Juggling act

Well, the last few days have had me taking over most of the responsibility for the Cusp Tech position. I'm feeling more confident about the daily activities, but am still apprehensive about troubleshooting when something major breaks. Weather allowing, Jason will be out of here tomorrow, and I'll be on my own until this time next year. The daily checks for the Aurora Tech position are straightforward, so I'm not worried about that either.

There was a lot of activity in the last several days for the Fire Brigade (a.k.a. Team 2), of which I'm now the designated lead. We had the gear turn-in for most of the outgoing fire fighters, and got gear for those new Team 2 people that have already arrived. Yesterday we had our turnover drill, which was intended to be a chance for the new team to do their thing responding to a fire alarm while the experienced folks from the previous season are there to observe and critique. I was really worried about how it would go, and pretty much didn't sleep Friday night. But, when the time came, our team and the others came together and did a pretty good job for as inexperienced as we are. As we were sitting in the galley sharing comments about how the drill had gone the fire alarm went off again for real. We geared back up and once the location of the problem was found, responded once again. It turned out to be nothing major, but was actually a great opportunity to immediately put into effect lessons we'd just learned from the drill.

The weather has been relatively cold here the past few days. Yesterday I was doing my checks out on the roof of ARO in -90F and below wind chill. I think a lot of the winterovers are worried their flights tomorrow may be delayed due to the cold. I'm going to help man the aircraft fire fighting rig for the two flights of the day that are carrying passengers, so that should be interesting.