FDIC Recharge

If, like me, you are a regular visitor to the FE Community, you will have noticed a sparsity of postings over the past few weeks, my own blog included.  I suspect that the explanation for my slacking is shared by many other regular contributors, and that is the vast amount of ideas and information we are sorting through since returning from FDIC International 2017 in Indianapolis.  While I spent a lot of effort on my own presentation, adding updates right up until my assigned time on the last morning of the show, and received feedback that will fuel blogs for months to come, it was what I learned from other instructors and from interactions with fellow attendees that had the greatest impact.  As usual, those opportunities were not limited to the classrooms.  For instance, I found myself seated on the flight into Indy next to a fire service innovator whom I had never met, but whose material I frequently cite, then encountered him and exchanged ideas another 3 or 4 times through the week - amongst the over 33,000 other attendees.  Even after the conference had officially ended for me, as I waited for a connecting flight home, I ran into a fellow fire service heretic and we shared our thoughts on saving ourselves from ourselves over a sausage sandwich.  Throughout the week, I found my own understanding of many concepts challenged and tested, causing me to dig deeper to reinforce or revise my arguments and perspectives.  

They say you don't know what you don't know.  What they don't tell you is that, once you know what you don't know, it takes a lot of time and effort to fill in the gaps.  Anyway, that's my excuse.