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.