The Old Folks Home

[ronott1]

I'm not planning for retirement, but I did finish my "eye spy" baby quilt today.







It has all the shapes and colors, plus a bunch of stuff to look for. Some can be matched exactly, some can be matched by type (ie different butterfly fabric).

That is a nice Quilt!

 

[NotAFarm]

I'm not planning for retirement, but I did finish my "eye spy" baby quilt today.



It has all the shapes and colors, plus a bunch of stuff to look for. Some can be matched exactly, some can be matched by type (ie different butterfly fabric).

What a wonderful quilt! Love all the colors and patterns!

 

[Alaskan]

Good grief Alaskan,  maybe you should move back to the contiguous  USA.  I never heard of such ridiculous rules.  I guess that means you can't keep a kennel full of sled dogs.

Yep..

People with sled dogs have to live somewhere else.

In the watershed area, the max is 5 dogs and I think 200 pounds. So, only one Mastiff would be legal, not two, but you could legally own five Chihuahuas. Stupidity out the wazoo.

and, it doesn't matter if you have 40 acres, 80 acres, or 2 acres. Still, only 5 dogs and 200 pounds of total dog weight per address.


Some things are related to size of property, like number of horses. I can no longer remember how many acres are required per horse.

I am alowed to have as many apple trees as my little heart desires... As long as there is no bare ground anywhere.

Insanity!!!!

 

[Latestarter]

And here I thought that Alaska was the final resting place for the home of the free... I guess even there has been corrupted.

 

[Alaskan]

Totally

 

[Alaskan]

We have problems with crazy California types moving up and wanting it to be "like home" and then we also get giant super rich wildlife groups run by people that don't even live here, telling us what we can do. They actually just show up to try to get all sorts of regulations passed, and they have never lived here, and don't talk to anyone who does.

We right now are trying to fight a law/proposal that will make the wildlife nuts have power over anyone in the state that owns a goat or a sheep. They want to make domestic goats and sheep mostly illegal, you would be required to have a permit, and a hefty double fence, and annual testing etc. etc.

The nuts are worried that wild goats and sheep will come into contact with the domestic ones and swap disease. It is not founded in reality, because the disease they are worried about, isn't here in Alaska, and the wild goats and sheep stay up in the mountains super far away from the domestic animals, so no contact anyway.

It is crazy scary.

 

[Latestarter]

The entire world is losing its collective mind... and forcing their dementia onto the rest of us who are trying our best to remain sane and sensible.

 

[chickisoup]

The entire world is losing its collective mind... and forcing their dementia onto the rest of us who are trying our best to remain sane and sensible.

Amen.

 

[getaclue]

Al, BEWARE of the animal rights groups. Their intentions seem good, but it's a one-size-fits-all mentality that causes problems. We have a native Florida deer here that is unique to Florida. They're small by comparison to other deer, but were plentiful, and delicious. Part of the reason they were so plentiful was due to the way the wildlife dept. managed them. Years that we get plenty of rain, there were good sources of water for them, and the rain allowed for the growth of the necessary vegetation to sustain the herds. When we had drought years, the wildlife dept. would have a controlled hunt, to thin the herds, and the meat was donated to various charity type organizations. I think it was in the mid 80's when we we went through a bad drought, so the wildlife dept. called for the hunt to thin the herds. Court battles ensued, and the animal activists won.

Due to the lack of rain, there was also a lack of vegetation. The herds suffered from lack of food, and water. They became weak, overwhelmed with parasites, and fell to diseases that in a healthy state they would have had normal immunity against, and their ability to produce healthy offspring was greatly impaired. It almost wiped out the Florida deer. It was touch, and go for many years, but the wildlife dept. managed to save the Florida deer from extinction. It took over 10 years to bring them back, and undo the damage. One good thing that happened was that the animal rights people will never be able to stop the controlled hunts in the drought years ever again.

There is a fish called an Arrawana that is totally illegal in Florida, but legal in all other states. There is a good reason for this, and a good example of why the one-size-fits-all mentality doesn't work.

The introduction of exotic snakes, constrictors in particular, is another good example of the flaw in the one-size-fits-all way of thinking. They should be banned in this state, just like the Arrawana. The toll they've taken on our native ecosystem has been devastating.

Latestarter, I agree that it seems like people have lost their minds, and doing their best to force their thinking on everyone else.

 

[chickisoup]

We have problems with crazy California types moving up and wanting it to be "like home" and then we also get giant super rich wildlife groups run by people that don't even live here, telling us what we can do. They actually just show up to try to get all sorts of regulations passed, and they have never lived here, and don't talk to anyone who does.

We right now are trying to fight a law/proposal that will make the wildlife nuts have power over anyone in the state that owns a goat or a sheep. They want to make domestic goats and sheep mostly illegal, you would be required to have a permit, and a hefty double fence, and annual testing etc. etc.

The nuts are worried that wild goats and sheep will come into contact with the domestic ones and swap disease. It is not founded in reality, because the disease they are worried about, isn't here in Alaska, and the wild goats and sheep stay up in the mountains super far away from the domestic animals, so no contact anyway.

It is crazy scary.

The odd thing is here in the land of Ansel Adams and Aldo Leopold, the first Earth Day and yes, sorry California, even the birthplace and start of John Muir, (and yes, even the Republican party) The state of Wisconsin has, in the past few years, started pushing back against organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy and their increasingly over the top meddling. We've even had problems with Earth First and Green Peace! Don't get me wrong, I have always been a bit of an unapologetic tree hugger, trying my best to live responsibly long before it was ever "cool". However, I always believed it was possible to live without returning to the stone age AND still not totally destroy the world in the process. Things in our state was getting to the point of being totally absurd. The environmental groups have done a lot of great things here in the past such as holding the mining companies' feet to the fire and making them operate in an environmentally responsible manner and "putting it back the way it was" when they were through but then these groups decided a few years ago that ALL mines were evil and started a two prong assult on any company operating or attempting to operate in the northern part of the state by the "big" groups working in our state capital and the UWM campus while the "nuts" like Earth First were grabbing headlines by destroying mining equipment and attacking survey crews. In the meantime, the Nature Conservancy was quietly buying up thousands of acres of forest and wetlands and locking them up in perpetual land trusts that took them off the tax roles. This all sounds great until you look at the damage this was doing to the local economies and the folks that lived in these areas. Laws and regulations were passed that removed almost all common sense and tied the hands of the DNR. The counties were forced to get "creative" under the new laws to find ways to retrieve lost revenues so they did things like look at our mostly mushy, unusable "back 40" that had first been declared a protected wetland, sigh, which at least gave us a tax break and declared it "recreational" because you could get back there in winter on a snowmobile, maybe, and now was technically usable and raised the taxes on it.

All these groups, like Al said, don't live here, so frustrated one mining company that was gong to come in and build a copper mine not far from us, that they packed up and left, taking all their jobs and tax monies with them. The groups screaming "No more mines", declared victory, packed up and left as well. First, using their cell phones to call their friends to share the good news. Idiots. If there were no more mines, where would all the metals come from for the materials in those cell phones, the towers that carry the signals, the laptops for their data, the vehicles that got them all the way up here and home again to the houses and apartments all built with mined materials? Oh, and the machines that make all that "earth friendly" clothing they wear?
Thank the Lord that sane and sensible is slowly creeping back into the land of Leopold.