the barrage

This one goes with my October column in Canadian Fire and EMS Quarterly. Click on the picture for a bigger view.

pretend cartoonist

This blog was originally intended to be a place to show my photos, but it ended up being too cumbersome for my computer-challenged mind. You can see photos of mine and others by going to http://www.flickr.com/photos/beebewitz .

Along with freelance writing, I like to pretend I'm a freelance cartoonist. I actually persuaded Firefighting in Canada to post some of these sketches with my articles in their Web Exclusive section. I will post them here as I have time, along with links to the articles that they accompanied (or were supposed to accompany).

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I drew this one as a kind of therapy to get myself out of the dumps after a particularly long, cold, and depressing fire. You can read a little bit about it here.

The article that accompanied this drawing talks about responding to a call in no-man's land . . . with the underlying implication that if something happened at home while we were away, there would be no Mutual Aid reasonably close enough to help.

Volunteer firefighters take criticism - sometimes justified, sometimes not - about not being qualified. I wrote an article about this dilemma, and the fact that we have to do the job to the best of our ability, and try not to overstep our qualifications. Then I drew this cartoon to make fun of the situations we get ourselves into.

Recruitment is a perennial problem in Upsala. We never have enough people, a problem that is compounded by our lack of near neighbours to help out. Click here for my article on the topic.

History in pictures

Here's 20 years of Upsala Fire Department history in four minutes.

The Bureaucrat

Here's my latest attempt at cartoonery. I drew it to complement my January article for Fire and EMS Quarterly. I think it is fairly self explanatory . . .