Saturday the 14th

Anther Saturday rotation is underway!

Yes, every six weeks we give up one Saturday night to listen for the call of those in distress. This happens to be my weekend to do so. It's just myself, Bob and the Village Idiot; after 21h00, we need not worry about the Village Idiot. As it happens, we didn't anyway - we were blown out for a call around 19h30, as I'm standing in line at the grocery store with milk, skim milk, yogurt... all perishables. Isn't that nice? Of course I'm about to pay for my boatload of groceries when my plektron starts screaming (and can be heard across the store) and so had to dump the goods and race over to the squadhouse. The call is for a house over in the catacombs as we used to call them - all the little side streets of Lake Parsippany. This is 65's territory, not ours, so I did not know specifically where Northfield was. I got in and pulled the rig out, waited for Bob and the VI to join me when another call - also for the other side of town - was blown out.

We began heading for the first call - I can get to Allentown Road no problem, but finding Northfield - well, I get ahead of myself. We heard 65 get on the air - it's Chris Miller and it's only Chris Miller. You can't roll a rig out with only one person, so we stop at the corner of Allentown, drop off the Village Idiot (oh, yes, Chris won't be thanking us for that...), and happily head down Allentown to grope our way through the catacombs to find this house. What a trip - we were all over the local area, us in our humungous vehicle on these tiny streets. We finally find the house (with no cop waiting on scene!) and go in, lift up our patient and after about ten minutes, we are out of there, released from the scene. I don't remember what the other call was - the usual, I imagine. Feeling sick, difficulty breathing or possible chest pain (which is almost never a heart attack). They went to the hospital, so Bob and I just went back to the squadhouse and went home. Well, he went home - I went to FoodTown to retrieve and pay for my groceries.

I came home and Tom, Alayna and Matthew were there. Matthew is no longer a happy, pass-me-along-to-the-next-person-in-line baby. He has reached the nobody-but-my-parents-get-to-touch-me-now stage, so he took a look at me and cried. Wonderful. And they have a helmet on him, too. I mean, yes, he's kind of a funny looking kid. And he will be for a while. But the whole craze to ensure that your kid has a round head is just too stupid for me. I have seen more and more of this phenomenon showing up and honestly, is this what parents worry about? There are better things in life to focus on than this...

We had a fun night and it was interruption-free. We ordered Chinese, had a great time sitting around talking and then sitting around talking and eating. They stayed until cose to 22h00 and then went home. Luis was in bed watching the telly while I began sorting through both the summer clothing that was divided into two piles: going away for storage and going into a bag for the clothing drive I'm running. The winter clothes, in three huge bins that I stored them in, were also sorted through, and swapped. The summer clothing I'm keeping was both put into one of the three bins and hung up in the closet down in the library. (I had thoroughly cleaned out the library this morning - I mean, I really went in there with a vengeance and cleaned out all kinds of crap - I threw out tons of stuff. I also got things into storage containers and books put away and it looks great down there! Just beautiful! And the cleaning ladies came today and cleaned the floor, so it looks perfect!

Anyway, it's midnight (almost), so that is half the shift over. C0nsidering that we are apparently covering all of Parsippany and not just our third, this is saying something!