The Official Ablaze! Firefighter Gets His Uniform

Last week I posted a photo of myself somewhere (but not here) and immediately heard from two fine individuals who wanted to know where my fireman’s suit was. Huh? The picture I put up was of me at a family reunion of sorts last summer. I was just sitting out on a patio in a t-shirt and shorts, which by the way, is my normal attire away from work and church even if it just so happens to be thirty degrees out. Anyways…

“Frank, where’s your fireman’s outfit?” and “Where’s the suit and hose to put out all those fires Frank?” were two question that were thrown at me. Ha! These guys get the joke! Gosh I love folks with my skewed sense of humor!

I know they were joking around but what if they weren’t? I guess these might be valid or fair questions since I was dubbed the Official Ablaze! Firefighter(TM) some time ago. I’ve had more than my fair share of fun with that idea to be sure and after some consideration, the questions got me a thinkin’. What to do, what to do? Uh oh, there I go thinking again.

But here’s my problem, I’m not a fireman, I’m a metrologist. That means there is no way I would even have access to the gear necessary to even pretend that I was a fireman. So when I decided entertain the idea that I should post a picture of myself as the Official Ablaze! Firefighter(TM), I turned to the best tool at my disposal, Gimp, a Photoshop type program that is absolutely free. I was able to cut and paste myself and the blog’s logo into a pretty convincing picture in just under three hours. Not the quickest job, but it got done. That was last week.

Yesterday morning, someone who I’ll only identify as CB, delivered a real, regulation firefighter’s suit; coat, pants, gloves, the works, to the Official Ablaze! Firefighter(TM). The suit was taken out of service on a schedule and was just sitting in a closet. CB thought I might enjoy being able to take a real picture in a real suit instead of altering an existing one’s pixels.

Yeah, I’m gonna have fun with this as soon as I deal with next weeks unpleasantries. Thank you CB, you made my day and cheered me up a little.