So we had two different options lined up for someone to come and haul the deer away, dress it, and butcher it for meat, but they both fell through. The County Animal Services folks say it’ll be somewhere between 1-3 days before they can get someone out here to haul it away, and they’d only do that if it was easily accessible—which meant it needed to be in the driveway or out by the curb. I decided our neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate a rotting deer carcass sitting next to the sidewalk. I looked up How to Drag a Deer Out of the Woods on YouTube last night and a nice man showed me how to loop a rope around the rack and tie that to a stick, and I was able to get it moved around the house to the driveway behind our cars much quicker than I’d thought. Last night, our local fox found the corpse and started picking at it, driving Hazel into fits of panic.
It’s a rare occurrence for us to see a deer, let alone have a buck with points die in our yard, so I figured I’d take the head, cut it down, and boil the skull clean to mount it. I had about 10 free minutes between meetings this morning, so I put the axe on the bench grinder to sharpen the blade, then went out and gave the neck about five good whacks before it separated cleanly.
I was expecting Kurosawa amounts of spurting blood but overnight coagulation in the driveway meant everything was still and mostly solid. The head is now sitting under a rubbermaid bin weighted with a cinderblock behind the greenhouse. My next YouTube search is How to Clean a Deer Head, which, frankly, looks pretty gruesome. Hopefully I can get to it in the next couple of days before it really starts breaking down. Temperatures are in the low 40’s for the next couple of days, so I should be able to get a couple of hours on Saturday morning to get my hands dirty (we are currently preparing for one of our yearly Big Events this week).
This beautiful young buck was hit by a car out in front of our house this morning. I was at my desk working and heard a dull, loud thud as a rust-colored Jeep slammed into his flank; I looked up to see him scramble to his feet and run back into our yard and behind the house. I ran to the windows to see if I could see him, then outside to check the yard. He was laying on his side behind the Chic Shack with a stunned look in his eyes, drawing labored breaths and bleeding from his mouth.
I ran to check on the driver, who had pulled over to the side of the road. She was OK so I told her I was available if she needed me for the insurance claim and went back to look at the buck. In that short interval he had died; there was a pile of dark red blood and tissue around his mouth that he’d aspirated before the end. I don’t know why it hit me so hard, but I felt so bad for this guy, cut down in the prime of his youth, just trying to get the fuck out of the suburbs and back into the woods where he belonged.
Huh, I don’t know where this has been and how I missed it, but Spotify just suggested The 500 With Josh Adam Meyers: a podcast where the host goes through The Rolling Stone’s Greatest 500 Albums of All Time with various interesting musicians, comedians, and artists; they pick a song from the album and discuss. Right up my alley. His voice is a little grating, but overall I like it.
A detective wrote in a probable cause statement that Brandenburg, 46, is an admitted conspiracy theorist and that he told investigators he intentionally tried to ruin the vaccine because it could hurt people by changing their DNA.
Fantastic. I guess this asshole doesn’t remember his Hippocratic oath class in pharmacy school.
I’ve had about ten different tabs open in my browser for the past week, which usually means they contain something interesting and it’s probably time to share them. Here goes:
- Here’s an article about why mirrorless cameras are better than DSLRs; I haven’t actually been shooting much in the last eight months, but it’s always good to refresh my memory. The big takeaway here is about using focus peaking in the viewfinder, something you can’t do on a DSLR unless you’re using Live View.
- This is what it says on the tin: 3 hours of oldies music playing in another room with rainfall and some thunder.
- This is a good time waster website: Rare Historical Photos. The author(s) do a good job of researching the stuff they post, so it’s not the usual Tumblr image dump. See also: Shorpy.
- Austin Kleon, a writer/artist, posts a list of 100 things that made his year better. See also: 31 favorite records. His post on 15 years of blogging contains this excellent insight:
That last line is worth repeating: “Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.”
- I don’t know how I’ve overlooked this for so long, but Hype Machine is an aggregator of new music websites that posts interesting new stuff to listen to every day.
- We saw Soul on Friday night. It was good—as usual, Pete Docter (writer/director of Wall-E, Up and Inside Out) takes a big, adult concept and makes a warm, human-centered movie out of it. My only complaint is that it felt rushed compared to other Pixar movies—a lot happens and they speed through it all quickly. It could have benefited from a little more time throughout to breathe and let the character beats settle. Still—recommended. Here’s the song Just Us, which ran over the credits, but which I really loved:
- Finally, we saw the movie Uncle Frank on Saturday evening: a gay man in New York returns to South Carolina for his father’s funeral in 1973; along with him for the ride are his niece and boyfriend. Finley needs more gay uncles like these.
Driving through the County after a hike with the family yesterday, I spied these two beauties parked in the back of a lot about twenty minutes from the house. Perhaps I’ll stop by in the summertime when I’m driving Peer Pressure and see if the owner is home.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
