I can sing the Mickey Mouse song. Both of them actually. The one that is currently on Disney channel and the one where you spell out his name from when I was little. That being said I have never been a huge Mickey Mouse fan. You know like the people who send their Christmas cards with a family picture from Disney world every year. Or the people who have Mickey Mouse on every piece of clothing that they own. I guess I always just had cartoons that I liked better. I am also a tom boy. I know, shocker right? I would so much rather wear jeans than dresses or skirts and really don't care if my hair is perfect or if I get dirty. I guess thats a good thing since I'm on a fire department. :) And I do occasionally wear skirts, like on Christmas and Easter. Anyhow I have always been the kind of girl who liked frogs, turtles, and even snakes. I have always told C that I am fine with any pet as long as it doesn't require live crickets for food or is a tarantula. (I despise crickets, not sure why.) Ok so all of that back story to tell you this one. A couple weeks ago I got a new nickname at the fire station. I acted like a girl and will not live it down for awhile. We were getting ready for our weekly training in which we were going to spend the night cutting up cars and blowing off air bags. Fun huh? Nothing like making a van into a convertible. In order to do this we wear all of our gear including goggles because of flying glass and metal. Anyhow we all went out to put on our gear around 7. Now our lockers are along the wall just like in high school. They are about the same size but don't have doors on them. So we are all standing there taking off our shoes and talking when we smell this really funky smell. The guy next to me blames it on his feet. We had had a fire earlier in the day and that always makes your feet funky, especially if you put them right back into leather shoes. Which he had done. So we all told him he stunk and kept getting ready. I was feeling kinda icky that day and so thought I might end up cutting drill short if it was going to be a late night. (It was the guys got done about 11 pm) Anyhow about 9 I went back over to the station to pee and I remember thinking that my bunker pants smelled musty or something and that I should throw them in the washer after drill. I spent the next couple minutes trying to figure out when they would have gotten wet and I had not dried them properly. I then went back to drill. Around 10 I decided that I was done and needed to go to bed due to having to be up at 6 the next day. Anyhow I walked back over to the station and started taking off my gear. Thankfully only a handful of the guys were over there. So I took off my helmet, eye wear, hood, helmet and coat and hung them up. Then I took off my bunker pants. Now the next part is a little fuzzy because it happened so fast. I pulled my leg out of my boot and then the other one. Upon pulling my other leg out a mouse landed on the floor. A dead mouse. I'm not sure where he was other than somewhere in my bunker pants. I know he wasn't in my boot I would have felt that. Anyhow, apparently I shrieked and danced around the station saying things like "Ewww, gross" and "Ick". My bunker pants went directly into the washer and I found my back up scrubs in my locker to put on. I also simple greened my jeans and calves. It's an anti bacterial right?? Then it hits me. I bought new leather boots last year at fire school. Our rubber boots that you get when you get on are similar to muck boots or rain boots. You can just power wash them out. My previous pair had been power washed at least 4 times. Leather boots are different. They are way more comfy but more expensive and have some strange things in order to care for them. I know from my Haz-mat training that I can not expose them to certain chemicals or they will not protect me during a fire. SOOOO how am I going to clean them? I decided that I should go ask the chief before I ruin a $300+ pair of boots. Now apparently even with jaws, saws, and spreaders running if you come out in scrubs and pull the chief aside everyones ears work great. So I casually ask the chief how I would disinfect my boots if I had to. He gives me a strange look and asks why. I then tell him what happened. At this point half of the dept. is listening and keeps asking if I'm crying. I wasn't but if they kept asking I would have started. I was having an emotional day to start with. I get sent back over to look for spray lysol to take to my boots. After an extensive dept. wide search there is none in the station. At this point I went home to shower with anti bacterial soap for a LONG time. Needless to say there is now 4 Sam's size cans of lysol in the station and one in my locker. My bunker pants came out ok after 2 washes and my boots still smell. They have been lysoled so many times that they wont have germs for years! Friday morning the assistant chief greeted me with "Hi Minnie Mouse". I now have a new nick name. It has taken me a couple weeks but now I can laugh about it and share. It was traumatic though. And I'm pretty sure that I won't even get asked this year before banquet what my most memorable fire dept. memory is. Although now I have two, and the other is just as traumatic. :) Like I told my assistant chief, you put a girl on the dept. and sometime we will act like it.
