Entry# 7 Summer 2018

Not Enough Time!

Photo: Cody Milne

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Although the summer did not offer any breaks, it just meant I had to push harder to get half as much done. Within the first week of the summer I registered the name of the business and  locked down a logo. From then on, I really only had the three days off between fourteen day fireline tours to get anything done. During these short periods of time I was able to set up a basic business framework, take some Udemy online film making courses for colour correcting and work flow management, as well as sourced and negotiated coffee equipment purchases. Now I know this is a short list of seemingly simple tasks, but when you are working crazy hours for days, weeks, months even the simplest tasks easily turn into blankly staring at the wall for hours.

Photo: Mary Schidlowsky

Well I was wrong, Wildfire season 2018 takes the cake for worst on record in British Columbia. Starting almost immediately in May and carrying all the way through into October, myself and pretty much every other Wildfire fighter in the BCWS did back to back tours throughout the Province. In a regular Wildfire season, we usually have a slow May and June, ramp up at the end of July, a busy August and a quick end by the first week of September. A regular season would allow me amble time to learn everything I could want about video editing work flow, plan and draw dozens of versions of the bus layout and how it would operate, as well as build a stellar business plan. Instead. I barely had enough time to smear together a  half-baked version of each of these things at the great expense of fatigue management.

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Near the end of the summer as things started to slow down  I was able to put together the website, which took much longer than it appears it should have. In addition I began to plan out the process of how the build would flow throughout my extremely short two month construction period. In doing this I obviously thought out all the steps that are needed in the construction, but also, what could go wrong at each one of those steps, and how long fixing them should take. Now a normal person would have looked at that and backed off their opening day timeline, but not this guy. Anyone can build anything on a long enough timeline, but trying to get everything done all at once only a few can do...which I would be outside of that group.