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Chicken processing day. I have been semi-permanently booted out of the evisceration room to the finish pluck table since we’re long-term out our usual heads and feet guy, who’s having wrist surgery and is therefore like, super not around. The young lady apprentice from Kansas has filled in for him; she’s very soft-spoken and sort of shy but once in a while will quietly say “this is when Heads-And-Feet Guy would make a slightly sexist joke about hairy legs,” and we all nod and laugh.
rambling behind cut on various topics.
The two apprentices this year, I don’t know that I’ve talked about much. Young Lady is from Kansas and has red hair and super-fly looking metallic red hearing aids; she didn’t find out she was hard-of-hearing until high school, and before that had just said “what” a lot. She’s got some sort of genetic condition where her midrange is unusually bad, so when they test for bad hearing they test the high and low ends and thus didn’t catch it. Downside: the midrange is where people talk, so she just never knew quite what was going on. She reads lips a lot and tends to wait to weigh in on a conversation until she’s got her thoughts in order, so I guess it’s sort of mis-stating things to call her “shy”.
The other one is a very young man (freshly 18) from New Jersey. He’s very self-possessed. Young Lady was admitting that she’s way behind on the news lately, so Young Man was filling her in on Charlottesville. He’s taking a semester off from the Early College kinda dealie he’s enrolled in, so that he can do this internship, and so he’ll have time to kill after the internship ends in October but before the next semester starts. He’d said he might just roadtrip around and see all his friends, and come back for turkey slaughter, but as we got discussing Charlottesville, he said he might instead seek out an antifa group to do some direct action stuff. I told him to be careful; I’m not sure what his actual heritage is but he’s arguably some shade of brown, at least in the eyes of law enforcement in this extremely segregated region, and I worry. But 18 is the age to do those things, if you’re going to. [He’s the lovely young man standing just to the side of my brother-in-law in the chicken-cutting-up video from earlier today.]
Anyway. I’m enjoying them both, they’re both very bright and happy to work hard, which is what you want in apprentices– they’re here to learn, not have their time wasted. Young Man has occasional bouts of being 18 and certain that he’s got the world figured out, but he takes correction gracefully, which is pretty key.
I finally have the yurt set up how I like it, and I’m going to be leaving on Saturday, for two whole weeks, to work at my day job, alas. Two or three? I’m not sure.
I took a second video of the chicken-cutting-up today; Instagram cuts off at a minute, so I recorded another one not in the app, and it’s 1:52 and is the whole process. B-I-L asked that if I post that, I set it to dubstep, to be like a video I sent him forever ago of drone footage of combine harvesters somewhere with enormous fields that was set to dubstep and highly amusing to us both. So now I have to figure out how to edit videos just to do that. I’m sure I can figure it out.
Anyway, if anyone wanted to see the entire process, from whole carcass to salable parts and soup carcass, I’ll have that up later when I figure it out.
I almost posted a photo of Dolores. She’s being decorative, currently; she’s spun her web across the face of my hanging lamp, and in silhouette, she looks like a Halloween decoration. She’s a very pretty spider, but more crucially, I’m to the point where I’m just more comfortable when I can see her. If i can’t see her I worry she’s somewhere I might squish her or she might bite me or something. I doubt she’d bite me but still.
B-I-L is so arachnophobic, and he’s worked hard not to pass that on to his daughter, but I actually feel like me having this “pet spider” has helped her a bit, because she’s at an age where she finds it entertaining to pretend to be scared of things but she mostly doesn’t with spiders, she brings up Dolores and says “it’s probably her, don’t be scared Daddy!” and such, which is very cute.
In other news I reread Found Cat and you guys, when did I manage to write a cute story? WTF. Does anyone else do that, reread your old shit and be like how did i come up with this or is it just me?? It’s not even a question of it being good or bad or anything, it’s just like, what kind of mind created this??? I kind of want to go back to it, I know I had a bunch more written. Maybe I will.
Chicken processing day. I have been semi-permanently booted out of the evisceration room to the finish pluck table since we’re long-term out our usual heads and feet guy, who’s having wrist surgery and is therefore like, super not around. The young lady apprentice from Kansas has filled in for him; she’s very soft-spoken and sort of shy but once in a while will quietly say “this is when Heads-And-Feet Guy would make a slightly sexist joke about hairy legs,” and we all nod and laugh.
rambling behind cut on various topics.
The two apprentices this year, I don’t know that I’ve talked about much. Young Lady is from Kansas and has red hair and super-fly looking metallic red hearing aids; she didn’t find out she was hard-of-hearing until high school, and before that had just said “what” a lot. She’s got some sort of genetic condition where her midrange is unusually bad, so when they test for bad hearing they test the high and low ends and thus didn’t catch it. Downside: the midrange is where people talk, so she just never knew quite what was going on. She reads lips a lot and tends to wait to weigh in on a conversation until she’s got her thoughts in order, so I guess it’s sort of mis-stating things to call her “shy”.
The other one is a very young man (freshly 18) from New Jersey. He’s very self-possessed. Young Lady was admitting that she’s way behind on the news lately, so Young Man was filling her in on Charlottesville. He’s taking a semester off from the Early College kinda dealie he’s enrolled in, so that he can do this internship, and so he’ll have time to kill after the internship ends in October but before the next semester starts. He’d said he might just roadtrip around and see all his friends, and come back for turkey slaughter, but as we got discussing Charlottesville, he said he might instead seek out an antifa group to do some direct action stuff. I told him to be careful; I’m not sure what his actual heritage is but he’s arguably some shade of brown, at least in the eyes of law enforcement in this extremely segregated region, and I worry. But 18 is the age to do those things, if you’re going to. [He’s the lovely young man standing just to the side of my brother-in-law in the chicken-cutting-up video from earlier today.]
Anyway. I’m enjoying them both, they’re both very bright and happy to work hard, which is what you want in apprentices– they’re here to learn, not have their time wasted. Young Man has occasional bouts of being 18 and certain that he’s got the world figured out, but he takes correction gracefully, which is pretty key.
I finally have the yurt set up how I like it, and I’m going to be leaving on Saturday, for two whole weeks, to work at my day job, alas. Two or three? I’m not sure.
I took a second video of the chicken-cutting-up today; Instagram cuts off at a minute, so I recorded another one not in the app, and it’s 1:52 and is the whole process. B-I-L asked that if I post that, I set it to dubstep, to be like a video I sent him forever ago of drone footage of combine harvesters somewhere with enormous fields that was set to dubstep and highly amusing to us both. So now I have to figure out how to edit videos just to do that. I’m sure I can figure it out.
Anyway, if anyone wanted to see the entire process, from whole carcass to salable parts and soup carcass, I’ll have that up later when I figure it out.
I almost posted a photo of Dolores. She’s being decorative, currently; she’s spun her web across the face of my hanging lamp, and in silhouette, she looks like a Halloween decoration. She’s a very pretty spider, but more crucially, I’m to the point where I’m just more comfortable when I can see her. If i can’t see her I worry she’s somewhere I might squish her or she might bite me or something. I doubt she’d bite me but still.
B-I-L is so arachnophobic, and he’s worked hard not to pass that on to his daughter, but I actually feel like me having this “pet spider” has helped her a bit, because she’s at an age where she finds it entertaining to pretend to be scared of things but she mostly doesn’t with spiders, she brings up Dolores and says “it’s probably her, don’t be scared Daddy!” and such, which is very cute.
In other news I reread Found Cat and you guys, when did I manage to write a cute story? WTF. Does anyone else do that, reread your old shit and be like how did i come up with this or is it just me?? It’s not even a question of it being good or bad or anything, it’s just like, what kind of mind created this??? I kind of want to go back to it, I know I had a bunch more written. Maybe I will.
