Oh, the things I could give up for Lent...

How about working in the cold!? Working in the snow maybe... working with cold feet... or working in the mornings!? How about food in general!?

I've decided the cold feet only happen in the morning!? It kicks in around 10-10:30. They manage to stay warm in the afternoon though. Maybe they aren't awake enough to keep themselves warm... folks here have proposed battery operated socks! Well I may need them... if we are scheduled to get this supposed 9 inches of snow TONIGHT that I've been hearing people talk about, tomorrow might be a cold one! It snowed ALL day today. As pretty as it is on the pine trees, it's not very much fun. Actually as long as I can stay warm, I'm alright.

So, food would be pretty easy to give up for Lent if the weather keeps up like it is. The scheduled grocery flight today didn't happen... let's pray for tomorrow! When I arrived last week (A day late also... I'm seeing a trend!) I realized "hum... I don't think I have enough food!" Well, that was a week ago... I'm cuttin it close here so this flight better come soon! I've also realized some things that I SHOULD have put on my grocery list which I will have to do without for another week. Sacrifice... *shrug*

I spent a while today getting a taste of what I will be doing for weeks on end in the upcoming months... feeding fish! ha ha And I'm not just talking sprinkling nearly weightless flakes of fish food into my fish tank... we're talking LOTS OF FOOD! Sad thing is that the fish really aren't eating alot right now... come summer... WHEW My arm hurts just thinking about it! Remember that picture from yesterday of those circle ponds right out my window... the Coho salmon reside there and I fed alot of them today. There are about 60,000 fish in each pond plus or minus a few thousand. One really only has about 30,000 because of lots of deaths in that pond. Anyhow, so today each pond was fed between 6 and 6.5 kilograms of food. For those of you not familiar with the metric system, that is about 13.2-14.3 pounds of food. We would feed 4 ponds at a time so we had to carry 2 buckets of food out there at a time... do the math... that's about 57 pounds of food at most, split between 2 buckets. *SIGH* There are... oh I don't know... 37 or 38 ponds. That's alot of food!

Really I'm not complaining... just trying to explain how it is now. Before these fish are released, I'll probably be feeding them for 8 hours a day straight because they'll be eating so much. It's not so bad... but I can tell ya that my left arm WILL be really quite sore tomorrow cause I can feel it now even. I fed 8 ponds of the covered ponds too. Only 4.5 kilos of food each though.

Anyhow, tomorrow we are going to start "ponding" the chum. That's where the tiny chum, who are in the incubators now, will be going out into a big raceway with millions of other fish. I know we are going to be doing this Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday but I'm not sure if that's ALL it's going to take or if it'll take longer. We'll see. It's hard to explain but there are 16 incubators in a row... with 3 rows. Each incubator has 5 trays of fish. That is 240 trays. (Lots of math in this blog today!) Tomorrow we are only doing... 30? Yeah, looks like we'll take longer than 4 days. This is the group of fish that Tommy said there were 90 million! WHEW... we're gonna be busy!

OH, I failed to mention that the incubator room must be kept completely DARK so we'll be doing this under headlamps. HA good times. Angie said when we are working in "the dungeon" as it's nicknamed, time goes real fast though.

WEATHER-Snow all day. 25 or lower I'm guessing.

P.S. Who has see the Harry Potter movies? I've come to the realization today (after I saw a bald eagle fly by) that with the snow falling on the pine trees and the birds flying around, it's right out of a wintery scene of Harry Potter with the owls flying around! HP fans would know what I mean.

P.P.S. The amount of commercials during an episode of American Idol is getting to be rediculous! I'm about to not watch because it's making me angry. And it's probably a "girl" year for Idol.