in the furniture store in Charleston, SC! Please print this out and read it; there are so many interesting points. Let me cap a few for you, in case your life is crazy and you really don't have time!

• The supply line to the very large furniture store was 50 sections of 2 1/2" hose. The 4" supply lines did not get established with water flowing until close to an hour after the call came in.


• The very large 51,500 ft2 structure SHOULD have been sprinklered per their ordinances.


• 28 gallon cans of extremely flammable solvents were found inside the loading dock, the area the fire began.


• One of the engines had a "touchy" pump and was difficult to get engaged to pump water to the fire.
  

So many things to learn in a report like this. And so many things to learn in general!! If you are interested in expanding your fire education, there may be no time better than the present.

A Wyoming Volunteer Grant may very well make this type of education possible. I have been exploring ways to make this work for any of you interested. I believe I have an avenue. Please contact me at kclay@tetonwyo.org if you want more info. Although it is challenging, an online education is just like anything else - you get out of it what you put in!

Saturday in Wyoming

For years I have sought the perfect bread pudding recipe. Not too sweet, not too dry and a sauce to drizzle over. Found it and I shall share it, cause it's good, you should try it.

Bread Pudding

8 cups of stale bread, 1" cubes

3 cups milk
1 cup whipping cream
3 eggs
2 T. vanilla or 2 whole beans scraped
1 1/2 c. sugar
1/4 t. allspice
1 t. cinnamon
1 cup dried blueberries -
soaked in 1/2 c. bourbon

Bourbon Sauce
1/2 c. butter, melted
1 c. sugar
1 egg
(Add at the end) -
1 cup bourbon whiskey

Here's what you do. First butter 8 ramekins or a 9 x 13 inch glass dish. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Make the wet mixture first. I start with the eggs, then the seasonings, mix that all up. Then add the milk and then the sugar. Throw in the blueberries and the booze and lastly the bread. Gently toss or you'll have mushy, falling apart bread pieces (yuck). Spoon into ramekins and bake 40 minutes.

While that's baking, stir the melted butter and sugar together. Then add the egg and stir really well. Slowly heat, stirring all the time (or you'll get a scrambled egg). This mixture needs to heat to boiling to thicken. Take off the heat, throw in the whiskey and call it amazing topping! Yum!

Cover the cooled uneaten ramekins and keep in fring. You can nuke them about 1.5 minutes, then add some sauce, nuke another 30 seconds and enjoy.

What to do with eggshells? Somewhere I read that a person should bake them before throwing them on the compost heap. However, I can find no such info now.

Next project is to work on the compost pile. Thinking about some raised beds here at our little cabin.

Isn't he a handsome cat? Jynx out looking for a rodent to slay (and later throw up on the floor!). Ya gotta love that!!

Building of the Coop

I started to think about having chickens over a year ago. Dave Phillips will remember me talking about it over an email February 26, 2008 (you check, Dave, it's there! I asked about the 10 things a person should know to raise chickens!). Patience is a virtue!

It took a couple of months to sell Michael on the idea. Obviously, raising chickens for eggs makes no sense whatsoever! They are really, really cheap. But when was the last time you had a fresh, orange shelled and brilliantly orange-yolked egg, I ask? He finally bought in.

Next came the structure. I hated the idea of building something from all new materials. My wonderful loud mouth, obnoxious Italian friend Janet offered up a door, window and OSB board from the company "bone yard". We bought a 4 x 8 rough "structure"- used to be a wood storage shed. Fellow firefighter, Mike Mayer, practically gave us pre-stained t&g cedar siding, and the trip to Idaho Falls (see picture above) finishes up the supply stage.

Now, it is stacked and ready to go. In a week it will be May! Michael is off doing a three day forest service class in lovely Buffalo, Wyoming. It is supposed to snow. Again.

Thanks to Andy Christensen for the dog run donation - soon to be chicken run! With some work it will certainly help in the effort to keep our dogs, killer cat, the foxes, coyotes, eagles, hawks, mountain lions and wolves (?) away from the chickens.

Dave, I sure hope you've got about six chickens and one fancy rooster growing for our coop-to-be! I love processes. Sometimes it's not the having of something that is nearly as fun as the getting of it!

Stay tuned. There will be more as construction is sure to begin!

CREW RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Crew Resource Management. Jon Politis brought us this concept again at last weekend's very educational Trauma Conference. You can get a GREAT book from Amazon about CRM, click here to check out this book.

One of the big teachings of CRM is Situational Awareness. You know the problem. Things go bad, your focus narrows down to the most serious situation and you miss the "big picture." Your scene becomes tunnel visioned, fixated.

One of the very first incidents that lead to CRM was a plane crash into the Florida Everglades. All of the folks running the Eastern Airlines plane were focused on a burnt out light bulb. No one was flying the plane. The plane crashed and lots of people died.

The aviation industry trains its pilots to anticipate problems and address them in a systematic way. A first step in avoiding loss of situational awareness is to minimize the level of distractions. In the flying world this is referred to as keeping a "sterile cockpit".

This concept is easily transposed to fire department operations. Imagine your next call. You are enroute and the firefighter next to you is yammering on about how he hates his job, he hates his boss; all of this yammering is NOT about the job at hand or the one coming up very shortly. You all arrive and no one has much of a clue of what to do.

Practise this "sterile cockpit" technique from now on. Don't let anyone distract you, others or themselves from the incident at hand.

Next week, I hope to have the link to find Instructor Handouts from the Trauma Conference. Please feel free to comment on this blog site. Does it work for you? Let me know.

Testing Today

A beautiful day was had by all in Jackson Hole today. Some of us, unfortunately, made the big sacrifice and stayed inside to get smarter at the annual Trauma Conference. It is noticeably warmer, snow is melting and the grass in greening.

Let me know if you get this post. I really want to figure out how I can link information in this writing into another page that pops up. Did you check out Smitten Kitchen? Weird recipe this week, but she makes some good stuff!

This is a picture from our Emergency Vehicle Operations Training. Did you hear I got the best score? It was really fun and we got lucky on the weather that night!

Kathy's Corner

Kathy's Corner: "adventure in a helicopter"

My attempt at a blog site. Forgive me as I work through this and make discoveries! I hope my site brings something positive to any of you visitors.

I hope to share in this site. Recipes, movie reviews, cool web sites, family and friend news. On the surface, a blog site seems so, well, egotistically personal. However, I have gotten SO much enjoyment from those I follow. I'll give this a try!

Some of you heard about my adventure in a helicopter atop a mountain top last week. Happily, after the 3 attempt, the helicopter did start up and myself and three other souls did not have to spend the night on a 9500 foot mountain! Certainly, one of the most memorable events in the last week.

Best friend of all Diana is opening a yoga studio in Ottawa. I believe she has found her calling. Much work is expected in the upstairs studio (above Gunk's shop) and she hopes to be open in two months.

My mentee in the fire department, Coralia Miller, is off to the Grand Canyon for a river trip! Safe travels; you'll be a different person when you return!