So, last time I drove a snowmobile I was like 13 and ran over a little kid.  When I drove one last night I rolled with 4 kids on it and crushed a runnersled.

 Simon and I duck hunting on opening weekend. 

 Dylan's birthday

Thanksgiving pictures

Not much is happening here.  I was taking pictures off the camera and decided I should probably post a few. 

I went on a guided goose hunt with some other Ducks Unlimited volunteers last weekend, and this was the result.  We got 18 geese with 5 hunters.  The guide was getting the truck so we could load up, and my friend Kent was taking this picture, so that's why there's only 3 of us in the pit blind.  Pretty fun morning.  Not much else has been going on really, we got a call today asking how many sawyers we had available to send back east to help with the storm damage, so hopefully that will pan out and I can head out there, just waiting for a call back from our dispatch center.  Hope everybody's doing good, I'll take some pictures of the kids tonight in costumes and post them on here some time in February probably.  Happy Halloween!

My Natural Disaster is better than Jeremy's

 Sorry Jeremy, you have back surgery, a doctor tells me I'm going to die, you have flooding in your park, we get a windstorm that knocks out power to the entire county for 2 solid days, eventually takes 2 weeks to get power back to everybody, does an estimated 15 million dollars in damages, and smashes houses and cars all over the county. 

 We put an small airplane up the day after the wind storm to look for people and/or cars trapped behind roads that looked like the one above, which was essentially every main road on the forest, and at 12:00 the observer called to tell me they finished flying the district and didn't see anybody.  Then at 12:30 a guy came crawling over the downed trees along a road and met one of our folks out surveying damage and said his car was trapped about 2 miles further up the road.  So the next day we ordered a helicopter and had them fly the district again, but lower and slower, which is where most of the pictures came from.  It was a pretty amazing storm, I've never seen the wind blow that hard in my life.  They were predicting 60 mph gusts that day, but it had to be blowing harder than that, we've had 60 mph gust on the district before that didn't do that level of damage.  I have a computer program for modeling the terrain's effect on wind, and I ran a 60 mph gust through it and it came up with 115-145 mph for it's top windspeed, which I find totally believable.

 After the wind storm clean up was pretty much done I took a couple days off and took the kids camping.  Breakfast on what was predicted to be the hottest day of the year.

 How Simon and Dylan stayed cool on the hottest day of the year.

 This was one of the funniest things I think I've seen the kids do, they were totally hamming it up trying to make me laugh harder, and it worked.

 The inside of the wall tent on the first night.  We brought the dogs with us.  We went to sleep at about 10 pm that night.  At 4:30 the next morning, I was woke up to the sound of dog barking like it was going to kill something, then heard the other one join in, then I saw a squirrel turn around and dart out of the wall tent, with the dogs in hot pursuit.  They left the tent, came back through the tent, slamming into the cot the boys were sleeping on and bouncing off the center tent pole, over the top of me, out of the tent, then back through it again, the whole time the dogs are barking, I'm yelling at the dogs, the squirrel is shrieking in squirrel terror language, and the kids are dead asleep.  I got up and went outside the tent to see Arlo catch the squirrel and give it a good death shake.  Dylan was the first one awake about 2 hours later, and I think he may have thought I was making the whole thing up, he didn't hear any of it, neither did Simon when he woke up a couple hours after that.  I can't believe what they'll sleep through. 

This picture was supposed to be up with the other ones.

Did anybody watch the meteor showers last weekend?  Simon and I stayed up til 2 am one night watching, it was awesome, we saw one meteor that I swear was going to hit the ground.  It just kept getting bigger and brighter and lasted about 3-4 seconds, which if you count it off in your head and picture a meteor getting bigger and brighter, is pretty cool.  They're apparently called fireballs, I read about them the next day.  The next night of the meteor shower neither kid wanted to stay up and watch it, so I stayed up until about 4 am watching them, with the help of a couple pots of coffee.  I decided that I would just sleep on the trampoline once the coffee wore off, since that's where I was watching from anyway.  I left Faith a note, she had to be at work at 7 that morning.  She left for work while the kids were still asleep, and when they woke up they didn't see my note, and grew rather concerned they were home alone.  So, rather than enjoy it, they went over the district office and told my boss their mom was at work and their dad was supposed to be watching them but he wasn't anywhere to be found.  Someone from work actually came over and looked around the house to make sure the kids didn't just miss me, then left me a note.  The kids decided they'd be OK at home as long as they locked all the doors and sat on the couch watching a movie.  The whole time this is going on, I'm sound asleep on the trampoline, which is in full view of the road every single person has to walk or drive up to get to the office.  I'm sleeping in a gray and bright orange sleeping, and I don't if any of you have noticed, but I'm kind of hard to miss, especially outfitted in bright colors.  I woke up and said good morning to somebody walking by, who looked startled by my apparently disembodied voice floating out of the bright orange mound on the trampoline and said "We've been looking everywhere for you!"  I tried to get in the house, and found all the doors locked, except the sliding glass door on the deck, and went in to find about 30 messages on both my personal and work phone.  It was pretty funny.  That's about it, my boss is on a fire, so it appears that I get to work for 19 days straight, which will be nice.  Hope everybody's doing well.

Finally, some pictures

 I got home from Montana on Thursday, and on Sunday we took the boys to Chewelah, WA to check out Chataqua Days, an annual carnival kind of thing.  It's an hour and a half drive to Chewelah, but there was a planned power outage and flash flood warnings with quarter sized hail predicted for Republic, so we decided it would be worth it to get out of town for the day.  It was pretty fun.  They had a bunch of rides set up, and little booths that had a bunch of hand made jewelry and stuff, Faith had a watch made for her out of old silverware that is pretty neat.  The boys had loads of fun eating cotton candy and snow cones, riding all the rides, and playing little carnival games for stuffed animals.  The picture above is their last ride on the small roller coaster.  I took the pictures with my phone, because we forgot the camera.  You may recall me saying that I believed the camera had been stolen out of the van.  I still believe it was, but the thief must have felt bad, broke into the house, and hung the camera and camera bag in the coat closet under the winter coats for Faith to find. 

 Hopefully you can see Simon's expression.  This was the Sky Machine, it goes back and forth and eventually spins all the way around, and pauses at the top so you're completely upside down a couple of times and just hanging from the harness praying that this isn't the time the stupid thing breaks.  Simon rode it 3 or 4 times by himself, and somehow managed to talk me into once.  I did not enjoy it as much as he did.

 Bumper cars.  They did this one a lot, Faith and I sat in the shade for an hour while they just ran around and got in line again every time it ended.  Simon got rather intense while driving the car, and if someone bumped into him he gave them a look like he was going to hunt them down and kill them slowly, then would follow them around ramming them until somebody else ran into him, then the whole process would start over. 

 This is the first ride on the roller coaster, notice that they're both smiling.

 After the first lap, notice that Dylan doesn't look like he's enjoying himself, hopefully you can see the look on his face.  He shrieked almost the entire time, to the point that the operator looked over at me in concern like he was thinking about stopping the ride to let Dylan get off.  When the ride finally ended Dylan jumped off and ran over and said "Did you hear me, I screamed like a girl the whole time!"  He was laughing while he said it, and he rode it again, so must not have been too bad for him.  There was a couple rides he didn't ride because he said he was too scared, the Octopus and the Sky Machine, but Simon rode everything.

This is from Montana, we watched this fire start at about 730 in the evening from a powerline knocked down by a windstorm, this picture was taken at about 8 pm.  We ended up catching it at about 530 the next morning, at 9,500 acres.  I had a pretty good trip, I got stuck working on night shift for 7 or 8 shifts, but night shift can be kind of fun.  As long as you get food and good sleep during the day, neither of which was readily available at times.  As a joke I'd told the guy I was working for that I needed 4 things from the management team:  Maps, Communication, Resources (like hand crews and fire engines), and some fire to fight, the team was good about getting me 2 out of the four pretty consistently, usually resources and fire.  After a few shifts on night shift and discovering that they were out of food for breakfast or they hadn't started cooking dinner yet and wouldn't until we were already supposed to be on the line, and spending way too much time either trying to find us a place to sleep or chasing shade around a campground, I asked if we could negotiate to get food and sleep added to my list of things I needed.  Overall it was a great time, I ran into a couple of park rangers who knew Michael, one was from the Grand Canyon and one was from Utah.  That's about it, I've had the last 3 days off, but I go back to work tomorrow.  Today the kids and I are going for a bike ride while Faith's at work, then I'm going to go fishing when she gets home.  Oh, I bought the kids new bikes on Friday, they were getting to big for their old ones, and about 15 minutes after getting home, Dylan ran into a parked car, hard enough to make his bike slide most of the way underneath it.  That's what I hear anyway, I was in the garage looking for something, one of the guys living in the bunkhouse heard it happen and helped Dylan get his bike out then pushed it back up to the house for him.  Hope everybody's doing well, see ya later.

Spokane, fishing, and flat tires

We went to Spokane this week and spent the night there, Simon had a couple of doctor appointments, and I had my appointment with a new cardiologist.  Simon's appointments went fine, just routine check up stuff.  My appointment went pretty good, I'm going to get a heart catheter in a few weeks to see about finding the cause and possibly fixing the tachycardia thing, I've got an extra node on my heart that could be sending wonky signals and causing the rapid heart rate, and if they find that's the case they can burn it off with the heart catheter.  The cardiologist also thinks I would be a good candidate for heart valve repair surgery.  Everything I've ever looked at for surgery was valve replacement, but he said if I got valve replacement neither him nor any cardiologist he knows would sign off on me fighting fire again.  So he's going to do some more tests like the heart catheter thing and maybe a trans esophogeal echocardiogram (they knock me out and shove a camera down my throat to look at my heart), then he's going to present my case to the group of surgeons he works with and see if any of them think my valve could be repaired.  If they say no he's going to refer my case to the Mayo Clinic.  He stressed it wasn't an emergency to get it repaired, but thought it would be better to do it in a non-emergency situation.  So we'll see what happens.  After the doctor appointment I took the kids to the mall while Faith went to Michael's (the craft store, not her boyfriends house).  The boys each had $20 to spend, and they insisted they were going to spend it all on video games at the arcade.  They mostly play games that spit out tickets that they can trade in for cheap crap.  I convinced them to go to a comic book store first that sells toys to see if there was anything they wanted.  We all decided to spend $15 on new wallets.  I got a Star Wars wallet, Simon got Batman and Dylan got Ironman.  Their wallets have chains, mine doesn't.  So then we went to the arcade and they spent their last $5 on games, got a bunch of tickets and traded it in for cheap crap.  Dylan got a paddle ball that broke before we even left the arcade.  Saturday Faith was going to go grocery shopping, and I was going to take the kids to the car races in town, but on the way home they saw that the movie "Brave" was playing in Colville, so Faith convinced them to go see the movie instead.  I went fishing with Landon to a place called Empire Lake.  I caught 8 or 9 fish, I lost track while we were trying to see the bear that was making weird noises at the edge of lake.  We assumed it was a bear any way, whatever it was was making "whumpf" noises really loud at the edge of the lake, but the brush was so thick we couldn't see anything.  We also saw a great blue heron getting attacked by a black bird, that was pretty neat.  It was cold and raining, so after 3 hours we decided to call it quits and got out of the lake.  I'd told Landon I wasn't sure if I was cold or if my waders were leaking, turns out they were leaking slightly.  It also turned out that my van had a flat tire.  It also turned out that my spare, while it looked fine when we got it out, was flat as well.  Luckily I had met Landon at the lake, so he gave me and my tire a ride to Les Schwab to get it fixed, then dropped me off at home, Faith and I have to go get it put on the van today.  That's about it, hope everybody's doing well.  I think I mentioned in my last post that my camera got stolen out of the van, so no pictures for a while.

The cardiologist and camping

So I went to the cardiologist last Friday.  He said "You have an interesting and complex heart, and an ER doctor that sees it for the first time is going to think you're having an acute medical emergency, but in reality, your heart looks the same as it did 5 years ago when I first looked at it.  You can continue to do whatever activity you feel you're able to."  The tachycardia is something that happens a couple times a year to me anyway, and I can usually get that to go away on its own, and the pains when I took a deep breath probably was the pericarditis.  That continued until I took some ibuprofen when I got home from the ER and it went away and hasn't come back.  So, back to normal for the Curtis family in Republic I guess. 
Friday night was my friend Billy's birthday.  I went camping with him and his wife and his twin brother Gary (it was his birthday too) and Gary's girlfriend.  We went camping in a campground because a friend of Billy and Gary's was coming up Saturday with a travel trailer to "camp" for the long weekend.  I wasn't planning on camping, but when I woke up Saturday morning I decided to run home and grab the kids and come back up and camp.  Faith chose to stay home and have a weekend to herself.  A few of our other friends were camping for the weekend as well at the campground, so there would be other kids for the boys to play with.  So, I got home at about 6:30 in the morning on Saturday, loaded up the old minivan with the necessary gear, including a wall tent my friend Jeremy had given me years ago and I hadn't used yet.  I also brought our normal tent in case the wall tent didn't work out.  So we headed up to Swan Lake campground and got a site right next to where everybody else was camped.  The wall tent set up went surprisingly well with the boys helping hammer in stakes and tying things down while I held the poles steady.  Having a tent you can stand up in to change clothes when you're wet is awesome, and both Simon and I ended up in the lake, but we'll talk about that later.  So Billy's friend Brian showed up with his travel trailer and his family.  We walked over to introduce ourselves and Simon met Violet, Brian's 7 year old daughter, and the two were instantly inseparable.  Brian told me last night "If Simon was about 5 years older him and I would be having a long talk."  They were pretty funny together, Violet said her chair was too heavy for her to move, so Simon assured her it wasn't to heavy for him and lifted it over his head as he moved to where she wanted it.  Simon took her fishing down by the lake and was showing off by walking on a log jutting out into the water and fell in the lake.  I had extra clothes, but not extra shoes, so Simon sat in a chair by the fire the rest of the night, and said he wanted to throw small pieces of wood into the fire.  Violet then spent the next hour or so running between our campsite where there was a bunch of small pieces of wood the boys had chopped with the hatchet, and the campsite where we were sitting around the fire bringing Simon handfuls of wood to throw in the fire.  Violet invited Simon to sleep in the trailer with her, but I said no.  Dylan spent a lot of time playing with his friend Logan, they went fishing for awhile, but both ended up getting their line snagged, and Dylan tried to wade out to free their hooks, but didn't make it.  So I now had two wet kids sitting by the fire with no shoes.  After dinner and smores, Gary fed all the kids birthday cake at about 9:30 at night, except for Dylan, who informed the whole camp he "wants to eat more healthy stuff and less unhealthy stuff" so he didn't eat any cake.  I think it was more from eating 6 hot dogs, 1/2 a bag of doritos, and 3 smores, but he assured me it wasn't, and sat down and ate another hotdog.  Me and the boys spent a great night in the wall tent, got up the next morning and started a fire and ate some breakfast, and I got our friend Gwen to keep an eye on the boys while I ran home to grab dry shoes for the boys, and I got back and we went for a hike around the lake to do some fishing.  As we took off, Gwen's son Lucas said he should take the lead, since he knew exactly where we were going to fish.  So he took the lead, with Simon and me right behind him, and we ended up leaving everybody else way behind.  We got about 3/4 of the way around the lake, and Lucas turned with an exasperated sigh and said "Ben, where are we going!?"  I told him I'd been following him and I wasn't sure.  So we found a place to fish, Violet, Dylan, and Lucas' brother Logan had caught up by then, and between all the boys we caught three trees about 30 feet up, numerous bushes behind us, one finger, and a downed log in the lake.  We finished the hike around the lake and ate some lunch, and me and Billy and Brian started a cribbage tournament (which I won later that evening), when Brian said he'd always wanted to build a raft and paddle it across a lake.  After some discussion about what supplies we had available, Billy, Brian, TJ (Gwen's husband), and I took off  hiking to the other side of the lake with 50' of rope, a bow saw, and a hatchet.  After cutting up a bunch of 9' long chunks of wood of varying diameters that a beaver had thoughtfully laid down right next to the lake for us, I suggested we have a discussion about design.  About that time Gwen's dad Richard showed up with all the kids to watch us.  We settled on a design and set to building.  We quickly discovered that 50' feet of rope wasn't enough for the design we wanted to we figured out something else that we were fairly certain would work.  Richard suggested handing anything over to him that we didn't want at the bottom of the lake, so I gave Simon my wallet and a knife and keys, which he ended up setting down next to a stump and trying to leave, but I noticed and got him to pick it up and take it with him.  So we got the raft built and Brian and Billy got on.  It wasn't looking too stable, and while it was technically floating, the weight of the two of them was keeping it just barely above the surface of the water.  Billy had already made me swear I would get on it and paddle back across the lake with them, so I jumped on the raft, causing it to sink about a foot under the surface of the water.  I was standing on it, and I was going to turn and jump back to shore, but every time I tried to shift my weight the darn thing almost tipped over, so I ended just jumping backwards off of it and wading back to shore.  Richard thought it would work if I sat on the back of the raft with my legs in the water, Billy in the middle, and Brian in the front.  Since I was already wet I waded back out and hopped back on.  We all got situated and amazingly the raft stayed afloat, though all of us were wet and the "raft" was below the surface of the water.  We had some "paddles" that were really 6" wide pieces of dead tree, and we set off paddling all the way back across the lake to camp.  I spent some time thinking on a an article I had read in the paper a few weeks ago about the number of drownings this year already. The leading causes were alcohol, inflatable water craft, and a lack of life jackets. After I thinking that at least we weren't in an inflatable water craft I started to feel better.  I spent most of the trip back convincing Billy that it would be much better if we made it without sinking, and Billy trying to convince Brian and me that it would be a much better story if the raft sank 1/2 way back and we had to swim the rest of the way.  We ended up making it all the way back to camp, where quite a crowd had gathered.  Richard had brought his wife and her parents, some of our other friends had showed, and some other kids camping at the campground had all gathered to watch us.  The people in un adventurous store bought boats with their life jackets on gave us some pretty weird looks on the way across.  Gwen took some video and a couple of pictures that I will hopefully get from her and post.  My camera has disappeared, I am beginning to think it got stolen out of the van at some point, that was the last place I remember having.  I've looked all through the house, and the van and it hasn't turned up.  So we all got changed into dry clothes, though Brian didn't have any extra shoes and had to wear his wife's flip flops the rest of the trip.  Another friend showed up with her son and a bunch of wood that somebody had cut up for the kids to hammer together to make boats, so we spent the rest of the evening doing that.  Dylan said he was cold at about 630 and asked me to come into the tent with him to grab his coat, then told me he was tired and wanted to go to bed, and he was asleep about 5 minutes later.  Simon and Billy both fell asleep sitting in camp chairs at about 8:30, and everybody else started drifting off to tents shortly after.  I got up this morning and started a fire and made some coffee, the boys slept in for quite awhile.  Everybody packed up pretty early, Brian had to drive back to Idaho, and they all wanted to go to a fireman's breakfast benefit they do every Memorial Day weekend here.  Simon told me he was going to miss Violet, so I suggested he ask for her address so he could write her a  letter.  Me and the boys just came home though, ate some lunch and watched a movie while I took a nap.  It was a pretty fun weekend overall.  Hope everybody's doing well.