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post slaughter day check in
Oct. 30th, 2019 11:03 amvia https://ift.tt/36inpEb
thebyrchentwigges replied to your post “quick check-in”
may I recommend that, if possible, you take tomorrow off? you’ve had a big trauma and you’re injured. you need time to heal, and there’s lots of ways to slip up processing a slaughter. and rubber gloves + hard work + blisters = recipe for PAIN. please look after yourself!
Ah, we were already short three people for slaughter day. I wore dishwashing gloves for the whole setup, and then switched to disposable gloves once we were in it. Since we were missing three people, two of whom normally worked in the kill room, and I knew gloves would make me a very slow and poor eviscerator, I moved over to the kill room and for a while I was the only person doing the work of all three missing people. But it meant my hands weren’t getting wet. Heads and feet removal was fine; I’ve been too squeamish to do it in the past but in the face of necessity I realized it’s not that hard to do. But cutting out the preening gland was nearly impossible to do in gloves. I still kept getting stuck doing it.
Since with my absence we were short two eviscerators, the line backed up there enough that it didn’t matter that I was very slow on that table trying to work for three. Finally our backup eviscerator showed up, and they were able to catch up and send me someone to help with heads and feet. So we still finished processing by a little after 11am. And in the afternoon, packaging doesn’t necessarily involve getting one’s hands wet– my job is mostly dry, I put the labels on– so I was able to do my normal duties.
Very excitingly, we delayed our packaging to go and help a visiting work crew (paid for by a state grant!) put the plastic onto the brand-new enormous 40x100 foot greenhouse. The work crew were Old Order Mennonites, which was so interesting, I didn’t know there were any around! They spoke strangely-accented English, and I was wondering at it until I heard them talking to one another in what has to be a dialect of German. So very interesting, and they were very efficient workers– but it was breezy, and handling greenhouse plastic in a breeze is something so dangerous to do with too few people, so we took our whole work crew to act as human sandbags, and got it all done in an hour. And then we were still done with packaging by 3:15! Not too shabby.
So– I mean, I can’t really ever take slaughter day off, it’s always such a Thing, but. Sister was very solicitous about not making me wash anything, so my hands wouldn’t get messed-up.
I am mostly not feeling traumatized, just a little sad, though I haven’t tried to start a fire in a woodstove since then so we’ll see how I feel about that then. I still sort of can’t believe my hair didn’t get singed. Finally I got all the smoke smell out of my hair and my skin, at least.
I’ve discovered when you say the phrase “tiny house” people lose their goddamn minds. The current tentative plan is to maybe construct a multi-purpose small building in the slope next to where the yurt was, and have part of it act as a sugar shack during maple season, and then part of it be my little guest apartment, and there are numerous people already clamoring to help, including an actual licensed architect. So. I would feel a great deal less awkward if it wasn’t just for me, if it was something broader than that– it was already a small agony for me twice a year to have to ask people to help me set up and tear down, so anything where it’s not about me is a huge bonus. I want a space i can use and I don’t want to be trouble, that’s basically the long and short of it, but if it was an adorable tiny house I’d be delighted.
Farmkid keeps pointing out that whatever the space is, there needs to be a guest bed for her so she can have sleepovers. Which is hilarious, because she lives here, and there’s also already a camper, and a treehouse under construction for her to do exactly that if she wants, but listen she is an angel who deserves every joy and of course I will make a space for her to sleep over if she wants.
Anyhow. I gotta go, hopefully the power adapter Dude mailed me for this computer will get here today but at the moment I am scraping the battery down to the bottom to post this, so.
In parting, a photo of greenhouse plastic application featuring B-I-L and Veg Manager:
(they’re up pretty far off the ground! it’s a tall greenhouse! VM is SO excited, it’s so much space!)
thebyrchentwigges replied to your post “quick check-in”
may I recommend that, if possible, you take tomorrow off? you’ve had a big trauma and you’re injured. you need time to heal, and there’s lots of ways to slip up processing a slaughter. and rubber gloves + hard work + blisters = recipe for PAIN. please look after yourself!
Ah, we were already short three people for slaughter day. I wore dishwashing gloves for the whole setup, and then switched to disposable gloves once we were in it. Since we were missing three people, two of whom normally worked in the kill room, and I knew gloves would make me a very slow and poor eviscerator, I moved over to the kill room and for a while I was the only person doing the work of all three missing people. But it meant my hands weren’t getting wet. Heads and feet removal was fine; I’ve been too squeamish to do it in the past but in the face of necessity I realized it’s not that hard to do. But cutting out the preening gland was nearly impossible to do in gloves. I still kept getting stuck doing it.
Since with my absence we were short two eviscerators, the line backed up there enough that it didn’t matter that I was very slow on that table trying to work for three. Finally our backup eviscerator showed up, and they were able to catch up and send me someone to help with heads and feet. So we still finished processing by a little after 11am. And in the afternoon, packaging doesn’t necessarily involve getting one’s hands wet– my job is mostly dry, I put the labels on– so I was able to do my normal duties.
Very excitingly, we delayed our packaging to go and help a visiting work crew (paid for by a state grant!) put the plastic onto the brand-new enormous 40x100 foot greenhouse. The work crew were Old Order Mennonites, which was so interesting, I didn’t know there were any around! They spoke strangely-accented English, and I was wondering at it until I heard them talking to one another in what has to be a dialect of German. So very interesting, and they were very efficient workers– but it was breezy, and handling greenhouse plastic in a breeze is something so dangerous to do with too few people, so we took our whole work crew to act as human sandbags, and got it all done in an hour. And then we were still done with packaging by 3:15! Not too shabby.
So– I mean, I can’t really ever take slaughter day off, it’s always such a Thing, but. Sister was very solicitous about not making me wash anything, so my hands wouldn’t get messed-up.
I am mostly not feeling traumatized, just a little sad, though I haven’t tried to start a fire in a woodstove since then so we’ll see how I feel about that then. I still sort of can’t believe my hair didn’t get singed. Finally I got all the smoke smell out of my hair and my skin, at least.
I’ve discovered when you say the phrase “tiny house” people lose their goddamn minds. The current tentative plan is to maybe construct a multi-purpose small building in the slope next to where the yurt was, and have part of it act as a sugar shack during maple season, and then part of it be my little guest apartment, and there are numerous people already clamoring to help, including an actual licensed architect. So. I would feel a great deal less awkward if it wasn’t just for me, if it was something broader than that– it was already a small agony for me twice a year to have to ask people to help me set up and tear down, so anything where it’s not about me is a huge bonus. I want a space i can use and I don’t want to be trouble, that’s basically the long and short of it, but if it was an adorable tiny house I’d be delighted.
Farmkid keeps pointing out that whatever the space is, there needs to be a guest bed for her so she can have sleepovers. Which is hilarious, because she lives here, and there’s also already a camper, and a treehouse under construction for her to do exactly that if she wants, but listen she is an angel who deserves every joy and of course I will make a space for her to sleep over if she wants.
Anyhow. I gotta go, hopefully the power adapter Dude mailed me for this computer will get here today but at the moment I am scraping the battery down to the bottom to post this, so.
In parting, a photo of greenhouse plastic application featuring B-I-L and Veg Manager:
(they’re up pretty far off the ground! it’s a tall greenhouse! VM is SO excited, it’s so much space!)
