Legalectric

My friends at Xcel are miscalculating my schedule, sending the guys with the boom trucks over on a Friday without a deadline!!!  HA HA HA HA HA HA and not only that,

Yeah, give ’em the raspberries…

Today they’re taking out the poles across the street so they can start on the mother of all retaining walls.  We do now have a distribution line in the front yard.  Where’s that gauss meter?

Did you know that they saw down utility poles?  Odd, I figured they’d take them out and resuse them.  Here they’ve sawed the support pole in half, then took it down and are sawing it up into little chunks.  So small that I’ll bet they haul them over to their garbage burner here in Red Wing, or down to La Crosse where I know they burn railroad ties.  Railroad ties, penta poles, what’s the difference!

We’ve told the city that we LOVE the quiet at night, what a difference, and they were tickled that we thought they’d done something right (guess Alan and I are known around city offices).  There are deer back in da ‘hood again, one strolling down the middle of the dirt street, and somebody’s been eating the day lily buds.  We need to move some of the construction hazard lights closer.

Life goes on with construction… but work?  No way!

So I’m sitting here working and staring out the window, looking up the bluff, and a deer saunters across, about 30 feet above the poop deck outside my office, and then coming down and down the bluff into my back 40 (40″ that is, behind the kitchen and laundry room, 4o” of flat land behind the house before the retaining wall up the bluff).  She liked the day lilies, and over there, there are more than enough to keep a few young deer going.

That’s out the back kitchen window, over the dog kennel, where the deer’s having a little brunch.

There’s deer hunting in Red Wing, this house is in the official “Hunting Zone.”  I could bow hunt off my deck, or open my office window, and the deer are probably glad I’m a veggie… a Sagittarian with a bow is a dangerous thing.

Minnesota DNR page on Chronic Wasting Disease

In the STrib:

Chronic wasting disease seen in SE Minn. deer

If the preliminary diagnosis is confirmed, it marks the first time the disease has been found in Minnesota’s wild deer herd.

By DENNIS ANDERSON, Star Tribune

A deer killed by an archer in southeast Minnesota last fall is believed to have been infected by chronic wasting disease, the first wild whitetail in the state to be stricken.

Preliminary tests show that a doe felled Nov. 28 near Pine Island in Olmsted County carried the disease. Very little of the animal has been eaten by the hunter or his family, the Department of Natural Resources reported Friday morning, and authorities will pick up the butchered meat for further testing.

CWD is not believed to pose a danger to humans, though hunters and others who eat venison and elk meat are warned that an animal’s brains and spinal cord should be avoided.

The deer was killed about three miles from a captive elk farm near Pine Island that had been shut down recently after CWD was identified in its herd, which subsequently was “de-populated,’’ or killed in its entirety.

DNR big game coordinator Lou Cornicelli said Friday there is no way to determine how the wild deer became infected.

Before it was shot, the animal appeared thin, the archer recalled, but otherwise behaved normally. CWD can gestate in an infected animal for as long as four years before clinical signs of the disease are detected and the animal dies.

The archer has asked state authorities to remain anonymous.
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