Clean Day

Hello everyone! :)

Apologies for my absence, it has been busy. I know I've said it before but it does get crazy really quickly around here especially when I'm the lone intern. I'm so used to doing everything by myself that when I actually have volunteers to help me with anything, I get so thrown off since I haven't had to delegate very much since I just do it myself. Something I need to work on.

This post is going to be about CLEANING. WOO. Clean day is one of our most important because it makes the enclosures pretty and more sanitary...for a little while until a cat poops. :D It also gives us a chance to get all their uneaten meat or bones out of their enclosures. If left too long, decomposition smells REAL bad, and maggots show up, and no one likes picking up maggot-infested carcasses. I'm painting a great picture right now, I know. All the people involved also use the protocol for locking up cats, checking said locks, unlocking the gates, then locking the gates, checking those locks, and then releasing the cats into their newly cleaned enclosures.

The day starts off as usual, with morning duties which consist of making meds, making lemur food, feeding Bindi, giving the meds, watering all the cats' buckets, and feeding the lemurs. On clean day, these duties usually take place at least a half hour earlier, sometimes an hour earlier than I usually do them. This is because we want to start cleaning as soon as possible. It isn't so fun to clean in the hot sun at 5 pm after you've been cleaning since 11 am. So we try to start before then. When I'm out watering, I keep an eye out for our "difficult-to-lockup" cats and if they are in their lockdown areas, I act quickly and grab the metal hooker hanging on the side of the fence, shut the door and pin it as fast as possible. Our lions, Sammy and Layla, are difficult to lock up especially when she is in heat because Sam won't leave her alone but if she is sleeping on her box in the lockdown, boom. But you have to move as quick and as quietly as possible because male lions are easily worked up. One of our cats, Clyde, doesn't particularly like chicken, which is what we use to lure them into the lockdowns. Chicken drumsticks are like candy for the cats, so when you have a cat who doesn't really care about chicken...your job is a tad harder to motivate them to move. Lately he has been sleeping in his lockdown house, so the other two in that enclosure are pretty easy to get in.

Once morning duties are done, I get the gator ready for the day and load it up with shovels, rakes, bleach, and spray bottles. We usually start in the uppers which is the half of the compound which is near the vet center. Whoever is cleaning that day figures out the positions of who is doing what and then the point person goes and locks up cats. If I'm point person, I grab my chicken and go start with the easy to lock up cats and then if I need help, I'll ask. Sometimes you have to get creative in finding ways to motivate the cats to get up. If chicken isn't working, dragging cardboard boxes behind you on a metal hooker so it seems like it is moving by itself works a lot of the time. Derek once used his hat to get Allucia into the lockdown. He put his hat on the end of a hooker and waved it around and she came running. Once the uppers are all locked up, the point person goes back and helps those cleaning pens.

The rest of group begins cleaning while the point person is off locking up cats. Before any unlocking of gates can happen, someone needs to make sure that the enclosure is "good to enter". The way this happens is by checking that the cat(s) are in the lockdown and that the pin in through the hole in the gate. A good game to play is 'Count the Kitties' which is ensuring that if there are three cats in the enclosure, there are three cats in the lockdown. A senior volunteer or an intern who is keyholder will unlock the gate after the enclosure has been declared good to enter. Once the gate is opened, the enclosure is cleaned of poop, vomit, bones, extra meat, and then a mixture of bleach and water is sprayed around the pen where poop and pee spots were. This is to disinfect the areas for the kitties. If there is just dirt in the enclosure, the entire thing is raked to help aerate the bacteria and turn it over.  Once is is clean, all the tools are counted to ensure we don't leave anything in there and then the gate is shut, pinned, and locked again. Someone other that the person locking the gate has to check the lock and pin to ensure it is indeed locked. If the lock is locked and the pin is all the way through, the word "clear" is said, and it is said loud and clear to evoke confidence that you believe that the enclosure in in fact, clear and everything is put back in order. If you are not confident, then you fix whatever was wrong.

It is all about safety. Plan and simple. We do NOT want one of these cats getting out and potentially injuring someone, or themselves. Clean day is pretty simple, if not for the fact that we have about 30 pens to clean. It takes awhile, no matter what. Its easier when there are lots of people to help but sometimes a few enclosures will always take a while to clean. Kannapalli is one of the messiest eaters and he likes to eat on his rock in the nice weather. Scrubbing that rock alone takes a good 10-15 minutes. It is caked with blood and meat bits from his food (usually a head) so it take some serious scrubbing and bleach.

Everything we take out of the enclosures go in the back of the gator and once the back is piled high with bones, poop, and other meat, it gets dumped in the pit. I usually end up dumping once the uppers are done before heading to the lowers because it gives a clean slate and you don't have to keep piling bones higher and higher.

Once everything is done and looking pretty again, I'm not done. By then it is usually about time for night duties! More watering and making sure there is nothing gross in the buckets, and in case there is, we dump them and rinse them out and then refill. If there is algae in the buckets, we swirl some bleach in there and rinse it VERY well and then fill them up. Other night duties is making lemur food which is much more involved than the morning. We have to give them fruits and veggies at night in addition to their morning chow mix. Once that's done, I feed Bindi and do all the dishes from preparing lemur food.

I used to not like clean day whatsoever. I didn't have the routine down, I was awkward at raking and shoveling up poop (believe it or not, there is a technique) and I was just slow in general. But now I don't dread it anymore, and haven't for a long time. It just took me a little while to gets used to it, like everything else here. It can be tedious but if you move quickly, other people will be more likely to move quickly and not dawdle around. It is super important so it happens every four days, just like feed.

Okie dokie, lots and lots of text in this one. Here is a recent picture Derek took :D

Watering Tess

I hope you all have a great day/night/ whatever. :) 

One last thing, RACHEL IS COMING BACK. YAYYYY. She is coming to train the new interns for the next term and she's coming a week early so we can go on the field trips I was supposed to go on, and to help me around here.

My Time Left

Hi everyone! :)

It has come to my realization that I have less than a month left here at CARE. It's going to be so strange to not get up and make meds, lemur and Bindi food, and water. My last day is May 15th. It's so crazy to think I have been here for three months already...I feel like I just got here, kind of. Obviously not in terms of experience and knowing what to do but it doesn't seem like I've been here for that long. It doesn't seem like it's April. I feel like it was just January, even though I have been in the 80-degree heat. Strange.

I have no idea what I am going to be doing once I'm done and home again. Everyone is seeming to ask me that when they hear I only have one month left and I have no good answer. All I know is that I need to find a job. Obviously. That's what everyone wants to do, but that it easier said than done of course. The one thing I want is a summer job at the very least in which I can be outside and perhaps be doing some kind of manual labor so I won't lose all the muscles I've been building these last few months. I've gotten pretty proud of my biceps now that I've been working them out, pulling cow and horse bodies from the freezer, rolling up hoses, raking, etc. I don't want them to just wither away into nothing just from being lazy.

I do have one solid plan for summer, and that is participating in a summer show musical. The Weymouth Alumni Theatre Company puts on a summer camp for kids all the way through high school, and the "counselors" are the people who graduated from high school already. We put the show together in about 5 weeks and it is a medley of Broadway musical songs. I have been in this show for the past three years, and it is always the highlight of my summer. Some of the best friends I have participate in it, and each summer it's a little different but always amazing.

It's going to be quite strange to go back to Weymouth when I'm used to upper 80 degree weather. Once I get home, it will probably be in the 60s, hopefully 70s. I'm going to be COLD. If I'm not doing super strenuous work like cleaning or tours, anything with a lot of work outside, I'm pretty comfortable in jeans. Methinks I will be a little chilly since I won't be working outside and sweating all the time. Ah well, I'll acclimate as I did down here.

On a happy note, my Mom has been visiting me these past few days, and it's been very nice to have her here. My Dad was supposed to come as well but he got injured a couple days before they were supposed to leave so my Mom made the trip solo. She's helped us on clean day, but unfortunately the sun was just a wee bit strong for her and she got quite a sunburn. So now we aren't really adventuring anywhere because we don't want the sun to bake her skin anymore. She says she's fine with just staying here and not doing anything, and I'm fine with just hanging out, but it would be nice to get out of here and do something. Heidi keeps telling me to go out and leave the compound since I haven't really gone anywhere. Anyway, she's gotten to see me butcher :D And she got to see me feed on the tractor...during a thunderstorm. Yeah. That was kind of terrifying. It was raining when I was butchering, but it didn't really start coming down until we were waiting for Derek to come to the freezer. It was POURING when we were loading the bucket, and when we started to feed. All was going fine until there was a huge crack of thunder and lightning right near us, me in particular since I was up in the air on the bucket, and Derek immediately lowered the bucket and told us to go inside. I had never fed in the rain, let alone in a thunderstorm, so that was an interesting thing for my Mom to see.

I'll definitely be trying to update this more now that my time is dwindling down. I'll be sure to share lots of pictures with you all. :) I apologize for not updating in a little while, it's been hard to find enough time sit down and write. If I do have time, I'm usually falling asleep pretty quick.

Anyway, here are some recent pictures to tide you over!

 

 Solano looking adorable

 

 More Solano

 Dahlia :)

Pretty sunrise the other morning

 

 Ace

Mwali showing his nice pretty teeth

Donya and Rascal 

Have a great day! :)

Texas Weather

Hi everyone! :)

I originally planned on writing this last night during a crazy thunderstorm we were having, but I went out to dinner instead. So now I'm writing this while there is some very strong gusts of wind rushing past. Still out of the ordinary, so there you go.

Texas has some of the most ridiculous weather I have ever experienced. Being from Massachusetts and going to college in Maine has given me quite the understanding of cold and snowy, but what I realized once down here, is that I never had to work outside in it. Sure, I walked to class in a blizzard or in negative degrees, but I was really never outside for a long period of time. Or if I was for a lab or something, I was adequately prepared to spend such time. Here in Bridgeport, it got cold. It may not have been as cold as Massachusetts or Maine, etc. but for Texas, it was COLD. Frozen water buckets, snow/hail, frozen water hoses, frozen pipes...you get it. Since I was from New England, everyone said to me, "Aren't you used to the cold?" Yes. But not being outside consistently in it and performing tasks that require my hands to be frozen even with the layers of gloves I had.

Now the cold lasted awhile, and it seemed reluctant to let go. There seemed to be a stretch of warm weather when it even hit the 80s! But literally the next day it was down in the high 20s. I was not impressed. I had gotten a sunburn the day before, and now was dealing with cold. My body was very confused.

Fast forward a few weeks, and it has been consistently in the 80s, which I have gotten used to in a way. This was mostly the weather I experience in the summers of Massachusetts. Humid grossness. Doing chores and working outside in the humidity is a whole different kind of torture than the cold bitterness. I have to make sure my sunblock isn't wearing off, or else my skin will be hurting later on and other stuff like that. If it happens to be a clean day, you have to be careful of cleaning up the bones because if you're wearing shorts, cuts and scrapes from bone can happen quite easily. I speak from experience. I was lifting a body into the gator and got a pretty bad scratch on my calf from some jagged ribs. Hydrogen Peroxide has basically been my friend lately.

*Quick side-note: at my last job working in a scenic shop in UMaine's theatre building, I was pretty well known for being accident prone so that when anyone saw me holding my hand and walking to the sink determinately, no one asked what happened anymore. I had probably just scraped some skin off, gotten a metal splinter, or that one time a screw gun bit went through my hand. Good times. Anyway, back to hydrogen peroxide, anytime I get a scrape, cut, anything that my skin gets ripped open in a way, I'm pouring that stuff on. Last clean day I tore a chunk of skin from my thumb knuckle when one of the pins that go through an enclosure door was stuck and finally slid through, and caught my thumb. Wasn't a big deal except that the pin was quite rusty, so I wanted that safe from infection.

Wearing shorts can be a hazard, sun-wise, and protection from bones and other icky-stuff-wise. But if you're working out in high 80 degrees, pants are really not an option. Butchering in the heat is also a time-sensitive activity. I haven't gotten to experience true Texas heat yet, but I heard from Rachel that you could be butchering, and have meat essentially go bad right as you're cutting. The heat makes the meat rancid if left out too long, so I am sure I'll experience it soon.

Okay, that's enough about Texas temperature. Now, onto storms. Yikes. Thunderstorms out here are nuts. Last night I was about to start evening waters and I heard thunder rumble off in the distance. As I begin watering, the thunder continues, slowly getting closer. I get the uppers done, and then the wind rolls in. It's the kind of wind that you can just tell is the foreshadowing to a storm. It got dark as the thunder got closer, and lighting strikes were visible. Thankfully, Derek helped me finish the lowers to get done quicker. It was starting to rain by the time I made it inside, and then I was invited to dinner. So all in all, it was fine :D A week or two ago, there were tornado warnings in our area which was a little terrifying since I had never had a tornado warning before...it just sounded like really intense wind outside, I didn't know any better. Something I realized is that the thunder hits first, then lightning, then rain. Back home, sometimes it rains first, then the thunderstorm rolls in. I kind of like this way better because it's like a warning. Pretty much saying, get what you're doing finished quickly, or you're gonna get wet.

As quickly as they can come in, the storms can exit just as quickly. The last storm lasted about an hour or so. It's really intense for a little while, and then it's over. It's exciting, but it's also scary to think about the animals. They all have their houses which is good, but if we have animals to butcher, it gets stressful.

Okay. So this was word heavy...so here are some recent pictures! :)

JP stretching

Allie :D

Fire 

I loved how the sunset softly back lit Tabula.

Oh hellooo Kannapalli

Mmm, that Texas sunset.

Okay, now it's time to go feed! Have a great day! :)