Day 1: Memorial Day. . . a national holiday where I stayed home and chilled with the family, and got paid! Boo-yah!
Day 2: The rest of the crew arrives. We spend most of the day getting them all ironed out straight. Most of the crew, actually all, of the crew are people that I went to high school with. I think I am the oldest. I'm also the only new guy who got hired to a WG 5 position, even some of the returning crew are still at WG 3. That means I have at least a little authority. Whoa!
Day 3: ATV training. I thought this was going to be a joke, but the course was actually pretty intense. I spent most of the day inhaling dust. We were kicking it up so thick that I couldn't see the orange cones 10 feet in front of me. When we were done I had a thick layer of dirt that started below my goggles and circled around down my face, kind of like a goatee. My lips were black. This is the life! We then took the ATV's back to the shop, ran a few errand type activities, and then started a chainsaw training lesson to finish the day.
Day 4: Since we can only work 40 hrs a week, and we are working 10's, and we were credited 10 hrs on Memorial Day, we got Thursday off. We couldn't take Friday off because that was when we were scheduled to do shotgun training. I puttered around the house, began a work project for my dad, cooked hamburger stroganoff for dinner, but was otherwise quite lazy and content.
Day 5: Shotgun training. This time I was much more relaxed, but I was a little worried after I could only see a couple holes in the target (and these were all from the wads) after my first five rounds. Well, upon closer inspection, I had four slugs that went through the required target area grouped so close they overlapped edge to edge, my fifth slug was a stray, about an inch below this group (but just outside the target area). My second round of five was exactly the same and by the time I was done, I had just one big hole in the target about the size of the mouth of a coffee mug (with two stray slugs just outside). All I needed was familiarity with a dad-gum shotgun. Then, just for fun, we did a bear charge simulation drill. We set up three targets (one at 30 yrds, one at 15, and one at 5) and then sprinted about fifty yards towards the firing line where we were handed a gun and were then required to fire three shots in five seconds, one at each target. I fumbled around trying to rack the first shot and undo the safety, but then blasted my three shots with significant time remaining. My first shot was low ( at the feet of the bear target that I posted before), the second was about 3/4 an inch off of dead center, and the third was right through the center of the left lung (and I didn't even aim for that one, I just blasted him). Anyway, good day, and redemption.
Then we finished our chainsaw "training." I felled a couple trees and then sliced them up. No big deal.
The End (of week three).
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