I'm sure you can imagine that there are a few reoccurring health problems. They affect us all. They are something that we also joke about after hours. I've made a list of some of these problems.
Tourist Voice:
It's a tone of voice, cadence and diction of our speech that we change in order to make ourselves seem more friendly. We have to 'paint on our nice faces' everyday and at the end of the day we don't have to be nice. People say things like 'Well... at least the helicopter ride was nice.' we cannot say back 'Well... at least my last tour was nice.' and so we have the tourist voice that we turn on and keep on all day.
Snap Thumb:
Snap thumb comes from hooking up dogs. The snaps that one has to do and undo in order to get the dog from it's house to the line will sometimes leave little cuts on your thumb. These sting like you would not believe. I had about 15-20 of these small cuts on my thumb. Every time I went to wash my hands my thumbs were throbbing.
Tourist Elbow:
Too much waving. It's like tennis elbow, repetitive motion. The pain is on the outside of ones elbow and feels a bit like a tendon. It's probably the most pathetic pain I've ever felt... too much waving.
Christmas Feet:
Also known as 'trench foot'. Yes this is a serious thing that does happen on the glacier. Peoples feet will go numb from being in the cold and wet for too long. Mine haven't started yet and I plan on keeping it that way. They go numb during the summer and don't come back until Christmas. This is nerve damage. Probably this is the worst thing that could happen up on the glacier.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Friday, July 6, 2012
Poop
It's part of my reality, both human and dog poop. After my first week on the glacier my mom asked me 'so what do they do with the poop?' and I'm sure she wasn't the only one who was curious. So here are... an entire post dedicated to poop.
Every morning at 6am I'm out in a dog yard scooping poop. Dog pee is sterile (aka it's clean) and it doesn't have enough of an impact because it's immediately absorbed through the snow, so we leave the yellow snow. The little treasures get put into 5 gallon buckets and then they are dumped into one of 3 50 gallon barrels. Scooping up after 40 dogs is a bit of a job but I feel that if you get it done in about 45 minutes you're doing good. It's an art to pick up just the dog poop and not the snow. Some dogs enjoy spreading their poop everywhere so that their little section of the yard smells like them. They've claimed it. These dogs are my least favorite in the morning. Usually scooping 3 times a day is the easiest because in the morning you will fill up about 2 buckets of poop, and the afternoon 1- 1 1/2, and at night 2. It's super annoying when you have more than 2 buckets to carry to the barrels because then it means more than one trip.
Human poop is a little different. We have 2 porta-pottys which have been converted to hold a 5 gallon bucket with a toilet seat on it. It's always someones job to empty and clean them twice a day. They go into a different set of barrels. We also add a chemical which breaks up the poop.
These barrels then get capped and a helicopter comes and gets them. A cable is attached to the bottom of a helicopter and the barrels are picked up and brought on down to town where they either go in a compost bin (dog poop) or the sewage treatment plant (human). Yes, dog poop gets helicoptered out.
Every morning at 6am I'm out in a dog yard scooping poop. Dog pee is sterile (aka it's clean) and it doesn't have enough of an impact because it's immediately absorbed through the snow, so we leave the yellow snow. The little treasures get put into 5 gallon buckets and then they are dumped into one of 3 50 gallon barrels. Scooping up after 40 dogs is a bit of a job but I feel that if you get it done in about 45 minutes you're doing good. It's an art to pick up just the dog poop and not the snow. Some dogs enjoy spreading their poop everywhere so that their little section of the yard smells like them. They've claimed it. These dogs are my least favorite in the morning. Usually scooping 3 times a day is the easiest because in the morning you will fill up about 2 buckets of poop, and the afternoon 1- 1 1/2, and at night 2. It's super annoying when you have more than 2 buckets to carry to the barrels because then it means more than one trip.
Human poop is a little different. We have 2 porta-pottys which have been converted to hold a 5 gallon bucket with a toilet seat on it. It's always someones job to empty and clean them twice a day. They go into a different set of barrels. We also add a chemical which breaks up the poop.
These barrels then get capped and a helicopter comes and gets them. A cable is attached to the bottom of a helicopter and the barrels are picked up and brought on down to town where they either go in a compost bin (dog poop) or the sewage treatment plant (human). Yes, dog poop gets helicoptered out.
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