Welp. At 2:30 it started raining, so I woke up a little to make sure I had the various bits of my...

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Welp. At 2:30 it started raining, so I woke up a little to make sure I had the various bits of my yurt roof in position to deal with it. No big, didn’t get out of bed, it was fine, then I could pet the cat. (I am in the midst of a lovely Whiskey visitation, but she’s so unused to snuggling nowadays that she gets really excited if you pet her and then has to chase your hands around for twenty minutes.) 

Then my phone went crazy and it was a flash flood warning alert, which is nice and all but i scouted this location for that, there were two hundred-year floods since I picked this location and i know it was untouched in both. So even if there is a flash flood, it won’t touch me here. I’m on a hill right above a creek. This spot didn’t even get flooded in Hurricane Irene. 

Then there was indeed a thunderstorm, and I can see that there’s a puddle creeping across my entire floor, which is just ducky. Fortunately I am an old hand; there is nothing touching the floor except for a cardboard box I don’t really care about. Everything is either up on shelves, made of impermeable material, or suspended from the walls or ceiling. Even the bed is up on little stilts and I have conscientiously ensured that no bedding touches the floor. 

Everything is damp, though, from the air. That’s just how it is. 

I tried to level the platform as we were putting it down, but we should have elevated the center of the platform and just– didn’t. So, I’m going to be dealing with this kind of water problem; the platform is larger than the yurt and so rain is going to hit it, and it’s going to flow downhill, and that’s that. I put a tarp against the wall to keep water coming in the way it did before, and it wound up just making things worse. Oh well. 

copperbadge: 161infocafe: /// THE PENGUIN HAS A BASEBALL BAT...

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copperbadge:

161infocafe:

///

THE PENGUIN HAS A BASEBALL BAT YES

"You look at trees and called them

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“You look at trees and called them “trees,” and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a “star,” and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, “tree,” “star,” were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of “trees” and “stars” saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien
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So having been awake since 2:30 am and topping out, my health app on my smartwatch tells me, at 1...

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So having been awake since 2:30 am and topping out, my health app on my smartwatch tells me, at 1 hour 56 minutes of deep sleep for the night, was not a good start to a chicken processing day. I made it through processing all right but started to fall apart at lunch and by the time we finished packaging I was seeing stars and incoherent, despite four cups of coffee. Also one of my back muscles went into spasm so that was phenomenally helpful. (whining and some really pretty gross ruminations on evisceration etcetera below the cut)

On packaging, the others do everything up to shrinkwrapping, and then dump the shrink-wrapped chickens on a too-small table and then I have to #1 cut off the excess tail from the bag, #2 dry the wet bag off, so that #3 the sticker adheres to it (and the sticker has to be placed pretty precisely), and then #4 write the batch number on the label (usually a symbol– last time, a five-pointed star, this time a series of three dots), and then #5 stick the chicken on the scale (and if it’s wet, it’ll slide, so I have to dry it off again sometimes) and get the weight, then write it in the tiny spot on the label where it fits, and then #6 put the chicken into a bin on the back of the truck just outside the door, and then every ten chickens I have to #7 then move the bin and get a new bin, and each chicken is around five pounds and there are ten in a bin so it’s kind of hard to move. And it stresses me out because they come ten at a time and you can’t fit ten onto the table securely, but you have to pick up and put down four different tools– the towel, the scissors, the towel again, the label, and the Sharpie– so there’s no way to multitask and hurry through it and finish the first ones before the last ones are done being shrink-wrapped. (My sister brings them out two at a time but it only takes her a matter of seconds to dunk them and go back for more; I can’t possibly do the first five steps so that I can get the first couple of chickens off the table in that amount of time). So anyway. I hate chicken packaging, but that’s just a thing that has to happen. 

Then once all seven or eight bins are full, we have to take the truck over to another room and load the chickens into a fridge, sorting them approximately by weight, and that was when my back went into spasm and I started thinking about just lying down on the floor and crying because I am a giant fucking baby. 

Anyway. I have been very slightly revived by a shower but I am possibly going to die, or throw up, or both. 

Oh, also, I forgot to cut my nails– I cut them last week, so they were too long today. So after about 30 chickens, I broke a nail, in the gross way they break when they’re wet and too soft– just tore off all the loose bits, but at least it came off clean. I then proceeded, about ten chickens later, to stab the fuck out of one of my fingers, but it was a relatively minor cut, it just meant i had to go put a nitrile glove on so I wouldn’t get my own blood on the carcass that someone was meant to be eating. The fact that this would keep my body from absorbing quite so much chicken juice was just a side bonus.

So far every processing day, we eviscerators have come up with something truly disturbing in conversation, but today we fell down on the job a little. (I think I’ve discussed this before. One time we were trying to figure out how to do bobbing for chickens– i.e. the raw freshly-processed carcasses we throw into the ice tank– like bobbing for apples.) The only disturbing comment was when my sister asked if it would make the same disgusting squelching sound when you pulled a human’s guts out, and we decided, no, not exactly, because you wouldn’t gut a human through the pelvic girdle, you’d cut the belly open. Plus we have a different structure entirely inside, with a diaphragm separating our lungs (birds have a weird system and their lungs seem to be driven by their ribs somehow? they also have a circular inhale-exhale structure, so that they are always doing both? I don’t understand it but I know their lungs are a bitch to remove). So, we debated it a bit, and decided no, a human evisceration would have a whole other set of absolutely disgusting sounds. 

And then one of the farmhands shrieked and dropped her chicken and jumped backwards because she’d felt something weird in there, and sure enough, the thing had a truly bizarre growth internally, looked and felt a bit like raw penne pasta, a pair of weird thick tubes that connected to nothing and resembled, perhaps, some sort of foreign body that the chicken’s immune system had attempted to encase to protect its innards from it. (My sister, disgustingly, theorized that it was the chicken’s unborn fetal twin that it had absorbed.) It was unsettling and disgusting and we all stopped work to poke it and go “EEEEWWWWW”. The best part, though, was probably the woman shrieking, because none of us had ever heard her shriek like a little girl before; she’s pretty tough. (And then Aaron, that jerk, said, “Looks a bit like macaroni and cheese– we’re not having pasta for lunch, are we?” Fortunately, we weren’t.)

We all also separately observed that every time you do this, no matter how many times you’ve done it, there’s always a moment where you’re wrist-deep in a carcass and you look down and you’re feeling organs with your fingers (intestines are just– ugh the grossest, and maybe the grossest part is the weird transparent membrane they’re suspended in, laced with tiny red blood vessels in organic little patterns, very unsettling) and you think, for just a moment, “this is absolutely the most disgusting thing ever”, but then you move on because you’ve done this a million times and you have like fifty more chickens to get through today. 

original post on instagram hereThat screen door is right next to...

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original post on instagram here

That screen door is right next to the evisceration room. We were hearing a repetitive peeping sound, and finally we realized there was a baby turkey standing right in the doorway. One of the farmhands said it couldn’t possibly be one of the tame ones, but I said aren’t the wild ones really shy though? and someone else said aren’t the wild ones mostly bigger by now? and we debated it, and we eventually decided that surely it had to be a lost baby wild turkey. Perhaps it was ill, or injured, or, we weren’t really sure, but it was standing in the doorway peeping forlornly at us. Aaron confessed he had been clicking at the baby wild turkeys– the weird slow click call is what the mother turkeys use to call their babies, and sometimes you can fool them.

 If we were doing anything but chicken processing we would have stopped immediately to look at it, and go look at the turkeys in their pen and compare it, but when the chicken train’s a-rolling, you really can’t mess around. (My sister did go and offer it a piece of coffee cake, as it seemed to be rather cold and miserable in the rain. It was up in the doorway to get out of the rain and because it was so much warmer in the barn– there was a big burner going under the scalding tank, so it was quite hot in the barn at that point. But the turkey declined the coffee cake, and also didn’t run away.)

But after a little while, my brother-in-law came to look (he was on the other side of the building, and he instantly said, “That’s one of ours,” and picked it up and went and put it back into the pen. 

Sure enough, there’s a hole in the screen, so there’s my task for tomorrow.