When it Rains...

Out here in the Middle Of Nowhere (TM), we never know what we're going to get.

During an unusual storm, we can easily get a couple of dozen calls in a couple of days, starting to rival the typical call volume of a more urban department.

On the other hand, we've gone a couple of weeks without a call.
When that happens, I start to get nervous.
We all do, but no one will say anything about it. To do so would be to accept the responsibility of being the one who "jinxed" the call.

So I start looking up things we haven't seen for a while, and double checking to make sure my preparations are in place. I'll start staying up later, since I'll be getting a good night's sleep, and I might even procrastinate some things.

I learned early on that procrastination is a bad idea. As soon as you do that, you'll get a call at the last minute, and whatever it was that you've been putting off will end up rushed or simply not done.  Most things, it doesn't matter all that much.  But some things matter.

We had a slow November. One of the slowest months in a long time.  Granted one of the few calls was a fully involved structure fire, which is rare enough around here.  But all month, we only had two EMS calls. That's unheard of.

December rolled around, and still, things were fairly slow.
Nothing at all the first two weeks.
Then a couple of calls here and there, but nothing major, and all during the day.
Starting to get nervous.

I've been making a lot of Christmas presents this year. Money is short, and I like making things, so much of my plans for gifts have been time-intensive homemade things.  It has been a challenge to make things for my kids when they are here most of the time. I don't really have some place to hide away to work on things, so some of the tasks kept getting put off, hoping there would come a day, or days, when they'd have other things to do.

So here we are Christmas Eve.
Several gifts are not finished.
They finally had plans to spend some time with their father, who is in town for a few days.

So what happens?

It's so obvious, I probably don't even need to say.

Four calls in the past twenty-four hours, so far.
Naturally.

So I had better get off the computer and get back to work!