Mutant Deer and Petrified Potatoes

There is a sign along Highway 73 out to Camp Floyd that says, "Frequent Deer Crossing, Next 15 Miles." And I know it's true because there are always a lot of dead deer along the side of the road. I never get a very good look at the dead ones, but sometimes I see some live ones running through the fields--or running across the road. Every time I see one, I say to myself, "What the heck kind of deer is that?" The deer out by Fairfield look like something you would see on an African jungle safari (not that I've ever been on one, but they look like gazelles you see on NOVA specials about Africa). The Fairfield deer don't have regular horns. From what I have seen, it appears that the males have two horns that point backwards. They totally look like gazelles--only with shorter horns. Hmmm, maybe it is some kind of mutant deer that developed as a result of the nuclear waste that's out at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Toole?

Today at Camp Floyd I got to whip out the power drill (my favorite power tool) and fix some of the artifact display cases in the museum. I know I complained about all of the hard labor that Mr. Riccio made us do when we were preparing for the museum exhibit in the spring, but I must admit that I learned quite a bit from him, and I was able to employ some of my exhibit construction skills today. The coolest part about it was that I got to remove the artifacts from the display cases. There is a cool pocket knife that belonged to one of the soldiers. There are some buttons and other uniform decorations, as well as a lot of bullets and percussion caps. The two artifacts I am not too fond of, however, are the potatoes. Yes, "historic" potatoes. Calling potatoes "historic" is another way of saying that they are shriveled up, dry, nasty, disgusting food particles from 1858 that were buried in the dirt for a long time. I decided today that the potatoes have begun to petrify. I have no idea why we have the petrified potatoes on display in our museum. They are totally gross. They are about 1/8 the size of normal potatoes and they are totally black. Unfortunately I had to remove the potatoes today when I was fixing their display case, so I carefully scooted them around using a long screwdriver. I could tell just by softly touching them with the screwdriver that their consistency is nasty to the max. But, in the end I didn't have to actually touch the potatoes, and the artifact cases look really cool. Mark was very surprised at my sweet handyman skills :-)

I think that the potatoes are probably toxic and I bet if someone touched them their skin would turn black and shrivel up.