I’ve been MIA for the past month, I know. There have been several interesting things going on since I last blogged. We delivered babies in our most recent EMT class. A local doctor sat on the other side of the mannequin and pretended to be the mother as he tested us on a normal deliver, and a difficult delivery. He’s a natural ham, and kept bystanders entertained as we waited.

Class has been demanding, but I’ve only a month left. Ambulance calls have been few and far between this month, but in the past week we’ve been called to monitor firefighters at two house fires in our area. Two families lost virtually everything just before Christmas, and I don’t believe either of them had insurance.

The combined population of all the towns that send their kids to our high school is between 5 and 6 thousand total residents. We don’t usually have two structure fires in a year, never mind in a week. The good news is, nobody was hurt and things can be replaced and the community is already stepping in to help. But it’ll be a tough adjustment for the families.

On the writing front, I didn’t quite manage the 50,000 words I was supposed to write for NaNoWriMo, but I did finish somewhere around 23,000, which is better than I did the previous several months combined, so I’m not complaining.

Also we had our first real snow storm last weekend. My birds had never seen snow before and while my ducks and geese just went with the flow, my chickens refused to leave the coop for almost three days—the amount of time it took for the snow to melt back from the door so dirt was showing again. It was pretty funny watching them stare at the snow, refusing to leave the building. They usually pour out the door the second it is opened in the morning.