Saturday, November 3, 2012

Wisconsin miscellany


A quiet, busy week in Wisconsin.  I helped Ann with a project, read Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, a couple of Darcy Regency novels and took a chunk out of George Stephanopoulos’ All Too Human. I thought about bringing it home to finish, but it will be there when I go back.

The road noise will settle and the project will be a fun topic.  In the meantime, I carefully took these pictures on the Ohio turnpike.  And yes, the speed limit is seventy miles per hour:




After the power blackout of 2003 that left much of the East and Midwest without electricity our power company, Ohio Edison, and probably many others, undertook a brutal attack on trees as part of preventative maintenance.  Any tree limb capable of falling on a line had to go.  This preventative program keeps  Asplund and other tree management companies in the green to this day.  As soon as the leaves are down the big orange trucks line the road and branches are dispatched. There are no spreading oak crowns, or maple or any other sort along Ohio’s streets and roads.  They sport horizontal and vertical shears, to keep them away from power lines.


I’m not against this maintenance in the aggregate.  In fact, I have no say in the matter whatsoever.  But then I noticed this tree, across the street from Ann’s home.  The power lines go right down that side of the street, up to the oak.  Look at the two lines in the upper right corner.  They come off the last line before the oak, cross the street to the only pole on Ann’s side of the road, cross back and continue down the rest of the poles on the oak’s side of the road.  Ann said their power company did that to spare the oak.

13 comments:

  1. A decent power company? Wonders will never cease!
    Jane x

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  2. I wish I had som stock in Asplundah. They are busy little bees around here in PA.

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  3. That was a beautiful gesture by the power company. Welcome back :)

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  4. After seeing the way our trees get butchered - yes, that is the right word - by our local councils, I'm a firm believer in power lines being laid underground. Saves all that pesky "poles and lines getting hit by lightning" too. We have new subdivisions being built in some areas of Australia where all the power lines etc are placed underground. The streets and yards look so clean and tidy without all those poles and wires. There are still street lights, but the wires come up from under at each light pole.

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  5. I'm with River. Our local council doesn't do the butchering of trees in your yard they send a request (order) for you to do it. Street trees get mutilated. One near us last year was chopped down despite the nesting birds sheltered in it. And the council had been told about the birds. By several people. I wept and swore.
    Rant over - welcome back. I loved your comment about Jazz the malevolent. Still smiling thinking of it.

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  6. That is so unusual, and I would not have thought a power company would have diverted the line unless they were forced to. .

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  7. That's great that they would bother. Most big companies wouldn't give a hoot.

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  8. Wow...you don't see that kind of thinking too often these days do you?

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  9. yeah they do that here too. I understand why but I really hate it. They mangle those poor trees. it's like having a healthy limb amputated. and the ones they split right down the middle taking the heart out of the tree. guaranteed to split in two once they get big enough and the limbs reach out far enough. the city of Houston has an organization that plants trees which is a good thing except that they can be pretty stupid about it. they will plant trees in the easements right under or next to power lines which means that once they mature, the power company will come along and mutilate them.

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  10. It's amazing that the power company went to such trouble to spare a tree. It has long been a pet peeve of mine that public utilities have such brutal contempt for the beauty and necessity of trees. It pains me to see ham-handed workers butchering healthy mature trees without a thought for those that treasure them.

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  11. And I see your trusty car just turned over 100,000 miles. What a good car! Just another piece that feels good to have in excellent running order. Life is good in so many wonderful ways. Sorry about the grub thing. I looked it up and, yup, the pictures looks pretty close in all regards. Welcome home!

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  12. You like those numbers flipping over. Very nice that the power company thought not to hack the oak tree to pieces. Maybe the supervisor loves trees.

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  13. That's really remarkable that the power company was so considerate of the oak tree. We have a Swamp Oak (in Illinois) in the back that's gotten really hacked. It's so tall though that it's scaring me after all that happened on the East Coast with Hurricane Sandy.

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