Dependence on summer money, dependence on salmon…I have a lot to celebrate.

I’m carving a few minutes out of my day of sealing up and stickering shipping containers, writing production reports and crushing my fingers between blocks of frozen fish to tell you all hello.

Things are hot and heavy on the salmon front. According to my calculations, I’ve already shipped out over a million and a half pounds of chums.

Production switched almost immediately to a 24-hour day and hasn’t stopped for more than a few hours for the last week or so. I’ve worked 96 hours in the last 7 days.

It’s not so bad though. As opposed to last year, my position and duties are better-defined and better-appreciated. I track the fish coming out of the freezer, delineating between Chum, Pink, Sockeye, Coho and King and recording the weights for each species, so we can compare the numbers to our incoming pounds and calculate our recovery rate. Then I keep a master plan of where the product is, what’s staying in the cold storage, what’s shipping out to China or Japan or being shipped domestic (which means it goes in a different type of container).

When a container is at weight capacity with sacks of salmon, I fill out the bill of lading and contact the drivers from the transfer company, who then take the container to the barge landing. When the barge comes, the containers are stacked together and sorted in Seattle onto barges to Asia.

Anyway…that’s the boring details. Now for a good story.

I was trying to bust ass and move a pick up from the loading area, so our driver could pull our full container and replace it with an empty. As I rounded Bay 1, I planted my foot squarely on the giant power cord running the length of the chassis. Without the grip of the gravel under my Adidas, I hit the ground with a phenomenal home base slide-in on the right side of my body, and continued running momentarily, my legs churning air and gravel, until my brain caught up. Then I had to get up, tell the driver I was ok (I wasn’t…that shit hurt) and the god damned pick up was locked, so then I had to run up the stairs to the office – dusty and bleeding – to find the owner of the truck, so he could move it the fuck out of my way.

Nothing annoys me more than someone parking in my loading dock.

So anyway. I’m doing well. A little gravel-burned. Kind of sleepy. Soberer than I care to be but not sui or homi cidal.

Here’s hoping everyone had the 4th of July I dream you people have down there – beer, swimming, weenies, sunburns, weenie sunburns. Here we just had fog and rat bastard children lighting off fire crackers that ate into my 6 hours of scheduled sleep.

I’m old and grouchy.

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