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I am back home and Chita has decided my lap is a suitable port in a storm. (Normally, she won’t bother with my lap, only Dude’s, but he was napping on the couch so his lap wasn’t available.)
I took the picture with my laptop’s webcam though so she was not amused by me waving a literal computer at her, hence the stinky-face.
My right shoulder is fucked up from repetitive motion; turkeys are fucking heavy and you really have to go at them pretty violently with the delunging wand. Mostly I had to pry out kidneys and what I eventually realized was their reproductive system– it’s adhered really tenaciously to the spine, and is either a pair of tiny kidney-bean-sized white things that are testicles, or a little clump of tiny white spheres that are eggs in their earliest stage, all wrapped up in connective tissue and sort of.. I dunno, ducts or things. It took for-goddamn ever to get out, was always left behind by the eviscerators, and hurt my hands something fierce.
I mean, they call it delunging for a reason; I had to pry out a lot of left-over scraps of lungs too. They cling on pretty tenaciously to the ribs. But it wasn’t until toward the end of the day that I started having issues with there being a lot of lungs left. Every third bird or so, I had to switch hands; I was absently holding the birds with my left and going in with my right, using the wand and then my hand, and I kept having there be a big chunk of the right lung left that I couldn’t get my fingers under unless i went in with my left hand. I said, “I think one of the right-handed eviscerators is getting lazy.” There were three eviscerators: Jen is left-handed, and was using her right hand to go in, leaving her left to handle the knife and manipulate the bird. Aaron is right-handed, but uses his left hand to go into the bird because that hand is marginally smaller, he thinks maybe, or for some reason anyway it lets him get the gizzard out in one pull on chickens, where his right he can’t get all his fingers in. (On turkeys that doesn’t matter, but those of us who work with poultry a lot generally handle a lot more chickens than turkeys.)
That leaves Annie, my sister, who cheerfully answered, “Well, I’m being lazy because I want to give you something to do.”
Which explains why it was the right lung, and every third bird, because she’s right-handed and pulls with her right hand.
Anyway, it was amusing that she was doing it deliberately.
Turns out turkeys are really sharp on the inside. Never thought about it, but this is true of chickens too— their ribs really stick out a lot on the inside, as do vertebrae; there’s no padding once you pry out the viscera, of course. I beat the shit out of my hands. Turkeys are just so much bigger than chickens, so much harder to handle.
Anyway. The income from the turkeys is basically what sustains my sister’s little family through until vegetables start being harvested again, so— important work.
I am back home and Chita has decided my lap is a suitable port in a storm. (Normally, she won’t bother with my lap, only Dude’s, but he was napping on the couch so his lap wasn’t available.)
I took the picture with my laptop’s webcam though so she was not amused by me waving a literal computer at her, hence the stinky-face.
My right shoulder is fucked up from repetitive motion; turkeys are fucking heavy and you really have to go at them pretty violently with the delunging wand. Mostly I had to pry out kidneys and what I eventually realized was their reproductive system– it’s adhered really tenaciously to the spine, and is either a pair of tiny kidney-bean-sized white things that are testicles, or a little clump of tiny white spheres that are eggs in their earliest stage, all wrapped up in connective tissue and sort of.. I dunno, ducts or things. It took for-goddamn ever to get out, was always left behind by the eviscerators, and hurt my hands something fierce.
I mean, they call it delunging for a reason; I had to pry out a lot of left-over scraps of lungs too. They cling on pretty tenaciously to the ribs. But it wasn’t until toward the end of the day that I started having issues with there being a lot of lungs left. Every third bird or so, I had to switch hands; I was absently holding the birds with my left and going in with my right, using the wand and then my hand, and I kept having there be a big chunk of the right lung left that I couldn’t get my fingers under unless i went in with my left hand. I said, “I think one of the right-handed eviscerators is getting lazy.” There were three eviscerators: Jen is left-handed, and was using her right hand to go in, leaving her left to handle the knife and manipulate the bird. Aaron is right-handed, but uses his left hand to go into the bird because that hand is marginally smaller, he thinks maybe, or for some reason anyway it lets him get the gizzard out in one pull on chickens, where his right he can’t get all his fingers in. (On turkeys that doesn’t matter, but those of us who work with poultry a lot generally handle a lot more chickens than turkeys.)
That leaves Annie, my sister, who cheerfully answered, “Well, I’m being lazy because I want to give you something to do.”
Which explains why it was the right lung, and every third bird, because she’s right-handed and pulls with her right hand.
Anyway, it was amusing that she was doing it deliberately.
Turns out turkeys are really sharp on the inside. Never thought about it, but this is true of chickens too— their ribs really stick out a lot on the inside, as do vertebrae; there’s no padding once you pry out the viscera, of course. I beat the shit out of my hands. Turkeys are just so much bigger than chickens, so much harder to handle.
Anyway. The income from the turkeys is basically what sustains my sister’s little family through until vegetables start being harvested again, so— important work.
