things i have been up to

if only i was getting paid for this.

visiting family

visiting friends

helping with a massive garage sale and an open house

and helping move stephanie back to cornell.

aiee!

alaska: the "fish processing" edition

one of my favorite things about working in a cannery was learning the details of the processing portion of the fishing industry.  i've said it before and i'll say it again, we're so detatched about where our food comes from, and i was unhealthily fascinated with watching everything.

to begin with, the fish came to us on tenders.

here you can see a tender that is at the dock, relieving it's holds of fish.  the big silver machine is a giant vacuum that sucks them up.  (you can see the fish in brine in the middle there.)  it's pretty fun watching the fish get sucked up, you can see them in the tubes going off to the bins.

there are seven bins, the first six hold 90,000 pounds of salmon, the last one 70,000.  that's a lot of fish when they are all full.  (that's a lot of fish even if they aren't all full.)

from there, the fish go on a conveyer belt to get butchered, and in the cannery sliced, patched (making sure the cans weigh the right amount and look pretty) lidded, and they go to retort where they are cooked.  from there, they go to the warehouse, and then off to city dock to be shipped.

in the freezer, we also had a butcher line.  first, they go through the chink (so-called because it was once advertised as being able to "replace a hundred chinamen") where there heads are removed, then the tails.

that part in the middle is the part that cuts the heads off.  the blade was this huge thing that every night dave, the machinist, would take off and sharpen by hand.  it was a scary looking bit, but it was kind of fun to watch it go around and see the heads come off.  the bit on the far left is where the tails and fins would get cut off.  i never fully understood the mechanics behind it, but that's what it did.  (i think it's also the thing that gave us the most trouble; we spent a lot of time waiting around for it to get fixed.)

then the fish went into the ryan to get eviscerated!

these things sliced the belly open and sent all the insides somewhere else to be sorted.  the roe (eggs) is worth more than the fish itself.  on the upper left, you can see the slime line.  that's where the final cleaning was done, to make sure that there wasn't anything undesirable left inside. 

(the slime line)

and then they came to me.

this is what i stared at every day for about a month.  i counted the scoops of ice that went in, weighed the pre-fish tote weight and the final weight, and figured out what the net was.  i printed out labels and recorded everything.  i was the queen of the scale.  i was also lucky to get a dry job.

and that's basically it!  a tote like this, made out of cardboard, would get flown to one of two locations.  since these are tail off, they were probably going to kenai where they filleted them.  tail on would be a cannery in canada.  we also butchered salmon for our own fillet line, but for that we used blue plastic totes.  and it didn't have to be as precise since no planes depended on me being underneath a certain weight. 

and so that is a very basic version of what salmon go through in a cannery.  or at least, the freezer portion of it!

it can't be only monday...can it?

it was nice to see my friends this weekend, and i'm glad that my hair no longer feels like someone glued dried grass to the ends, but HOLY COW.

i'm tired.

and, today, my dad was in a minor bicycling accident and broke his collarbone.  and this weekend we have a giant garage sale, an open house, and on monday we move stephanie back to cornell.  and keep in mind my dad can't lift anything, which means even MORE fun things i get to do!  WHOOEE!

vacay!

flying to anchorage.  or king salmon. 

tomorrow morning i am going to ames with my family to visit family.  on saturday, i am going to april's wedding, followed by what will most likely be spending the rest of the weekend in iowa city, wishing that i still lived there with all of my friends, but not missing working at target.

i am distracted--stephanie & friends are watching labrynith and david bowie's pants are so tight i can't help but look.  it's sad that this will probably always be the only thing i ever remember from this movie.

alaska II

so where did i leave off?  i think it was when we arrived in naknek.  so, we arrived later in the day that first day and didn't do much exploring past ags and the beach.  the next morning we had orientation, which consisted of a powerpoint presentation of people we needed to know and things not to do, and this fabulous "germbusters" video.  it was completely in mime since it's supposed to be for people with many different linguistic backgrounds, but the premise was that everytime someone did something that you shouldn't do because it would get the fish germy, there was this radioactive neon glow surrounding that object to show you should not do it.  things like wiping your nose on your hand.  which is highly ironic because i spent the next three weeks wiping my nose all over my shirt.  (probably how i got the cold to my eye, giving myself pink eye.  i know, i'm fabulous.)

after that, we did all the usual stuff like tax forms and filling out emergency contacts, and were told there wasn't any work for us that day.  so melody and i ended up walking down to naknek to look around and make phone calls from the fisherman's bar--which has this totally awesome phone booth.  we actually did a lot of that through the 22nd.  napping, reading (thank goodness the local library had a free book shelf with things like margaret atwood, m.m. kaye and p.d. james on it), journaling, and writing postcards.  i think we went into naknek almost every day for one reason or another just because we didn't have much else to do besides eat a lot of donuts and drink a lot of pochas.  (poor man's mocha--hot chocolate and bad coffee.)  i also learned this really awesome card game from dean called benny, which is probably the only card game i will ever play.  if you are my friend, you will be most likely unfortunate enough to be forced to play it with me at some point in the near future.

we also had some other adventures, such as walking on the beach towards the bay, melody and i avoiding "our eskimo friend" as i took to calling him, and playing more benny.  oh, i totally got hit on in fisherman's one afternoon while i was waiting for mel to finish a phone call by a couple of fisherman.  they were both pretty harmless, but it was so funny because they were drunk (as fisherman are often to be found). 

i also have a haiku i wrote:
fish fish fish fish fish
fish fish fish fish fish fish fish
fish fish fish salmon.

i know, totally the most awesome thing ever.
sorry this isn't entirely cohesive; i have my journal out, but i'm just sort of skipping around in it.  next installment: we begin to work, i contract the cold from hell, and i get a tour of the cannery!  hooray!

BONUS: "who needs a shower when you have wet wipes?" (colleen)  also: "if you want to see iowa, go to the produce aisle." (vikas)

chronologically--how genius! an installment in the alaska adventures.

so i guess the most obvious (except to me) way to begin telling about my adventures in alaska is at the beginning.  where is the beginning?  drinking cheap wine with friends.  but we'll skip that part to the part where i actually go somewhere.

so we left on the 14th of june in rain, and began our drive to seattle.  it was a very long drive, with very little showering and lots of being cramped up in a small car.  but we got to see a lot of fabulous country along I-90, and we didn't kill each other, which was always a plus.

blah blah blah, stuff stuff stuff.

so anyway, we stay in tacoma with melody's family, who have an amazing view of ranier from their deck, and the next day we go to the airport.  apparantly a million people are trying to fly alaska airlines out of seatac that day, because we had to wait in line forever.  we tried to do the self-check, but there was something wrong with our tickets that way and couldn't.  so we waited...and waited...and managed to not miss our flight.

then we flew, which is not usually very memorable, and got to anchorage after seeing lots of mountains from the plane.  bought about 20 postcards and then flew on a little prop plane to king salmon with some other people going to work at ags.  when we landed, discovered that the mosquitos were trying to kill us and that there really aren't any mountains that you can see from that area.  sadness!

rode on a bus to naknek, where the driver kept saying how everyone was thinking it was going to be a really good season based on the cotton plants--ha!  what a joke that turned out to be.  anyway, picked out our bunk, hung out, and had our first ags meal.  that was the beginning of a week of doing nothing but hanging around naknek.  which will make a great installment two!

photographs i happened to take in alaska. so there!

the town of naknek, alaska.  they have fishtival.  no joke.

on the beach.

some more beach, at low tide.

sunset over denali, going back to anchorage.

the best thing after a 60 hour train ride is most defintely a shower.  wow.  i never knew i could look so scuzzy.

so i am back in iowa, the land of humidity and corn.  i missed the corn, but not the humidity.  it's so weird, especially since i am back in ottumwa and not iowa city, it's kind of a "wtf" moment really.

i have a lot to talk about, still, but at the same time i don't know where to begin.  so i guess if anyone has any questions, that's someplace to start.  i do promise to get to work on my photos, but as i have over 500 of them AND i have to go through everything i own for a garage sale, find some work and figure out what i'm going to be doing next, i do have a lot on my plate at the moment so it'll be a little bit of slow going at first.

yep.  and it's been almost two months since i've been into a target.  three cheers for that!