On Vacation!

So, I'm sitting in Oceanside, CA, on vacation. I'm getting some much needed R&R on the beach, spending lots of time on a boogie board, and certainly trying to recover from sunburns. Before leaving for a week (in the middle of Region 3's fire season), I had to put forth a bit of effort to prepare some backups for me while I'm gone.

Before I took over the BAER support job, there were two employees assigned to this task. One guy worked full-time, another worked full-time during the summer and then spent the winter up at Park City Mtn. Resort working. Since that summer (2002), I've been doing this alone, with the only exception being the SoCal fires of 2003, where I worked 16 straight days and got help as well.

Because I'm a one-man show, it makes taking time off during the summer a little difficult. I didn't take any vacations longer than a day or two last summer, but am now! We have two people providing support now, one to do the image processing and one to do the fire tracking, image ordering, and coordinating. I spent quite some time making "how-to" documents for these guys. It's not that what I do is difficult; rather, it's just that there are a lot of small things here and there that can make life a lot easier.

I had my temporary replacement map a fire last Friday before I left (man, it's been less than five days and I can't even remember the fire name...must be the sun) and nothing else was on tap. I hope it's a quiet week, but who knows?