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It is July now and I have been back in Idaho, hanging out with the parentals and working with the fish and game for almost 2 months now. It's crazy how time seems to go by SO SLOWLY during the week and then all of a sudden, 2 months have gone by. So life here has not been as bad as I thought it would be. It started out a little slow, a little rough, and a little boring with nothing for this college kid to do. But once I started working 40 hours a week as a fish clipper again, life got much more eventful. It was nice to go back to work and see all of my supervisors and some of the people I worked with last year in our fish marking trailers. It was a lot nicer this year because we were past that awkward, getting to know each other phase and are not more familiar with each other. SO MUCH FUN!! Plus, they got counters now to count all of the fish we clip so no more counting to 50 five million times a day and using clickers to keep track. I lost track so many
times last year. 32 was the number I would always return to if I lost count.
So at the end of May, I started working again and we went to the Clearwater hatchery and then down to McCall where I bonded with my big sister for a week again. After a week there and over 500,000 fish clipped by 16 of us, we headed to Riggins to run three trailers, have six supervisors, and over 40 clippers. For the last two weeks in June, we were at Riggins and it was a nightmare. Nothing seemed to go right with the automatic marking trailers and thousands of fish died in that first week. The second week proved not to be any better as two of the supervisors had to leave due to deaths in the family. All ended well though as the entire Riggins operation is now done. 3.2 million fish were clipped and some 100,000 were tagged and sent out to the big ponds to grow into larger Chinook salmon before being released next year.
The weekend before the Riggins operation, my family and I went out to the Demolition Derby out at the fairgrounds in Lewiston, Idaho.
This is an annual event where full-size, compact cars, and trucks all ripped apart, reconstructed with just the bare essentials, and painted with logos like "8-ball" and "Army" come out to smash into each other. The motto of the evening is: "The louder you get, the harder they hit." Carrying on tradition, we sat in the Dogpound because it is the section of the derby with the loudest, hickest, and drunkest people at the derby. It's always a blast! It was a pretty awesome derby with a couple cars catching on fire, a couple turnovers during the figure 8's and then the smashing derby part, and a guy on an electric guitar played the anthem at the beginning. It was pretty sweet but two days later, I headed back to work...
Last weekend (June 30 & July 1) my parentals, my older sis April, and I all headed out to the woods for a relaxing "before 4th of July" vacation in Clarkia, Idaho. We did some fishing, went out on the four-wheeler, played cribbage, made S'mores by the fire, and went to Elk River to watch the fireworks. The Elk River fireworks show is also a family tradition. It's
not the greatest fireworks display (only 12 min this year) but the echoing of the fireworks off of the mountains and the boom is such an amazing sound that it makes the show phenomenal. This year, we were treated by something else that was amazing...a full moon. After the show was over, we looked behind us and the moon was slowly peaking its way over the hills. Within 10 minutes, the full moon shown brightly over Elk River. It was almost an ominous moment and life was calm then. The next day, we fished some more and then had to head back to civilization and electricity.
So it is now the 6th of July and it is the hottest week ever. It was 112 degrees F here yesterday and it is only 1:25pm and it is over 100 now. The weather has been shifting so much that you're starting to see people finally accept Global Warming and try to do something different about it. More people are selling their big rigs and trying to get small, more fuel-efficient and eco friendly rigs and tonight starts the beginning of the Live Earth concert series. Live Earth is a 24 hour
string of concerts around the world to promote Global Warming. It's going to be intense!! That's been my summer so far and it has been a relatively good one. I'm still excited to get back to Alaska though and to go do some scuba diving in Juneau! But for now, I'm off to relax before heading back to work on Monday!!
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April Ann
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Us Idahoians!
See.. we aren't all that bad here in Idaho.. you love us because we are your family =) Love you... and glad I get to spend time with you this summer!