My Time in Anniston, First Spike Trip, etc.

I'm sorry. I am a horrible blogger. I have kept everyone waiting for too long.

Alright get over it. I've been busy.

So I've got some pictures from Anniston and some thoughts on the training and stuff, as well as other tales of my great adventures and injuries.

I'll start right off with it. I ended up despising the food. I know in my last post I was all about the food, and don't get me wrong, it was delicious. But every Monday was the same. Every Tuesday was the same. Every Wednesday was the same. You get it. The second time I had lemon pepper chicken it was tasty but kind of meh, and the the third time I only ate it in order to not starve.

Now that that's over.

I mentioned in the last post that we were given name tags and badges. Although I don't need the name tag anymore, the badge is a necessity until the end of my service term. We were also issued Blackberries and laptops for official use. It feels weird using BBM again, but it's just as convenient as I remember. The idea is that we can use the 4G from our phones with our laptops and then have internet anywhere AT&T has service. Which is actually quite limited. AT&T sucks.

NO RETAKES

Name tag for campus

Training ended up being alright, got through FEMA 101 after about a week and really learned a lot about FEMA and how it operates. After 101, we had 3 I think? days of cross-training in IA, which is the Individual Assistance aspect of the operations division. The classes, while incredibly dull, were very informative. I am very confident that if I am ever in a disaster I will know exactly how to apply for federal assistance. We had the sequence of delivery pounded into our heads until we couldn't even bear to think about it anymore. But that and everything else was pretty necessary so that we will actually know what we're talking about when we're out in the field. When IA training was over we finally got to do training in the area that we were assigned, which is Community Relations (CR). We trained in that for 3 days and then training was all over. The long days in the classroom were finally over. Not really much else to say about training.

Classroom

My desk

On our only half day off I decided to sign up for a hiking trip to Cheaha State Park which is about a 45 minute drive from Fort McClellan. It is the site of the highest point in Alabama. It had been kind of overcast that week, and that morning the mountains were capped in fog, so most of the time we were up there we couldn't really see anything. The highest peak had a pretty cool building on it with a tower (again, couldn't see anything).

Inside the building at the highest point, doorway to the tower

After seeing lots of fog on the highest peak we decided to head to Bald Rock, which is a scenic outlook and hiking trail at the same park. The hike was pretty entertaining, mostly because Chris kept running off into the mist howling like an Indian, hiding along the trail, and ambushing us with acorns the entire journey through the woods. He's a child. When we got to the outlook it was still foggy so we couldn't see much, but there were other opportunities for entertainment. Mom, stop reading. Chris had been there on a previous hiking trip and he had discovered a bunch of good rock faces for rock climbing and bouldering. So we started exploring and climbing everything we could find. It was really exciting at one point because if I had fallen I most likely would have died, which wouldn't have been good. 35 foot fall onto boulders and a very steep slope into the mist blah blah blah. It was all very exciting.

I realize that I'm not bald. It still had to be done

View from Bald Rock

Of course I ended up bleeding. At one point after I had finished climbing an actual boulder I was just walking across some smaller rocks and I slipped on some moss. Fell on my butt and hands and slid about 5 feet down to the ground. Sounds innocent enough, but the rock was a wicked little bugger, and very sharp in places. I acquired a cut about an inch and a half long and decently deep on my left thumb. And bled. I had forgotten how much even a little cut can bleed. As I write this (since it's been so long since I've updated this blog) the very last scab is about to fall off, it's almost completely new skin/scar tissue. Thank you liquid bandage, even though you sting like a son of a and make me scream like a girl.

Crawled through this cave

Off the bottom of this picture, 35 feet and probable death are not pictured.
I followed him right after I took this.

No stitches required. Also didn't ask anyone if I needed stitches.

After fun times were had and injuries were sustained we headed back to the main lodge of that part of the park. After a small (1.75 hour) coordination snafu amongst the team leaders, the sun finally burned off all of the fog and we were able to get some pretty great views of the park and mountains.

Finally a view

 The day before we were scheduled to leave Anniston, we found out where we were going and what we would be doing. We would be heading to Kansas City, Missouri. And we would be doing horrible office work, utilizing zero percent of all the training that we had just received. Needless to say we were all very upset. But what can you do

The night before we were scheduled to leave was crazy. I was assigned responsibility over our spike prep packet, which is a large piece of paperwork detailing everything about the project that we've been assigned. Usually teams do them together, but circumstances called for me to handle it since I'm the assistant team leader for my team. I delegated responsibilities to some of my teammates but in the end I still had to do a lot of it by myself. It probably took me about 3.5 hours. On top of that I was trying to spend a little time with my friends on other teams since we would all be split up the next day, as well as talk to loved ones on the phone and such. I finished all of these things by the 11:00 curfew, and was dead tired. That was when I started packing. Ugh. I packed until 1:30ish and finally got to sleep. Then I woke up at 5:00 or 5:30, I don't remember, in order to get the rest of my stuff together and eat breakfast. After packing up our van and finalizing everything, we were ready to depart on our journey west at 7:00 AM.

The drive was pretty uneventful, it was pretty much the same route we took down to Anniston from Vinton. I'd have to say the most eventful thing I saw was a school bus painted like the Batman batmobile. 

Bat Cave for life

We stayed at a nice hotel in Columbus, MO overnight, and then drove to KC on Friday. We weren't able to move into our lodging until Monday, so we stayed at the America's Best Value Inn in Independence, MO until our first day at the FEMA region 7 headquarters. During our weekend of no responsibilities we were able to explore the city a bit. The downtown area is pretty cool, lots of nice looking buildings and such. Not really much else to report about that. BUT. We wandered down to the City Market district and it was awesome. There was a really cool coffee shop type place that we stopped in to chill for a while, and I have to say it was probably the coolest coffee shop I've ever been to. The farmer's market was also going on, and you all know I love Madison's farmer's market, it's the greatest thing on Earth, but there were some vendors at the KC one that were awesome. This one guy had 5 tables set up end to end with just bags of different spices packing them. Couple bucks per huge scoop. Amazing. And fruit stands and a whole bunch of other stuff, I almost felt like I was in some market in another country.

Grassy plaza downtown

Statue at above plaza. I forget who it's of

Fall festival in downtown KC

Part of the awesome coffee shop

More coffee shop

Spice on spice

That's all I can handle for writing right now, I can fill in on all the other stuff having to do with our assignment and such in another post. Hopefully I will have it up within a couple days. Thanks for reading.