Thrusday, February 19, 2009

Woke up to a kinda of beautiful morning. Slight variable 15 like it was forecasted to be, about 37F out. Maybe we'll actually get a plane in today.

HA, only because my mom, store manager, and a bunch of other people came over on Trident's freighter boat the Eastern Wind last night, the weather happens to be beautiful today! They made it in at about 9:30PM last night. I saw Darryl (our PA) and another guy from town (to pick up his wife) up at Trident last night. Our store manager got her new dog in, she rescued a 2 year old fixed min-pin female, beautiful dog!

Nothing much going on in the office. Felt good to be able to sleep in and head to work at my usual time of 10AM. The dogs enjoyed their morning outing, Dante is enjoying running around with Tug and Roscoe. I had to clean rooms last night after getting off work from the office. No one has signed up for the housekeeping job, so I'm making my hubby do it. I told him it's really no different than cleaning our own house (since he cleans up at home!). And doing hotel laundry isn't hard either, so I think I talked him into doing it. As long as he isn't called a maid, housekeeping manager will work ;) LOL So at least my mom and I don't have to stress over who's going to be cleaning. I think I'm going to bring it up to the Corp board that we need to revamp our rooms with all new beds, towels, linens, blankets and what not. We should also be keeping inventory on all the cooking supplies and everything else in those rooms. I'm tired of all the people who have done housekeeping for us before and so many of our towels have walked out. Towels are supposed to be a $10.00 charge to your room if you decide to take them, but none of my housekeeping ever enforced that rule. So I'm hoping to get some changes made up there. We'll see how far I actually get on that one...

So, the plane came in at 11:30AM. Not sure what is coming in since all the people took a boat last night. Probably a whole bunch of mail sitting over there! I'm waiting on a bunch of supplies for my dogs. I also had my sister Ivy do a COD for me from Wal-Mart.

We had chicken nuggets for lunch. I don't really eat chicken, well not off the bone. But I've been trying to open back up to eating it. Ok the story of why I don't like to eat chicken:

Back when I was like 8 years old, my parents thought it would be cool to teach us the responsibility of raising and owning chickens. So my dad built a chicken coop out in our back yard, right out my bedroom window! At first I got to order 25 Rhode Island Reds, including one rooster, Big Red! (25 was the min order). The next 25 chicks a year later were a mix of Araucanas, Black Australorp's, a couple Leghorns, and a good amount of Plymouth Rock's, including my Roosty Rocky(who got way too big, must of jumped and got his neck tangled in something, I found him dead with his neck broken in the corner of the fenced yard, farthest from the coop one day..) I loved raising those chickens from little just born chicks to ones that laid eggs and knew who I was (or at least knew I meant food!) I mean yeah I named like half of them, tagged them and told my parents not to touch those ones, and the rest would be for eating on whenever. So they must have mixed up what I said and thought I said to only take the ones with the bands.... so one night we're eating dinner and I asked which ones did they take (because of how many diff breeds of chickens we had out back), and they told me they just grabbed a couple with the bands like I said... I freaked out...It was too late.. I had already eaten one of my pets... I swore off eating chicken since and raised the ones I had left... I didn't let them eat anymore of them, I told them to go to the store!! So for 5 years, until I was 13, I raised chickens in my back yard, by the 4th year they were "free range" and were able to walk around town in little groups, bumming scraps from certain houses! We had put like a door in the side of the fence where they can get out and go roam. It was pretty cool! But it sucked that they started to lay eggs outside! But then this person in town decided they were going to try to save this dog that they were going to put down over in Dutch (for being a menace and couldn't be "saved" over there by anyone because of how it acted..), and he let the stupid dog loose here... a stupid dog that attacks everything... just let it out!!!!! I'm still steaming over that one.... So, one night I woke up and that damn f-ing dog was in my chicken coop ripping up and killing all but my one rooster and a hen in the nest box, I mean that's like over 40 birds that dog killed/mortally wounded in less than 20 mins or so!! I was so heart broken... I knew how to shoot a gun... I knew what I was doing... I ran in the house, grabbed a shell, grabbed the gun...I went back out there... all the same time my parents realizing what I was doing and running behind me - but they were too late... I took one look at the bloody dog with one of my chickens all ripped up in its mouth, and shot the f-ing right there in my chickens fenced off yard. I didn't want to step back inside that coop, and my dad had to care for the last 2 surviving chickens. It took me almost 5 years to even walk back in that building, see the writings I did on the walls. See the feathers I had collected. It didn't seem not to long after the brutal killing of my chickens, about 2 years later, we went on a family vacation (my parents, lil sis and me) My older sis and bro stayed home, and they totally forgot to take care of them, and my last 2 chickens (the rooster and hen) died in November of 1998. Ever since then I've kind of been wanting like 5-10... but I have enough animals to deal with, but it would be cool to get fresh eggs again!

So that's why I don't really eat chicken. I will eat chicken nuggets, chicken strips from the deli, and once and a while a chicken burger. But I will not eat anything right off the bone; my childhood memory of that dinner still mortifies me! When I was 19 there was these people who were ministering the church that Trident has, and they wanted to raise chickens. So we ripped almost everything out of our coop (nest boxes, roosts, walkways) and gave it all to them for their little coop they were building. Now the coop is cleaned out and is being used for storage. When I went to UAF during the 01-02 year, my dad had taken a bulldozer and flattened out the whole back yard, removing the fence from the back yard but keeping the coop. Now the back yard is nice green grass (it used to be all full of tall grass and grown in with all kinds of local plants until my dad flattened it and threw grass seed down).

A lot has actually changed in the village since I was a little girl. In 1995 there was a house fire in one of the old wooden houses where one guy died. Then a year later my uncle's old wooden house caught on fire and he died. So the Tribe here worked on getting there Emercore (like snap together) houses for all the people who lived in any of the old wooden buildings (most of the houses here are HUD houses) and offered to tear down their old house and build those ones for a good cheap price. Since the Tribe was just helping get rid of all the buildings that weren't up to today's fire code laws. Everyone agreed and about 5 of the Emercore houses built here, with one that was scheduled to be built, but the owner passed away and no one did anything. They ended up tearing down a total of 10 old houses down (including the 2 that were burnt) and 3 people built their own houses back up. I forgot what year it was exactly, 1999 I think, we had our church torn down and rebuilt and restored. And now the last old building that’s practically left standing, our old store, is being torn down right now. I still want to paint my house all white with light blue trim like all the houses here used to be "back in the day."
In 1994 they extended and made our school bigger, the same construction company then build the East end of Akutan right after the school project (the house I live in is one of those houses). We also got our hydro electric building that year (which ended up being a total waste of money! someone let it break and turned the building with all the electronics and stuff into a big fish tank!)
Last year, well starting in 2007, the Aleutian Housing Authority (AHA) started to build a 4 plex "up on the hill" (as I call it). They finished it in August last year and 4 families got to move in! We also got cell phone service last year.
Just to name a few changes that gone on around here.....

So did I mention how HAPPY I was to have my mom back at work and not to mention our Store manager back! They are getting ready for the freighter that we have coming in this weekend, guess it's a small order. Nice and quiet in the office this afternoon. The clinic returned a key and said the doctor and assistant are sharing a room, so they only needed one room not two. We got a couple phone calls in, nothing really important. Vendors seeing if we needed anything. I guess the Post Office closed the counter for a bit to get all the mail sorted. Hard to get mail sorted, and deal with people asking if mail came in, easier to just shut the gate and get the mail done up, then tell everyone mail came in! People will even call and bug and ask if mail came in. HELLO, busy sorting it, can't get it sorted if they are busy doing something like answering if there was mail or not... I would know I work down there part time!! I will go end of the day and check my mail... :D

Not sure what we're going to plan for dinner tonight. I brought Dante to work with me today. Damn got some stuff in from an order and they sent the wrong product. Never fails to either have something not come in, the wrong item come in, or something you know! Well I'm going to show my mom the video professor CD's on QuickBooks. Show her that I can learn do the bank reconciliations if she don't want to deal with them, I just want to have her go along with me as a refresher for her, and help in case I don't know what something is!

Not sure if the plane is going to come back this afternoon or not, it's still sunny and blue skies and beautiful, but once and a while a little like misty squall will go by, not really rain, but a light mist that gets everything wet! It's only about 39F out, but it feels good in the sun! I'm happy we have boardwalks, the ground is completely saturated in rain and melted snow. Making for a dirty/wet walk once you step off the boardwalk. The store sounds nice and busy today, that's a good thing!

Tonight I have a couple shows I've been waiting 2 weeks to see (Hell’s Kitchen didn't come on last week, it was like some NCAA awards or something like that), so I'm waiting for HK to come on Fox tonight, and all new Gangland on History Channel. I love watching that show, educates you on the dangers in some of the city’s that I travel to (or would like to travel to). I accidentally got us in the wrong part of LA, took us to Watts and went to Inglewood... not on purpose, I screwed up on manually entering the address in my GPS unit.... we could have gotten shot, killed, robbed... who knows what.... all I know is that we weren't were we should have been! Then going to Vegas and seeing the gang tattoos on some people, those are dangerous f-ing people that I don't want to cross the wrong way! Or like how we met Chuck Zito, it wasn't until after we met him that I found out that he's like on the top in the New York chapter of the Hells Angels. So Gangland is a good way for me to keep myself aware of my surroundings and the dangers that some people will put them or other people in and not give a damn...... Other than catching those shows I don't have anything special planned for this evening.

I'm going to go check my mail, wait until 4:30 when the store closes, and get the store’s paperwork then my daily paperwork counted and done up and head home hopefully by 5PM! Then enjoy the rest of the day at home with my hubby and 3 pups! Only other thing I have to get done is price the stuff that’s coming in on the freighter, but I think I’ll just do that in the AM. We got our business licenses in, so I have to go hang those up. Got a couple faxes out, nothing too important. Ok well I'm just going to wait for my work day to end so I can go home. Oh and I heard at 4PM that the second plane is on it's way, not sure what's coming in... maybe more mail! :D

TTFN - Always, April Dawn