2000-11-14 - 23:37:44

I'm back from a two day trip to Northern California to see where the US Federal Govt gets the water is supplies to Southern CA.

I of course work for the state of CA and we get our water elsewhere, but the Federal water is important too. Especially since it is mixed with the state water I'm supposed to protect.

I got to see snow. :) I've not seen it really snow for a long time. To give you an idea how cold it was, it was snowing at an elevation of 1000 ft!

So I froze while looking at all the sites.

We first met at Shasta Dam. Um, it is taller than Grand Coole, and wider than Hoover Dam. It is something around 400 ft tall and causes all sorts of environmental problems (the water released is from the top of that and normally too warm ... this kills fish, which is bad).

We spent all morning at Shasta.

Oh, on the ride up my officemate Steelhead played his rock and roll the entire time. *yawn* I brought alone some CDs too, so we played those today coming back.

Sat afternoon we visited Kesiwick Dam and Whiskytown Reservoir. It was snowing at Wiskytown.

Now for dinner Steelhead wanted us all to go bar hopping. I really disliked, no hated, the redneck girls in Texas, and that is all that was around in Redding, CA. I got bored and went to bed early, well actually I sat down and read "Dune" til midnight. We did play some pool on crappy tables, and a few of us broke away from the skanky women ... bleck!

I got to sleep in a KING sized bed all by myself. Normally I sleep on a small twin bed. So I ended up sleeping diagonally ...my head was on the pillow, but my feet went center stage. Somehow this made my neck sore for the next day.

So today we visited a few more dam sites and were driving through the snow covered mountains ... it would have been romantic if I had somebody to be romantic with :sigh:.

Our last stop was at a Fish Concentration Camp, i.e. Salmon Hatchery.

OK, if you didn't know this, in order to make new salmon we slit the bellies of living fish, tear out their eggs and sperm, and then cut off their heads. =(

I had eating fish, but anybody who eats seafood should see exact how this is done. I'm sorry, but it was SICK. Incredibly sick.

Salmon swim upstream when they are several years old. Now we have dams in the way, but we build "fish ladders". Imagine water covered stairways that the fish jump up. That is exactly what they do. Anyway, their reward for getting to the top is as follows:

(1) We insert posion (CO2 gas) into their water and cage them,

(2) We lift the cage to a table and they are put 1 by 1 into a head bonker machine which snaps their spine (it doesn't work immediately, but we still send a hole punch through their fish necks,

(3) We those them into plastic bins,

(4) One by one we grab the dying fish and essentially finger them, to get them to spit out their eggs or sperm into a bucket,

(5) We also cut open the bellies on females to get every egg,

(6) Their bodies are tossed outside,

(7) Where they are tossed into a trough and measured for length,

(8) Then the head chopper off machine, just like the French used, cuts their heads ... um, three times actually, I don't know why, but the people cut the same head 3 times for every fish, __AND__

(9) The fish head is tossed in a zip lock bag, while the body is given to be turned into food.

Yup, your salmon that is.

It was sick.

It smelled.

The place was / is a slaughter house.

Anybody who eats fish should have to just watch this. I'm glad I don't. :p

Well, I'm mopey now. I'll play phone tag some more, and maybe call it an early night. But first I'll put another item or two on ebay. I just finished my laundry! :) My apartment is half clean too.

-=-

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