Sale-ing through Saturday

Such stress on a Saturday morning, having to choose between peoplewatching at the neighborhood-wide yard sale, and attending the second birthday party of the Farmers Market at Clear Lake Shores!

So I didn't choose - I did both.

For those of you who are not familiar with this venue, you can find introductory information in this post.  And this is what Marina Bay Drive (FM 2094) looks like in front of it.

They got a couple of snazzy new signs recently.  We're into the period of summer hours now, so the market opens at 8:00 a.m. each Saturday.

General view of the vendors.
This was taken around 8:30 a.m.,
so it wasn't too crazy with crowds at this point.

In my first post about the local farmers markets, I noted how odd it is to have two of them (Clear Lake Shores and Kemah) separated by just three quarters of a mile. 

Would you believe there is now a third one also planned in close proximity?!   About ten days ago, the Bay Area Citizen ran a story about how the Pelican Market, planned for Seabrook, has been put "on hold" for the moment.  

I hope the powers-that-be sort themselves out on this one, because what's going to happen here is that all these little markets are going to end up cannibalizing each other to some degree, which will be counterproductive for both sellers and customers.  Back in 2009, a League City Councilman got interested in migrating the Clear Lake Shores market into League City.  That never happened, and I don't expect it to unless League City invests in the type of public infrastructure suitable to support that and similar types of business-development and citizen-involvement events (why microscopic Clear Lake Shores, population approximately 1,205 persons, can accomplish this type of thing and mighty League City cannot is a topic for another day's editorial). 

I'll leave you with a couple of springtime sights from our flowering Pride of Houston (POH) yaupon hollies.  Because we currently have the only fully-landscaped back yard in Centerpointe's brand new Section 9, we are sorta seeing a "High Island" style wildlife concentration effect here.  For those of you not familiar with High Island, it's a world-famous birding location in far east Galveston County.  It's actually underlain by a salt dome, which has pushed up the surrounding land to an elevation where tree growth is supported.  It's literally an oasis in the Gulf of Mexico's coastal treeless desert, an oasis of which migrating birds take abundant advantage.  We have a micro-scale version of that concentration effect going on right now, with a few birds but mostly an astonishing number of beneficial insects:

The POHs became infested with ladybugs,
which are beneficial because they eat parasites such as aphids.

Yet another.
POHs are well known for their prolific berry production,
and I'm hoping that these new transplants produce a profusion of red berries just as they produced this initial profusion of flowers.

We are in the spring migration period of the Monarch butterfly,
and so we've been visited by many of these majestic critters as well.

Let me answer the obvious question that I get asked frequently:
I use a six-year-old Nikon D50 DSLR consumer package (18-55 mm lens) for most of my photography.  There are plenty of fancier, more expensive cameras on the market, but the D50 is my favorite "old faithful" optical work-horse.