Mary Ellen Shea's Page

My village hosts an annual Memorial Day parade.....and we've been blessed with great turnout and even better weather for the past few years. Our village is small (our coverage area is one square mile) but they are very pro-Fire Department. That might seem like a small statement....but for those of you who do not have the support of your community.....that support is huge. Our coverage area families completely buy into the services that we provide.....they attend our pancake/spaghetti/ carwash/ba… Continue

I'm a masochist.

There, I said it. A friend of mine (you may have seen him wandering around here --he has a Big White Hat) says that the first step in recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

I do have a problem. I have a problem with little kids dying from an incurable blood cancer.
So...in the spirit of putting my money where my big fat mouth is...

Once again, I'm going to run the Lake Placid Half Marathon for the Upstate NY/VT Chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in June, 200… Continue

It's that time of year.....

We had our multi-company OSHA eight-hour refresher training on Saturday. I can think of roughly ten millionnnnnnnn things I would rather be doing ( and cleaning out my sock drawer ranks right up there) instead of sitting through another eight hour session of “gotta do it, so shut up and suck it up” OSHA info. This has only been my second OSHA refresher, so I can't speak to how boring they normally are, but if last year's day-long exercise in water-board torture was a… Continue

Finally, a new drill in a sea of same-old, same-old. When our training officer isn’t feeling “inspired”, our drills tend to run to…take the trucks out, tap a couple of hydrants, do the inspections, run the equipment, wash the rigs and call it a night.

There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, it’s just that when you’ve done that three or four drills in a row, you’d almost rather have a cleaning drill (and I always end up doing the bathrooms on those nights…ewwww….shudder…..can some… Continue

Another “brisk” morning run…it was 22 degrees at 7 a.m., but factor in the gusty winds and “Lake Effect Snow” (what lake would that be in Albany, exactly.. ? )it made heading out kind of sucky, for lack of a better word.

We always start out enthusiastically, all chatty and chipper, feeling like we could run forever, until that first blast of icy wind smacks you right in the grill and suddenly the fun factor drops. That’s when you have to dig down and remember why you’re doing this in the first… Continue