More grinding (and not the fun kind)

So recently stuff here hasn’t been very exciting. We took the dogs around a new field so now they’re doing longer runs. I don’t remember exactly how long cause it’s in miles and I’m not sure if I have the number right. The other day we did a little more grinding, liver this time. Instead of the three day ordeal chicken grinding was, this was pretty simple. It was more like day one, set the liver out in the sun to thaw. Day two, check to see how much the liver has thawed. Day three, grind liver for an hour. So I got to scoop the liver up into ice cream containers for storage. We also went to pick up more liver from a Hutterite colony. Also a rather uneventful day.
Three days ago we drove to Peace River to watch Don’s grandson’s hockey game. I think he’s like twelve. Their team isn’t very good and they go beat 7-1. But you know, I’ve been there so no judgment. When we were kids playing soccer we’d get ice cream if we won, but I was on a team that was so bad one year that my dad took pity on me and bought me ice cream if my team scored a goal.
Two days ago we added more straw to the boxes and then I got to clean up the dog yard while Don washed the four wheeler. Talk about a thankless job. I'd rake the straw on the ground up into piles and then the dogs would pee on them. Then as soon as I collected up the piles the dogs would just pull more straw out of their boxes. There's this Futurama quote that goes "When you do things right, people won't be sure you'e done anything at all." And I always thought it was super deep and everything, but yesterday it felt more like what working with dogs is like. As soon as you clean up their space they just mess it up again right away. Especially since they love peeing on clean new things.
I digress, yesterday I went into Grande Prairie with Faye to run errands. It's fairly nice but you can tell its newly developed. Like of course it's been there for a while but apparently the population has grown a lot more recently (like everywhere), and there's a bunch of new box stores and stuff like that. I'm not even sure what branch of science I'm trying to describe so I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about but you know what I mean. We also went to one of the most stereotypical western stores you can find though. It was called Keddie's I think, and there were just cowboy boots, jeans, cowboy hats, and horse stuff everywhere. The even had a life sized plastic horse that you could try out the horse stuff on. I got more work gloves cause my hands are already  getting cold in the ones that Don lent me. I'm wondering how long I'll have to live out west though before I finally succumb and buy a cowboy (cowgirl?) hat. Probably a while unless someone back home gets wise and I get one for Christmas... (I'm just kidding, I don't want that.)

Dog of the day is Eli. Eli is a rather pretty dog, he actually looks like a husky which is a bit of an oddity at this kennel. I like Eli because he’s starting to understand that if he goes on his house then I’ll pet him. This sounds basic but most of the dogs jump all over you when you’re walking around the yard so I try to encourage them to go on their boxes and Eli is starting to get it. So good on you Eli, keep up the good work

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The missing bowls

Another northern story! So this one isn’t as exciting as the last one cause it doesn’t involve fear or death threats or anything. But there is mystery (ooohh).

So up north after we feed the dogs we collect all their bowls and wash them as stack them up to dry. So there are 30 regular bowls that go on the counter and a couple puppy bowls that go under in a little cubby. We had six puppies but the puppy bowls are all a little weirdly shaped and honestly some were better than others. So one day we go to feed and I can’t find one of the “good” puppy bowls, so I just use one of the other ones. Everything is normal and we count all the bowls and there’s thirty and we move on and go about our day.  The next day someone else lays out the bowls and I just help feed and wash. Everything is normal again, but I’m sure you can feel the undertones of “everything is not normal” at this point.  So maybe another day or two passes without incident. All of sudden we’re down to five puppy bowls total. This is a problem, we have to go to the back and find another sort of dish to feed the dogs. We decide to have a staff meeting. Maybe less of a meeting and more of a “Where the hell are the bowls?” followed by everyone claiming to "not know". In all honesty I can’t remember who was around at this point but I think it was during the summer.  We decide that maybe our boss was taking them for whatever reason, she sometimes did weird stuff like that. Or that maybe someone with a boarding dog had left with them.

Cut to the next day, I’m washing dishes after feeding and someone, lets’ pretend its' Nic cause I already talked about Nic and I honestly don’t remember. So Nic is walking down the aisle with some bowls and all of a sudden he drops them all and there’s a huge crash as he shouts “Whattttt”.

And we’re like “What the hell Nic?”

And he says “Its Koko, I saw her!”

I say “Saw her what?”

Nic says “She’s stealing bowls!”

So we all go over to Koko and Ushuaia’s cage and Koko comes out of her box when we open the door. We go to the back to look in her box and she has four bowls in there. Four, Koko was the bowl thief. Mystery solved. There were a couple of times after that you’d see Koko pick up a bowl and you’d just have to tell her “No Koko, you can’t keep the bowls you hoarder.”

Koko was honestly one of my favourite dogs, and definitely my favourite puppy I think. We had a lot of crazy moments, and she even sent me to the hospital once (I had to get a tetanus shot, calm down). I was initially reminded of this story because when we were cleaning out boxes Jackson had a bowl in his box. I guess some huskies are just bowl thieves.

Here's a picture of Koko licking my face shortly she jumping into our canoe from the other canoe.

This is just a video of what feeding was like up North.

The Chicken Grinding Trilogy

T-1 day

So my bosses have been telling me about this day for a bit, where we go and grind chicken up for the dogs. We have to go to a Hutterite farm and pick up a couple thousand dead chickens and then take them to some other guy’s farm and grind them up for dog food, so it should be fun.

Day 1

Oh my god. Ok so that was the most disgusting thing I have ever done in my life. Hands down. What happened, ok, we got up at 5:30 in the morning to feed the dogs and ended up leaving around 7:00. We got to the Hutterite farm at maybe 9:30. We drive around to the back of the barns and Don goes “there they are” so I look and there’s all these chickens on the ground but they’re covered in snow so you can just see their feet sticking up in the air. We just start grabbing chickens and throwing them into the trailer.

We were there for two hours, and I picked up 1572 chickens. I know because I had to count them.

Between our trailer and this other guy named Kenny’s trailer we got 5500 chickens. On to the grinding.

We had to drive the long way back to Aaron’s place (the guy with the grinder) because the roads were so bad getting there. I’m not sure what time we got there, maybe 2ish. Aaron had been at the Hutterite farm before us and was almost done grinding his chickens. So we started loading buckets onto his trailer while we waited. Then it was our turn.

Ok so Don was in the trailer putting chickens through the grinder and me, Faye (Don’s wife) and Doris (their friend) were on the ground trying to develop a system of loading buckets and moving them. After standing around for a bit I ended up being the one to pack down the meat into the buckets. So I was sitting there, on a block of wood, wearing rubber gloves, in below freezing weather, for something like two hours. This was literally the hardest thing I’ve physically ever done.

So aside from my knees hurting and my hands being freezing cold, it smells god awful. Like, apparently the past two times that they’ve done this its’ been around 10 degrees instead of -5 but Don says he’s never noticed a smell. Now if you know me you know that I have been blessed with a terrible sense of smell. My blessing did not help me today. When all sorts of chicken bits are being mashed together, it smells, strongly.

Next, it gets everywhere. Aaron built a little cover to guide the meat down to the buckets and whatever, but when you’re sitting right in front of it that does not matter. I got covered in chicken guts.

Also, because they’re laying hens, sometimes there are eggs. Once, when I was leaning over to scoop up some of the meat that missed the bucket, one came flying at my head, and dripped down into my face.

So yeah, in addition to all my other tribulations, I got egged in the face by a dead chicken.

After the aforementioned two hours, there was a pause and I was finally able to stand up. My knees hurt like hell, I had to pee, and I was freezing cold. When we got there, Faye had gone to pee behind the hay bales, because Aaron’s house was a field away from where the grinder was. At this point I was probably a little shell-shocked (ha ha) and just in the mindset of “I need like a minute, and then maybe I’ll be ok again”. So I walked across the field (I had to hop two fences) to Aaron’s place. Thankfully he was there and directed me on where to take my slimy, bloody gear off and where the bathroom was. The bathroom was immaculate and even had a shower. I was incredibly tempted for a minute since there was still egg in my hair but figured people would notice my absence. When I got back Kenny was there and they had already started on his trailer. Faye was doing my job but she’s short so she could do it standing and god know I wasn’t asking for it back. I ended up helping to pass chickens to Don from the trailer. Everything was running smoothly for a bit except the daylight was waning and then all of a sudden we ran out of buckets, with about 500 chickens still left. No one really minded since we didn’t want to do this in the dark. So we packed up approximately 150 buckets into Kenny’s trailer and went home. Kenny would buy more buckets and we’d just go back again tomorrow.

Day Two

We started at normal time, up at 8:30, then eat breakfast, and feed the dogs. Then Don put chains on the ATVs and I got to drive them around the block to test them out. Normal stuff, we were supposed to meet Kenny at 2:00 so we left around 1:00.

We get there and we have to wait for Kenny, when he shows up we go back to grinding chickens. I get to ferry them from the trailer again. Today its’ just me, Don, Kenny, and Rob (their friend).

A couple of things about picking up chickens, and please dear god DO NOT read this if you are eating.

So picking up chickens is especially unpleasant. Kenny’s got a closed in trailer so it smells, bad. Not as bad as sitting in front of the grinder but still not good. The chickens are cold and wet from being snowed on and just... just gross.

A couple of things I learned about handling dead chickens.

1. The best place to grab them is their feet, the neck also works but feet are better. Grabbing chickens from the ground was easy but when they’re all in a pile they settle a bit and it can be hard to pull them out.  
2.  Do not pull them out, grab from the top of the pile and work your way down. I repeat do not pull on the chickens that are stuck in the pile.
3.  If you have to pull out the chickens pull by their feet. If you pull by their heads, there are three possible outcomes, one, everything goes ok and the chicken comes out of the pile, two, you pull the chickens head off, or three, you accidentally crush the chickens’ head in your hand.
4.  If you pick up a chicken head that is not attached to a body, it is OK to freak out, as long as you do so quietly and continue working.
5.  DO NOT look into their eyes. You’ll regret it, immediately.

OK, you can start eating again (unless you never stopped you monster).

After another hour or so of grinding chickens, all of a sudden, we ran out of buckets. Again, with maybe another ~ 150 chickens still in the pile. Rob told Kenny he could just cut up the rest of the chickens by hand, and then we started putting the buckets into the trailer. About 100 buckets in our trailer and maybe 250 in Kenny’s. And there's still about 100 buckets left. Kenny says he’ll pick them up tomorrow. After that was done Rob left, and we drove to Kenny’s to unload the buckets. Kenny and Don have a deal where he can use Kenny’s walk in freezer to store meat. So we get to Kenny’s after about an hour of driving.

He’s got an old hunting camp building set up on his property and the freezer is in the back. There’s a doorway about two feet off the ground with no door that we walk through. The ground is slippery with snow and soft and muddy so we can’t get the trailers lined up with the door, just get them close. The freezer is through one room, up a step, and through another room near the back. You can see but its’ dark, there’s dirt on the floor but it’s slippery and muddy. Nearer to the freezer there’s blood on the floor and on some buckets just sitting out. It smells like that artificial cold smell that comes with freezers, and also death. Definitely the sort of place I could see someone storing my lifeless corpse.

We start unloading our trailer. Its open at the top and the back doesn’t come out so you have to swing the buckets over the railing and onto the floor. Then we carry them over to where Kenny is trying to figure out how to stack them in the freezer. About a third of them have lids, the rest are open. My right shoulder starts to hurt after a while and I’m hungry. After what feels like an hour we’re done with our trailer so we get a bathroom and snack break while Kenny moves his over. Don carries the buckets over to the doorway and lifts them up. Then I slid them across the floor and carry them the extra few meters over to where Kenny stacks them up.

So yesterday I said that kneeling by the grinder was physically the hardest thing I ever had to do. That was until today. My shoulder killed, my forearms started to hurt and I felt like I was going to throw up. Like, I’m not a big runner but you know that feeling when you’re trying to run steady for a long ways and then you get that gross taste in your mouth there's too much saliva and also too much information but you know? That’s what I felt like, from lifting things, I mean I’ve gotten tired before but god never like this. After Don moved to the front of the trailer we started a count down. Thirty more buckets, eleven, nine. Four more trips. Done. I honestly felt like I wouldn't mind being gruesomely murdered. 

Don and Kenny go look in the freezer. There’s and front and a back room and the back room is completely full, and there’s about 30 buckets in the front room. Kenny asks Don if he’d be willing to go back with him tomorrow to finish grinding the chickens if he got more buckets. He says feeding dogs’ whole chickens is “some northwest territories bullshit”. Don says sure. It takes us two hours to drive home, we get back around 8:30. And we get to go back again tomorrow.

Day Three

The morning starts off pretty normal. Its’ been two days without running dogs so we run two teams that morning. I get to drive after about halfway. The second team looks better than the first except Erie is in lead and he’s a little unfocused. We feed the dogs and then load up some meat into the truck to sell to Kenny. They’re bags of beef that each weigh between 30-40 lbs. We count up 1239 lbs. The truck gets stuck getting out of the yard. We have to unload all the meat and Don gets out the dog truck to pull out the pickup. Then we load the meat back into the truck. This ordeal takes about half an hour. After lunch we leave to meet Kenny for 3:00. We get there and load 24 buckets into the trailer and move the meat out of the truck bed to make room for some other equipment. Kenny shows up at 4:30. Just me, Don, and Kenny. We finish grinding the rest of the chickens. They figured the total number of buckets was about 510. We help Kenny load the rest of the buckets into his trailer and then move the meat into the front. Kenny and Don chat for about half an hour while I sit in the truck nearby and play games on my phone. We get home around 6:30 and unload the buckets into Don’s freezers. I mentally cheer after putting down the last bucket. I am so tired of lifting buckets. My shoulder hurts, my forearms hurt and my legs are bruised from buckets hitting the sides of my knees. I never want to see another bucket.

So I go pick up the water buckets and water the dogs. Then we go inside and I shower, and finally get to wash all the dead chicken off my clothes. And so chicken grinding is finally done. Until next spring.
                      

                     Where I sat on day one.                               Grinder set up.                              A couple of the buckets.

Driving the team, cleaning dog boxes, and spiders

October 13, 2016

Yesterday was fairly exciting, I got to drive the dog team on the ATV so that’s something. We were just going along like normal and all of a sudden Don stands up and is like “your turn” and I’m like “what” and then he pushes me up front and tells me I’m driving now. Apparently I did “excellent”, and I have done it before so it wasn’t really a novel experience for me or anything. A couple of new things, the largest team I drove before this was 8 dogs, yesterday there were 14. Also, these dogs run faster, around 20 kilometers per hour and apparently we’re taking it easy right now. That actually makes it easier though since you don’t have to slow down for lazy dogs.

Anyways, in addition to running dogs we’ve been cleaning up the dog yard. All the dog boxes were cleaned out and re-strawed. So how this works is Don lifts the house up on the tractor and brings it to the garbage pile and sets it down. Then I tip it over and the bottom of the house comes out. I tip the straw out and scrap off the floor, then try to fit the bottom back in and lift the house back onto its stand. Sounds fairly easy except the floor of the houses sometimes don’t fit properly and I end up hitting them a lot and getting my hand caught between the floor and the side and just end up swearing at the damn thing and kicking it. Then usually I realized I had the thing rotated wrong and it comes out no problem.

Also it was two degrees warmer and there were a lot of creepy black spiders. Now I definitely don’t have arachnophobia or anything but I still hate having spiders on me as much at the next person. So this happened a lot:

*Something brushes my arm*

Me: (shouting) “holy crap it’s a black widow” as I drop everything and jump back a foot.

*Looking down at my arm*

It’s a piece of straw.

All in all a pretty fun time, actually feels good to be doing real work for a change.

Dog of the day today is Woodstock. I hung out with Woodstock (we sat on his box together) while Don leveled the girl’s half of the yard. Woodstock is a good dog because he’ll go up on his box pretty much anytime you ask him. Woodstock is also a cheeky devil cause while we were sitting on his box, he knocked my hat off my head onto the ground, then jumped down and grabbed it and went to play “chase me”.

Woodstock in his harness beside Snoopy.

Thanksgiving

October 9, 2016

It’s thanksgiving. So far we’ve gone to the neighbours down the road for turkey and theres' another one scheduled for tonight. Don’s brother Chuck is staying with us as well, and his daughter and her son are visiting for the night. It’s a bit odd to be a part of a family’s thanksgiving celebration when you’ve know them for a week. Everyone has been very nice of course but in my socially inept brain I’m freaking out over my behaviour and manners around everyone. Just an example but this is a scenario that happens frequently:

Co-worker/acquaintance/generally polite human being – “Good morning Claire, how are you today?”

Me – “Good.”

Two seconds later after they’ve already moved on:

Me – DAMN IT I forgot to ask how they were, and now they probably hate me or think I’m rude, or that I hate them or…

And… continue in downwards spiral for a bit and promise myself to try again next time.

So that’s what’s going on in my head during a routine,standard greeting. Now I’m sure you can imagine what its’ like being around five to six almost strangers during a holiday. Here’s a hint, I tend to be very quiet.

Dog of the day today would be Jethro, even though he’s technically the dog of yesterday. Jethro is a bit special one, because he has blue eyes, and two because I have an actual reason for liking him. Jethro was a dream to harness yesterday. They do things a little differently here than at my last kennel and they harness the dogs at the gang line instead of at their kennels. Personally I think this is a bit more difficult but since the dogs here are chained instead of in pens then I guess it’s a reasonable way of doing things. But anyways Jethro is as calm as a butterfly and lifted his front paw sup so politely he could be invited to tea with the queen. Also he’s Ajax’s neighbour so I’ll stand between the two and pet them both after runs. 

I'm standing on a hill holding a screwdriver looking down at 5 huge bears while a German boy tries to convince me to walk by them, I can explain...

So I thought I’d try and type out a story from up north to see how good it turns out. So here’s one a few people know but not many people are aware that its’ not entirely true. I don’t frequently embellish stories because I’m honest as the day is long, but this one sounds better this way. And its’ about 90% true, so come at me.

So this one time during the summer we were hanging out one Friday night or whatever and Nic, one of the German kids was like

“Hey Claire, you should come hiking with me to the dump, I found this cool spot.”

And I was like, “Ugh, Nic, do we have to go?”

And Nic said yes, or something. Its’ been a while. Anyways so we go to hike to the dump cause Nick also wanted to see the bears that are usually there. Going to see the bears was a fairly common occurrence that summer because there’s not a ton to do, and bears are cool. However we usually took the ATVs or the car. So we walk across the golf course adjacent to the dump, and Nic points to this steep hill that leads up to the quarry behind the dump, and he’s like

“We’re going up that trail.”

And I was just kinda like “Ok…”

And we start walking up and its hella steep, and I’m like

“Nick, this is probably like a bear path or something, like bears probably walk here.”

And he’s like “Nah… its fine…”

And I’m like “Nic, there are literally bear tracks right here, I just stepped on one.”

And he’s like “Where?”

And I just go “See those five holes in the ground, those are claws.” (Picture me mimicking claw scraping)

 And he goes “I’m sure its fine.”

Until I point out a full bear print in the mud, and he finally admits it. So I look around and pick up a screwdriver that’s just lying around. And Nic laughs at me and goes

“Are you gonna fight off a bear with that?”

And I said “No, I’m gonna stab you in the leg and run like hell.”

Nick did not die that night, but we did see some very large bears and I’m still convinced he was trying to get us killed because he was quite serious about walking by them. 

Week One

October 8, 2016

It has been a week. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this place. We have gone out on the trail the last three days. Yesterday we went through almost the entire trail, 12 and a half miles out. No I do not know what a mile is but something like one and a half kilometers. Anyway we were driving through a bunch of fields yesterday and low and behold there were cows. In the country, can you believe it? I’m sure a bunch of your farmer types who grew up out in the middle of goddamn nowhere are all like “yeah, they’re just cows, you pass about a million on your way to work”. To which I’d respond “well yeah I’ve seen cows before (even up close, GASP)”, however I haven’t driving an ATV through a field of them before. So that was kind of cool. I started singing home on the range (in my head). Whatever I’m from the city ok?

Dog of the today is Smartie, for the totally arbitrary reason of: I’m currently eating Smarties. Ha ha, but ok Smartie is a good dog because she goes on her box all the time, and sometimes I sit with her there and we hang out. Smartie is only a little over a year old, and Don says that she’s already running very well. So good on you Smartie.

The box says "Smartie"... I'll get a better picture I swear.

I'm a little bored.

October 6, 2016

So apparently I’m starting a blog. I guess people think my life is interesting enough? And my dad wants me to try and make money through the internet, so let’s see if I can become famous. Long term goal I think is to have my own show on OLN. I’d probably have to actually move into the woods to make that happen. The premise of the show could be me, living with a pack of wolves and trying to turn them into the next champion sled dog team. Call it, “Mushing at the Moon”, I think that would fly.

Anyways… so far I’m just living with a retired couple and helping them with their sled dog team. I’ll make it to the woods eventually but right now it’s pretty chill. Because they’re retired everything here is at a slower pace then I’m used to. Lots of breaks, long time spent on meals, no one making snide comments about how slow I’m working… It’s pretty nice, but kind of like a culture shock I guess? Not culture but it doesn’t feel as much like a job, and more like an experience. Which I guess is ok for the nineteen year old international kids who come over for a Canadian “experience”. However considering I’ve already done all this and more I’m a little bored so far. 

We actually did do some real work yesterday though. We went out on the trail and Don cut down trees with a chainsaw and then chain sawed them into pieces. Then I went along behind him and threw the pieces into the woods. This was good for two reasons. One being that it was actually some real work, and lord knows I’m already getting soft here. Two is that it was great for my anger issues. Not that I’ve actually been very angry recently but throwing pieces of wood at other pieces of wood feels pretty good regardless.

So I guess I should start talking about the dogs. So far they’re not as cute as the tour dogs up north but they seem ok. Considering I didn’t like small dogs when I started working at the research kennel I’m sure I’ll warm up to them.

Dog of the day would be Ajax. He’s an early favourite for the arbitrary reason of: he doesn’t jump on me. He’s also got a pretty recognizable face, narrower than a lot of them, all black, and he’s the father of the most recent puppies: Idgie, Smartie, and Yumyum. Ajax runs in wheel so far, strong boy. That’s all for now.