Well, Merry Christmas to you all. I’m exhausted. After sorting everything out last night and opening our usual one present each (it’s a family tradition that harks back to the time when my sister and I were young and my mother wanted to bribe us once to get us to bed…it’s become a family tradition since then), we headed to bed…it must have been about 0100.
I woke to the sound of little running feet and a muffled shout “Mam, mam, Santa’s been!”. I checked my watch. 0300. Gah.
So after about a half hour of opening the things from his stocking, Rhodri was sent back to bed. I went back to sleep.
When Dafydd woke later on, my sister decided that it was late enough to get up. At 0530. So up we got and headed downstairs. “Mami, Santa’s left bajillions for us!” Rhodri’d seen the presents. All in, it took us over an hour and a half to open all the presents. Dafydd and Rhodri were over the moon with what Santa’d left them, and everyone else finally got to open presents. It’s coming up to 8am, the champagne is in the fridge ready for Bucks Fizz later this morning, and I’m writing this, rather bleary-eyed wearing my new clothes. The dog is nudging me and dropping her new ball at my feet wanting to play, I can smell the beef joint that’s cooking ready for lunch. The turkey was cooked last night.
Right now, I’m looking forward to a quiet post-Christmas period. I’m really enjoying up here, but it’s exhausting with the kids and the dog. I’m off now to try and plan the day so I can get a few hours sleep between now and Christmas dinner.
I’m writing this offline and I’m going to be posting it later. I’m up at my sister’s for Christmas on Anglesey, and while she has broadband, it’s a USB connection to her computer and I really couldn’t be bothered to set up Internet Connection Sharing on her computer just to run a cable to mine – she hasn’t got wireless anyway, so I’d be stuck in the bedroom.
Not much been happening recently – we’ve all been busy with Christmas preparations. I’m going to have a quiet one this year I think – Christmas up at my sisters’ with my nephews and mother before heading down to see Sean for the New Year.
Thursday my CRB finally came through – amazing that it takes so long to get a piece of paper that says “Nothing”. This means that I’m finally live with the first responders – I’ve got my Ambulance service ID card (amusingly my ID number ends in 007) and I’ve told the woman who does our scheduling that I’ll be available for scheduling in January.
Tonight is going to be a well-planned military operation – getting the kids out of the way while my sister and her husband play Santa. The boys are 9 and 7, so still young enough to believe in Santa.
Anyway, off now to help my sister get some CDs into iTunes so she can wrap a Christmas present. Merry Christmas y’all.
Every Thursday night, the Central Beacons team get together in the team base in Merthyr and do some kind of training. The topics covered range wildly from radios and comms, through medical, technical, search, personal health and fitness through to physique sports equipment.
Equipment is very important for us – a technical rescue will involve about a half dozen ropes of various sizes, technical climbing and rescue equipment like belay plates, auto-arrest devices, carabiners, friction devices and so on. That entire system is a whole training course on its own, and the sytem is fail-safe and capable of lowering or raising a stretcher, casualty, two rescuers and all of their kit. So it’s understandable that we need to make sure our kit is in good order – you rarely get time at the end of the callout, when it’s raining and dark. So tonight was a kit check.
This sounds incredibly boring. To be perfectly honest, it is. Inspecting all 300′ of a rope for blemishes, abrasions or cuts and doing so inch by inch is horrendously tedious. But absoolutely necessary. This was brought back to me perfectly tonight – I had to check all of the bits in the belay kit – basically all of the technical equipment used to affect a rescue excepting stretcher and rope. 19 carabiners, 2 whale’s tail’s, 2 belay rigging plates, 14 long tape loops and 2 small, 3 malleons for the helicopter winching rig…the list goes on. And on.
But every one of these kit checks is essential. Not only do we log every use and check of a piece of kit for the police logs in case we had a problem and had to explain it to them or (God forbid) a coroner’s court, but these kit checks give us time to go through every piece of equipment and carefully check it for degredation. Tonight for example, I personally marked 3 tapes as unserviceable due to physical damage in two cases and chemical damage in the third (oil contamination).
To be perfectly honest, they would have held my weight fine. But they were damaged, and I was responsible for looking at them and saying “Hrm, that’s not good. Let’s retire these for safety’s sake.”
Kit checks. Boring? Yes. Needed? Without a doubt. Maybe we could learn from this in other areas of life….
So the time has come. I need to upgrade from php4 to php5 – mainly because Sean’s bitching at me, but I kinda wanted to do it for a while and PHP5 is fairly stable now. So, I head on over to the ports tree and see what’s what.
Right, so there’s a php5 port. Let’s see, “portupgrad php4” will give me the latest version of 4. “portupgrade php5” will say go away because PHP5 isn’t installed, and “portinstall php5” will tell me that php5 clashes with php4.
Hrm.
After a big of digging around, I find this post on the freebsd-questions list. Absolutely perfect – I didn’t know that portupgrade could do that. So basically you tell it “upgrade this package (php4) but use this (php5) as the origin for the upgrade”. First thing you see is portupgrade telling you that the package name has changed…and off it goes.
One apache restart later, and it’s miraculously all working.
Sweet. I like FreeBSD ports.
Last night was our usual training night and on the agenda was river crossings – parhaps a particularly apt session considering our recent weather. We were gathered outside in warm gear going through the steps to take when crossing a river when the group next to us abandoned their practice and shouted at us to clear up. I quickly grasped the problem – we had a callout. I ran over to the car and got my Paramo kit out and started changing.
Seconds later, the first response Landrover disappeared up the lane with blue lights and sirens blaring. We followed a few minutes later in the second response vehicle, heading for an overturned car in Lansbury Park, Caerphilly. Barely had we hit the A470 however when we were called back – stand down.
By the time we got back it was too late to continue with the training and we counted up some money from the charity boxes and admired some toys from Victorinox – 5 new glow-in-the-dark penknives. They were to be given out to the five people with the highest attendance at callouts in the past 12 months. “That’s a nice thought and a nice Christmas present for them.” I thought. I’ve missed a few this year for various reasons, so I didn’t expect to be anywhere near the top five. I was absolutely shocked then, when Penny handed me the knife you see here, and well chuffed.
Lynfa had some fun with some glow-sticks after that – I could have done with a camera that had better shutter control, but hey, it’s a mobile phone.
Tonight I’m off to get Sean because he’s coming down for the weekend. We’re hoping to get some climbing in this weekend, and I’m going on my own again on Tuesday. Can’t wait.
So contrary to what you see, I did write a nice long update on the weekend, how I fixed the car with Malc’s help and drove up to Aberystwyth to surprise Sean (which I did) and how we both had a relaxing weekend snuggling and watching buffy. Unfortunately, it got lost. WordPress so needs a better editor – already looking into that.
Last night, Mal and I went up to the Welsh International Climbing Center. I’ve been there before but it’s come under new management since then, and one of the lads on our team works there which is good because we get regular updates on what they’ve done to the place – which is actually quite a lot.
So we wentup and changed and decided to do some bouldering to start with…and just carried on bouldering. They’ve completely revamped the bouldering room which is great – there are some 40 or 50 puzzles in there now, each one graded and laid out clearly, each one, it seems, concentrating on a particular skill. We started on the V0 graded routes, which equates to around a 5a/5b (ish). Now I know that I have climbed a 6a before in this center, but that was on a longer route, and isn’t really comparable to bouldering problems, where it’s pretty much all technique. There may have been a single point where that longer route was a 6a, but the rest was quite simple. We tried 4 V0 problems last night, of which I managed to do 3, and think that I completed 2 of them cleanly – the third I needed a bit of a nudge to get started. The last one was a traverse under an overhang with some real jugs for your hands, but I just haven’t got the upper body strength to do that kind of manouvering yet. So that route is my goal at the moment.
There’s explanations of how bouldering grades works here and here.
WICC has had a major facelift in terms of the walls – they’ve got two of my faovourite walls out of action at the moment as they’re rebuilding them, and I know that the staff they have there now are excellent. They really do offer a whole lot more than just a climbing wall though, especially with their artifical cave which rocks. Looks like they’re on the right track anyway, so I for one will definately be going back there.
I would like to pop back to Llangorse now that I’ve got a bit more experience than when I went there before, just to cast an eye around. It’s too far to go regularly, especially with WICC just around the corner from me really, but it might be interesting as a different place every now and again.
Orange seem to have a fault this morning which is causing me great joy as it deregisters my phone from the network, thus making my phone not work without any visible indication of this on the phone itself. Gee thanks Orange.
Waiting for callback from Customer Services now to tell me what they think is the problem…
Gah. I missed a callout this morning. Mal has already blogged about it, and the BBC even have a news article about it. It looks like a good call too, and being that close I would have been pretty much almost first on scene. Now I’ve been a bit less forward about attending callouts lately because with having to use personal diesel, and with Christmas approaching, I’m running out of money that I can justify using on Mountain Rescue. But this one I would have gone on.
So why didn’t I?
My pager was accidentally on vibrate. Our pagers have a “silent” function which is activated by holding down a certain key for 2 secs. Occasionally, they turn onto vibrate when they’re accidentally pressed against something during the course of Life. As a result, it was merrily vibrating away downstairs whilst I was peacefully sleeping upstairs.
Bugger. How pissed off am I…