Say YES to NNO

The title of this blog post is reminiscent of my all-time favorite T-shirt, which reads "Say No to Negative Thinking".  I reckon it took me a good 45 minutes to stop laughing after I first saw that one.

This post's subtitle should perhaps be "Dancing Cows and Missing Cats".  Because firstly, if you did not see the dancing cow last night at National Night Out (NNO), well, what can I say?  You should have, because if you missed out on this unprecedented cultural enrichment, there's really no excuse.

Unfortunately, he seriously put the kybosh on his own moves when he noticed I was filming.  I don't know why - was he afraid he'd end up on Facebook or something??  Or perhaps on some really dorky subdivision blog??

Now secondly, on the issue of missing cats, let me start by saying that what I really don't like about NNO is that it only happens once per year.  And it only happens for two hours.  Each year like clockwork (or Groundhog Day if you prefer), what occurs is that I show up, take a few minutes to cram some really good BBQ into my chops, and then manage to have time for only 1% of the conversations that I would like to have with residents.  And then a year later, the same thing happens all over again.  If I manage to make the next one hundred annual NNO's in Centerpointe, which has a zero percent probability of happening, I might get to actually talk to everyone.

But included amongst those few with whom I did manage to have interesting chats last night were a small group of the very first buyers in Centerpointe Section 1.  They had some interesting things to say about this area as it was Way Back Then, a whole entire decade ago, which is an unfathomable time frame for many of us (see, I was one of the first buyers in Section 9, the very last section - I'm the late chick to the party, here).  And what happened in those proverbial Early Years still resonates today in some of the effects that we can still see here.

Case in point: the coyotes.  Reportedly, when Centerpointe first commenced construction, this area was crawling with coyotes.  The Section 1 residents reported that they'd listen to them singing at night as they roamed across territory that included the as-yet-undeveloped Centerpointe Sections 2 through 9. 

So the coyotes moved out when the houses moved in.  But not entirely - they're still here, just not according to their original distribution.  I have seen them sneaking into Section 9 even after construction was finished.  And, of course, during the 2-ish years it took for this batch of 75 houses to go up, I would constantly see coyote tracks everywhere in the freshly-plowed dirt.

Coyotes' lingering proximity to Section 9 may be part of the reason why in this thread, "Walnut Pointer" noted what (s)he described as an undesirable situation with feral cats on Walnut Pointe (which is in an older section) and yet I haven't seen a single one of them in Section 9. 

We have one well-cared-for family-pet Tinkerbell-style feline who often runs at large here (we do cherish him) and that's all.  And I've wondered why that is, because usually there are feral cats to be found just about everywhere in urban and suburban areas.  I've wondered if perhaps the coyotes have been taking them out in those neighborhood fringe areas that they can still access, the areas that are still adjacent to the undeveloped lands that still support coyotes. 

It could be the case.  Coyotes do eat rodents, but a feral cat would make a much more desirable meal.  Better bang for the canine buck.  We are cleaned out over here in Section 9.  This might be the reason. 

So there's all that.  In future posts I'll talk more about the potential to have additional NNO-type events, because some residents do want that.  I don't mean large-scale commercialized events such as what occurred last night... 

Gone but not forgotten.

...I mean smaller-scale casual events.  Whatever happened to the Friday evening spontaneous gab-fest at the end of the cul-de-sac that naturally progresses into an unplanned mini-potluck?  One of our Section 9 cul-de-sacs is pretty good at doing that kind of thing already, and another of our cul-de-sacs is making plans to start.  If stuff like that happened, I might actually get to talk to everybody before I die.  So I'll have more on that idea later.