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The Napanee firefighters were on their way home from the western Ontario regional Scott FireFit competition in Windsor, Ont., a wonderful event through which competitors bond and excel.

The FireFit finals are this weekend in Brampton, Ont., with some of the usual suspects ranked in the top 20 including Graham MacKenzie (No. 1, Kamloops), Dwayne Drover (No. 10, Waterloo), Jamie Richford (No. 11, Moncton), Joe Triff (No. 14, Halifax) and Sean Henderson (No. 16, Oakville).

Moncton, Kamloops, Halifax and Delta are on top in the team events and Danielle Comolli (Toronto) and Jacqueline Rasenberg (North York) top the women’s standings.

You see all the standings at the Firefit link above. If you live near Brampton go out this weekend and cheer on these incredible athletes! (And if you do, please send me pictures so we can post them on our website!)

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The Canadian Association of  Fire Chiefs presents fire chief of the year awards annually to a career chief and a volunteer chief. Generally the names of the recipients remain hush hush until the end of the CAFC’s annual conference in September – this year Sept. 19-22 in Saint John, N.B. – and everyone’s pretty good about keeping things under wraps.

Everyone except the entire province of P.E.I., it seems. A press release from P.E.I. MP Doug Currie came across the wires last week congratulating Chief Miles Boulter, who began as a volunteer firefighter with the O’Leary Fire Department in 1972 and is the now the well-respected (volunteer) chief instructor with the Prince Edward Island Firefighters Association.

Then, on Saturday, the Charlottetown Guardian published a lovely story about Boulter, which you can read here.

We respected the CAFC’s wishes after the MP’s press release crossed the wires, figuring not many people would see it, but the Guardian story is mainstream, there are lots of nice comments underneath it about Boulter and well, we didn’t want to seem out of the loop, so we posted it too.

Congrats, Chief Boulter! Now, if anyone knows who the career chief of the year is, please, shhhhh!

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Is is just me, or are these “sick day” stories confusing. Today’s story says firefighters in Calgary are taking almost double the number of sick days as they were five years ago. But really they’re not, apparently, rather it’s all because of a new reporting system.

In London, Ont., absenteeism also appears to be an issue. According to a London Free Press story, firefighters there have booked twice as much sick time so far this year as workers in several other city departments. But as Jim Holmes, head of the London Professional Fire Fighters Association, notes, London firefighters work 24-hour shifts so one sick day for them looks worse than it is.

Honestly, I’m not good with numbers – most journalists aren’t and maybe that explains why neither of these stories makes any sense! - but this all seems like creative accounting to me.

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And, speaking of journalists, Fire Fighting in Canada is published by Annex Publishing & Printing, which publishes several trade magazines about everything from pizza to massage therapy to gardening, poultry, manure (no kidding – click here) and several forestry magazines, including Canadian Biomass. So, when a story landed on my BlackBerry last night about nine fire departments in Nova Scotia being called to battle a huge fire of burning wood pellets, I naturally forwarded it to our forestry editors. Who e-mailed first thing this morning with this not-so-subtle message:

Don't know if you've posted this on fire websites, but I'm pretty  sure it's actually a wood pallet fire (not pellet).

OK, I found it funny.

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