So much for those days off...

"Perfection of character: To live your last day, every day, without frenzy, without sloth, without pretense." - Marcus Aurelius

One of my colleagues recently left for another job, leaving an open shift that has to be covered.  There are eight of us - now down to seven.  His shift partner can't cover them, so in reality, there are just six of us to pick up the open shifts.  

I lost half a day to a mandatory annual training class, and lost two nights covering the open shift.  If you look at the top line item "Team 1", you can see how the schedule works.  Four nights, three days off, three days, one day off, three nights, three days off, then four days, followed by a week off.

Doesn't look too bad... a week off every month!  However there are some drawbacks to this particular shift schedule.  When you come off nights, you are actually working the first six hours of that first day off - and you need to sleep afterwards.  So it's 2.5 days off, and subtract the morning nap you will probably need to take on that first day off.  

When someone takes vacation or leaves, the shift has to be covered, so that week off may not be all yours.  You might also have to fill shift coverage on *any* of your days off.   

Notice also that you work 168 hours in a 28 day stretch.  Normal folks work 40-hour weeks, or 160.  That extra 2 hours per week doesn't seem like much, but it adds up:  104 extra hours per year.  I've been working shift for about 40 years now, so I've put in about 4000 hours more than if I held a normal day job.  That's two extra years of 40-hour weeks that I've worked.  On the other hand, it's hard to say no to the kind of money that they pay for working nights/holidays/weekends.

I've noticed that it's gotten a lot more difficult to pop on and off of night shifts over the past few years.  It takes quite a bit longer to break away from being awake at night.  No complaints, mind you, that's just how it seems to be going.  

Anyhow, enough about shift work, long hours, and covering open shifts.  The point I was getting at was that my week off got cut very short, and there was a lot of stuff to do at the house because of those damn trees that got cut down very late in the burn window.

Below, the burn sweatshirt.  Lots of embers have gone through it!

 

 

Each time I burn, it takes up most of a day.  I'm paranoid about the embers flying off and setting the forest ablaze, so I watch the fire carefully until it's burned down to coals - hours and hours.  Whenever a wind gust happens, I spray a mist over the fire to suppress the embers and slow the burn rate.

 

This time I stacked the branches out in a line instead of making a huge haystack.  It made the process much less stressful, however it took quite a bit longer for the fire to burn from one end to the other.

Below:  First burn of this year.  A couple of small trees out front.  They were pine trees, and full of sap.  They went up like newspaper.

It takes a lot of time to limb the trunks and gather the branches up, and then move them to a safe spot for burning.  The whole process takes a lot of time, which is in shorter supply than normal right now.

Below:  Whilst I was limbing the trees that the tree service dropped, I noticed one out behind the shop that the January wind storm must have uprooted.  I sectioned the trunk and limbed it as well.  No point leaving dry fuel (pine needles!) on the ground with wildfire season approaching.

Below: The final burn pile of the spring season.  Some of it was dead lodgepole pines that fell over last winter, and some was small dead fir trees.  The green stuff was the last branches from the bigger trees.  Anyway, the clean-up and burning are finished.  I'm just happy I was able to finish before the summer burn ban, and now I can get on with life!