That's a lot of climbing!

I’ve been home from the Firefighter Stairclimb for about an hour now. I’m letting my feet rest and watching Pirates of the Caribbean. I love Johnny Depp in this movie. Later this evening I have to sell cookies at a site sale. I’m waiting for lunch to cook and I’m starving.

The Stair Climb was pretty cool again this year. I worked the registration desk again and it was interesting. This year they had made some changes which were not good. Instead of having all the individuals’ registrations in one big envelope for each district, they had them just put together in mail tubs. There was just a piece of paper between each district. Sometimes there wouldn’t have been enough space in the tubs for all the individual envelopes of a certain district, so they would be in the next tub. Only no one told us that so… It was frustrating to say the least. They had people on the registration desk and then me and another volunteer would from the desk to the tubs and grab the district. Back and forth. It was frustrating. Sometimes they wouldn’t give us the proper name for their district. Other times, some members had registered under one name, and others from the same team would be registered under a different district name. I talked to the registration desk coordinator at the end and she seemed to listen to my suggestions and comparisons about how it worked better last year.

After I was done at registration, I went outside and watched some of the firefighters head inside. They do the climb in full gear, which weighs 60 lbs. They climb 69 flights of stairs, which is 1311 steps. The BOA tower is 788 vertical feet – the 2nd largest tower west of the Mississippi. Last year the quickest time was 11 minutes 30 seconds. This year there were teams from as far away as Aukland (New Zealand), Arizona, Montana. In the atrium, there were different booths and vendors set up to appeal to the Fire Fighters. One of the most popular booths was one that had all sorts of customized helmets. It kind of made me laugh, all the guys crowded around the table with the toys. Outside, I was fascinated to see some of the different uniforms. The fire fighters from the Port of Seattle wore these incredibly shiny silver uniforms. There may be some reason for this, but I don’t know what it is. There were a lot of women too and that was kind of cool. While I was watching a young, kind of tiny, woman was waiting in line. She kind of looked like Marla Sokoloff (from the Practice). I hope she did well.