Greetings from Orlando!  My buddy Shea and I decided that we needed a reward for finishing school.  Our choice was to get down to Florida from some fun in the sun.  We are spending a  couple of days in Orlando before heading to Miami for the rest of the week.  One of the best parts about this trip is that we are flying home to Toronto on a private jet.  Yeah, that’s how we roll.  We decided to get down here by a regular flight out of Pearson in Toronto.  Our flight was at 6:30am so we decided to show up at 3:30am because of all the security measures going on these days.  This meant that we didn’t sleep at all!  Shea was able to get through the security with no scrutiny at all.  I wasn’t so lucky.  My carry on was searched and everything was swabbed and analyzed.  They also made me reach my hand down my pants and then swab fingers.  Being a smart-ass, I asked if I was…ummm…you know…supposed to touch it.  He said that wasn’t necessary and seemed to relax a little bit after that.  Humor can get you out of anything!  Not sleeping at all meant that I was able to sleep on the plane.  As soon as we got into the sky I was out cold.  I woke up as the pilot announced we would soon make our descent into Orlando.  There was still enough time to select an episode of Two and a Half Men on the entertainment system.  I like having my own screen and the ability to select whatever movie or TV show I want.  Definitely an improvement.  After arriving in Orlando we met up with my bro who lives here and immediately had some beers and some food at Bahama Breeze.  We hung out back at his place in the evening and things went a little down hill for me.  We all went down for some naps and I woke up feeling horrible.  My stomach was bothering me and I just didn’t feel right.  I had a shower and then everything decided to come out or me.  I threw up like there was no tomorrow.  Weird because I didn’t even drink that much.  Luckily we had already planned to lay low on this evening.  I rested up and now am back to 100% awesome!  Today we are headed to do some shopping and hit up Disney.  We are going to do some drinking around the world at Epcot.  Hopefully I will be able to post some pics tomorrow.  After that I may not be posting very much.  I didn’t bring my computer with me.  I will try to get you a couple mid week posts though.  Later!

There are many perks to taking the pre-service firefighter training program.  How many people get to spend two days tearing cars apart with over powered hydraulic tools?  Well, that’s what I was up to this past Thursday and Saturday.  It was an awesome time!  We were at the GTAA fire training location at Pearson airport in Toronto.  This is a top notch training facility that has just about everything you could need.  While we were working on the far end of the lot we got to watch these massive airport fire trucks go through training exercises.  They have top mounted water cannons and they start drenching things before the truck stops moving.  We also got to do some international relations training.  The airport firefighters from Athens, Greece were in Toronto for training and during one of our breaks we got into a shirt swap with them.  So, I gave up a Seneca Fire shirt and got back a shirt from Greece!  The tools we used during training were a lot of fun, although they were pretty damn heavy.  You could literally cut through the metal on a car as if it was paper.  It was very therapeutic.  Here are some shots.

*One of my buddies using the hydraulic spreaders

*Another guy using the cutters

*We created a convertible

*We did it again…except this car was on it’s side

*This was my handy work with an air chisel.  The door was unlocked, but I figured it was more fun to open it this way.

*This is one of the massive airport fire trucks.

*Here it is in action

*Here is my Greek fire shirt