You are not likely to find something like this in the American consumer market.
That's a standard steel folded dog crate for a medium-sized dog (the crate has a 2' x 3' footprint), and the crate memory foam pad, both tucked into an oversized shoulder bag. In this post, I will describe how I created the bag.
The reason why you won't find this product for sale is that it's a spinal injury lawsuit waiting to happen. In other words, manufacturers most likely won't produce carriers for fear of liability. Even though steel dog crates are designed to fold flat and therefore presumably are intended to be moved from place to place, they are heavy and awkwardly large, and yet the result is that there's nothing on the market (that I have found) in which to carry them.
If you search for a carry bag product in the commercial market, mostly what you're going to find is flimsy nylon portable dog crates, "travel crates", some of which do come with an outer sack for carrying them. But a dog's crate is her castle, and my 45 pound mutt considers hers to be her Linus blanket. She would not do well in a tent-like portable crate. She would chew through it and then there would be no crate at all.
Screengrabbed from Google image search for 'dog crate carrying bag'.
My husband and I are physically fit and therefore it is not a problem for us to carry an oversized tote bag with a heavy load. In the photos below, I will show the sequence of easy steps that it takes to create this item. These instructions assume that you know how to operate a sewing machine, but advanced skills are not required.
To create a sack for a crate this size, you're going to need a good sewing machine (mine is a 10-year-old low-end Kenmore similar to this one), approximately three and a half yards of 56" wide light upholstery fabric, and extra strength thread, what we used to call "coat thread" when I was a kid.
I'm saying "light" upholstery fabric because there are limits to what most consumer-grade sewing machines can handle in terms of fabric thickness and (more importantly) fabric density. If you've got access to a heavy-duty sewing machine, you could perhaps choose a heavier material such as canvas.
This was a textured velvet fabric that I had left over from a home theater drapery project I did many years ago, back when I owned a McMansion with a separate theater room. This is the fabric laid out on top of the crate before sewing. Our dog is very attached to her crate and was made anxious by the fact that I was working with it. She would plop herself forlornly on top of the project at every opportunity.
I cut a 90 inch length of the fabric and doubled it, wrong sides together. Normally when sewing, you would primarily work with right sides together, but I was making this bag in a double fabric thickness.
I don't present a lot of measurements in this post. I mostly made this bag free-form by fitting it step by step to the folded crate and crate pad. The first step was to fold the doubled fabric in half, selvage edges together, in order to determine how deep the "lip" around the top opening of the bag had to be.
Remember to straighten up your fabric before starting this process, making sure that the edges are in parallel and that the bias is on square. We have ceramic tile through our entire house and it makes a very convenient measuring template for large projects such as this.
Here I'm folding down the two edges of what will be the top opening of the bag (the "lip"). In other words, I finished the top edge before sewing up the two sides.
Your main limitation with this project will be what your sewing machine is capable of plowing through, thickness-wise. Mine is just a low-end Kenmore, but I tell you, the thing is a hawse (sorry I can't find a good slang definition to link to that). It'll sew through quite a lot of thickness.
This photo shows the opening "lip" created, with the seam side turned outward, because I didn't want the crate to catch on the edge as I was slipping it in and out of the bag.
Additionally, I had sewed up one side of the bag and then put the crate and pad back in it, in this partially-finished state. For projects like this that do not need to be precise, I find it more efficient to fit as I go, rather than sewing based on measurements that I've made. So for instance, if you use a thicker crate pad, you'd want your bag to be slightly larger than this one so that it would accommodate the extra bulk.
Don't make your bag too tight. There's no reason for that and it will only make it more difficult to insert and remove the crate and pad. The crate has many wiry edges. It will tend to catch on fabric.
Now I've sewed up the second side.
A steel crate is heavy, so I needed big wide thick shoulder straps. I created them out of two twelve-inch lengths of the same upholstery fabric.
I half-folded the wrong sides together like this.
Then I folded over the end pieces so that they could be stitched first.
Once the ends of the straps were sewed, I folded the straps together again, seam edges on the inside, and stitched all the way around each perimeter. The resulting strap is approximately three inches wide, four layers thick.
Then I experimented with placement on the bag, as to what would be the best strap length and position. I decided on this configuration shown above. Again, no precise measurements - I used the tape only to ensure that each strap would be anchored the same distance inward from the sides of the bag.
It was very awkward to sew these straps on using the sewing machine. At this point in the project, the machine was sewing through six layers of this fabric. But it was able to handle the task as long as I proceeded slowly.
Once I got the first strap sewed on, I flipped the bag over and positioned the other strap in the same manner, lining the two straps up by feel. This pic actually shows both straps on top of each other, but you can only see the top one.
BTW, have you ever seen those popular Facebook posts that say "LIKE if you remember this object!" where they showcase a lot of nostalgic consumer products of yesteryear? This object shown above was, in fact, featured in a recent mass posting. When I saw it, I thought to myself, "Like if I REMEMBER this object?! WTF - I'm STILL USING that object!! :-)
I would have preferred to run my straps all the way down the side of the bag for strength, the way better tote bags such as this one are constructed. This tote is by Steele Canvas Basket, which just might be the only remaining manufacturer in America that sells oversized tote bags to the public. Most of them were taken off the market about 15 years ago because of liability fears (so I was told by a prominent manufacturer when I complained about their sudden disappearance). Injury lawsuits, in other words.
However, regarding my strap ambitions, with only a light-duty sewing machine to work with, I opted not to get too elaborate with my design, doing only what was needed instead of going for maximum strength. I don't need to be climbing mountains with this crate bag - I just need it to move the crate from house to car to hotel and back again. As such, I could make do with only minimal engineering.
Selfie in a smudgy mirror. This thing is not going to win any design awards, but it only took me a couple of hours to make and it will get the crate-carrying job done. Not only does it allow me to carry the crate, but it also will prevent the metal edges from scratching the interior side walls of my minivan when it's loaded into the back of it.
Note the visible muscles in my fifty-year-old yoga arms. If you are not physically fit, I don't recommend that you try to carry a big crate like this, bag or no bag. You could, indeed, hurt your back or shoulder. Or both.
Our rear fenceline a few years ago: That's a crape myrtle in the middle flanked by wax myrtles on either side, with a small sage and two loropetalumsin the foreground.
In that "unmurdered" post, I encouraged folks not to "knuckle" (over-prune) their crape myrtles. Houston landscape specialist Randy Lemmon's "Annual Crape Myrtle Massacre" speech remains the gold standard where that kind of advice is concerned.
Fast forward two years and my evidence for the non-murdering approach becomes even more compelling (I think):
Notice the shape contrast between my white crape myrtle in the foreground and common-area purple and pink crapes in the background, beyond my fence. Mine has an over-spilling, softly cascading type of shape whereas those in the background show the "feather duster" habit in which the flowering branches stick straight up and out, the form which is so characteristic of over-pruning.
If all of these crapes in this extended view had been similarly knuckled, the entire assemblage of new leafy growth would stick straight up. There would be no softening element - it would look too harsh. My crape myrtle is in harmony with the others in simply being a crape myrtle. But it's free-form, over-spilling structure lends a more flowing energy that otherwise wouldn't be here.
You'll notice another change relative to my 2012 pictures.
I dropped the height of our wax myrtles by a good three feet because I no longer need them to provide visual privacy. Time marches on and our subdivision is growing up - literally. The trees and shrubs in the green space behind our property have now increased in size to the point where I can maintain our wax myrtles as a more conventional hedge rather than as a collection of towering bushes. That was my original plan several years ago when we first installed them - they were specifically intended to remain responsive to the changing conditions that we anticipated were going to occur beyond our own fenceline. As I said in Landscaping made easy: Part 1, that's the beauty of wax myrtles - you can do whatever you want with them at whatever time. They can be pruned any which way and they will usually thrive, because they are especially versatile that way.
Quote from yesterday's Houston Chronicle (story probably paywalled):
League City's recent resolution rejecting refuge for Central American migrant children violates two landmark civil rights acts, a complaint to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development alleged this week.
Are you having Jornalerosflashbacks yet?! For those of you who don't know the story, just over a year ago, League City squandered hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on losing that unwinnable lawsuit. I don't think that the final figures were ever made public, but it was well into the six figure range according to initial reports. As losers on most points, not only did League City have to pay its own legal costs, but they had to reimburse MALDEF for theirs as well.
This Guidry article cited $357,000, but I don't know if that's the "total-total" or just a portion of it.
Rather than taking care of League City's legitimate business, City Council wastes taxpayers' money on culture warring where it has absolutely no business inserting itself. Here we go again with MALDEF and another special interest group. By this time, MALDEF is well-versed in successful strategies for dealing with the continuing flow of antagonistic crap that emanates from League City, so it will be interesting to see what develops here.
Meanwhile, in the past three or four years, has a single thing of actual municipal value been done with respect to practical issues such as resolving traffic congestion at Five Corners?? Nnnnope. Does this tell you anything about your elected representatives?
Stay tuned for forthcoming info on the November elections. They are the best short-term chance we've got at curtailing at least some of this nonsense.
Here are the positions to be elected. Screengrabbed from this page.
A few pics here to showcase some of our local micro-entrepreneur craftspeople who occasionally sell at the Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market, which unfortunately has a downed website as of this writing, but it's every Saturday morning in Clear Lake Shores... just drive down there and you can't miss it. And/or you can find it pretty easily on Facebook. Happily, most of what this market sells is actual home-grown and home-made food (rather than being a made-in-China trinket outlet posing as a farmers market, which some of them are), but there are also some wonderful local handicrafts among the offerings.
In no particular order...
Kitchen cutting boards crafted by RELEAF using recycled wood. This business has no website that I know of, but you can find the proprietor on Facebook by searching for 'RELEAF'.
Superb artistry. My cell phone pics don't do them justice. Wonderful gift ideas here.
Robin's Cedar Planters, also on Facebook. These are ingeniously constructed so that they are collapsible for easy transport. Most of them will fit into the back seat of a passenger car once folded up. Prices are very reasonable.
I like this pic because it shows how a Robin's planter can be incorporated into a standard existing suburban landscape as a focal point. Screengrabbed from Facebook.
This customer put the planter on casters so that it could be rolled around a patio as needed. For gardeners with limited spaces, these things would be great. They'd also be excellent for strawberry-growing. Screengrabbed from Facebook.
I took business cards for two of these proprietors but I don't have a card for RELEAF.
Remember to check with the market's Facebook page before you go to see which vendors will be present on any given Saturday. Not every vendor attends every market.
My February 24, 2014 post about how Verizon is not delivering guaranteed FIOS speeds got lengthy with updates, so I'm starting a new entry here to describe an apparent recent change in Verizon's tactics where contractually-owed refunds are concerned, because this might be of interest to those of you who really deserve to get your money back.
Past 6 p.m. on any given Friday evening, I've learned to expect this kind of thing. Like many other Verizon customers, we are paying for 50 Mbps, but routinely receive only a tiny fraction of that. The class action lawsuits can't move fast enough for my taste, but in the meantime, I believe we are owed refunds for service not delivered.
Back in early 2014 when my irritation with this issue first compelled me to take up the battle with Verizon, I could call them and say, "You are not delivering your guaranteed service and so you need to credit my bill accordingly" and they would do that. But what I noticed two days ago is that they seem to be developing new and more elaborate stalls and red herrings designed to alleviate their financial obligations, even as evidence of their bandwidth throttling continues to mount.
Let me explain. Friday represented my NINTH service request to Verizon for the 2014 calendar year.
For the first time on this past Friday when I called in, the CSR tried to tell me that my slow speeds were my fault rather than Verizon's.
First they gave it the old college try with the "Your own wireless connection is slow and is causing your problems" routine. To which I reply every time, "I don't use wireless". I normally have to fight with them before they'll believe that, during which time they try to trick me into admitting I'm using wireless (because everyone does, right?), when in fact I have the bluest ethernet cables ever manufactured running to all my machines.
This is not, and has never been, my problem. This is one of the reasons we chose to build our own house - so we could run about two miles of Cat 5 everywhere we wanted.
Having exhausted that possibility, they then proceeded to claim that my speeds were slow because Windows 7 Professional was causing my problem. Humoring them temporarily, I allowed the CSR to commandeer one of my machines and download this third-party software which he believed with all his heart and soul would fix my issue once and for all.
See the yellow squiggles highlighting the check boxes? Those were made by the CSR as he was driving my machine. I screengrabbed this for reference. The product is TCP/IP Optimizer from Speedguide.net.
The use of this product had no effect on anything, however, as Windows wisely seemed to deny it permission to make registry changes, even while running in Admin mode.
But of course Windows was never my problem to start with. But that didn't stop Verizon from trying to toss me a grenade a short time later.
Um, no.
In a word, NO.
"Grenade" as I understand it is a term from back in the computing dark ages. A "grenade" is a routine inserted to blow up a running process. If I had not replied back, they would have cancelled my service request with no further action on their parts.
I've noticed this more and more with Verizon - if they text you and you don't reply, they close your ticket irrespective of whether your problem has been solved. If they phone you and leave a message and you don't reply back immediately, they will automatically close your ticket. Of course, they tend to phone during business hours when normal working people have restrictions on when they can place personal calls.
In order to get my refund this time, apparently I have to follow through with a technician service call that is scheduled for tomorrow (Monday). Apparently one cannot simply ask for refunds any longer based on the strength of the evidence. Apparently one must now endure considerable hassle which seems to be designed to make pursuit of compensation not worth one's while.
Sigh.
As you contemplate that, take a look at this three-minute video posted by another disgruntled FIOS user just 24 hours before I made my latest service request. As I said at the outset of this post, the evidence supporting intentional manipulation continues to mount (HT: this Consumerist article).
Do you ever have to make do with whatever food items you can cram into your briefcase, no space for more, no refrigeration, no time? If you work in a place like east Harris County, you might find yourself in this undelectable position. For while it is developing rapidly, right now it's a service wasteland, a food desert. There's a Baytown Seafood on Sheldon Road. There's a Subway in a gas station a short distance south of Baytown Seafood, but you can forget about getting in there - the place is constantly mobbed by the starving masses who have no other local food options. So when my service contracts take me to this particular corner of Rome, I do like most other local working people do: I brown-bag it.
But I do it in style. Just because you're eating out of a briefcase doesn't mean you have to choose junk food.
Here's my line-up:
St. Dalfour French Bistro Three Beans with Sweet Corn - Surprisingly good for a product that looks like it's packaged in a cat food tin. Available at some Whole Foods stores some of the time (hard to get). 280 calories.
Wild Garden Traditional Hummus - Also surprisingly good for a packaged food (congrats to the Jordanianswho produce it). I got hooked on these after finding them in United Airlines Tapas snack boxes, although I've been told that UA has since switched brands. Available in 3-packs at HEB if you can find them; Amazon's unit price tends to be surprisingly high - 2x to 3x grocery retail. 67 calories.
Stacy's Pita Chips - Pita chips are relatively new to the market and most of them are so overloaded with salt that I literally cannot eat them. This brand seems to be more balanced (I'd vastly prefer whole wheat, but beggars can't be choosers). I don't know where to buy locally - I order single-serve bags by the case from Amazon. 200 calories.
KIND Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt bar - As near as I can tell, this is the lowest-sugar bar this manufacturer offers. Available in most grocery stores although prices vary widely. 200 calories.
Perrier. I find that Sam's Club has the best local prices. Zero calories.
Obviously I'm not the lightest lunch eater at 750 calories for that little haul. I actually prefer to eat my biggest meal at mid-day and have a smaller dinner, which is supposed to be the ideal strategy for weight management.
Anyway, I thought I'd post this as a counterweight to all the "excitement" about the dual Baskin Robbins - Dunkin Donuts that opened either today or yesterday in League City, depending on which published source you believe.
Photo of the new establishment screengrabbed from Facebook, where it had about 450 "Likes" as of Friday evening.
Seriously? Diabetes and obesity continuing to climb in America and people are excited by the prospect of more side-by-side glorified sugar outlets? This is newsworthy both north and south of the Galveston County line? Or it it all just clever marketing hype? Pardon me for being my usual fit and healthy (knock wood) party-pooper self, but compared to eating mostly empty carbs, you'd feel a lot better after a 750-calorie feed of nuts, legumes, and grains such as what is shown above, even if they are a bit more processed than ideal. But such is life when temporarily lived out of a briefcase.
I figured you might need photographic evidence, so here it is:
West Walker northbound at League City Parkway. Strong northwest wind, as evidenced by the flags.
Yyyyup. That's a frontal boundary. In mid-July. In Houston.
If I'd had the time this afternoon, I would have listened to the air traffic control chatter via LiveATC, because I bet there were some "WTF?!" comments from the pilots. Commercial traffic has been landing to the north for several hours now.
I attempted to find out when we last had a significant cold front in July (as opposed to one of those pathetic waves that drops the temp 1 or 2 degrees). This NOAA site suggests that it may have been as long ago as 20 years. Here's hoping you can go outside for at least a few minutes to enjoy the rareness of it.
Most League City residents have contributed to illegal immigration through their own economic activity. We can't all reap the benefits of the cheap construction provided by the 50% of Texas tradesmen who are undocumented and then turn around and disavow all responsibility for the corresponding problems that demand-driven illegal immigration predictably brings to our doorsteps.
Here's a join-the-dots example showing exactly how these moving parts all work together. I chose this example below because this speaker voluntarily elected to self-identify in public and therefore it can be reasonably assumed that she claims no expectation of privacy with respect to her personal identity or her views on this subject.
But where was Ms. Vickers' objection to third-world illegal immigration when those same people were most likely building her own house? Publicly-available CAD records (PDF link) suggest that she and her husband purchased their 2002 suburban masterpiece directly from builder D.R. Horton, the same D.R. Horton who made the news shortly thereafter for its treatment of illegal alien residential construction workers.
I've read other news stories in which major builders proudly disavow any hiring of illegal aliens. But of course they hire subcontractors en masse, and they typically don't check the immigration status of anyone working in the resulting supply chain.
I am by no means singling out Ms. Vickers as disproportionately responsible for contributing to the local demand for illegal labor. I suspect that, if a thorough analyses were done, every local homeowner would share a roughly equal responsibility. Including the bulk of our City Council.
Every one of those elected reps who voted for that unenforceable resolution... every one of them appears to hold title to exactly the kind of suburban tract home that we can reasonably assume was likely built using a significant component of illegal labor. But was there a single one of those representatives who was overtaken by the strength of their principles at the time of their home purchase and said, "Oh no, I cannot in good conscience follow through with this purchase because I know from simple statistics that this house was likely built in significant part using illegal labor, and I have taken a strong moral stand against contributing to the support and economic stimulation of illegal immigration in any way."
Apparently, not a one of them experienced an actionable twinge of conscience, a conscientious objection, at the time their sales closed. But when there's an opportunity for political grandstandingthat invokes those same anti-illegal-immigration principles that they'd prefer not to see violated, that is another story.
This is the basis for my objection to what League City has done here: Those who live in glass tract houses should not throw stones. Other commentators have invoked a humanitarian justification against the resolution, but I don't think that the analysis needs to progress beyond this simple bit of common sense that I'm presenting here.
I am a legal immigrant. It took me 13 long, difficult years to follow the procedure and finally attain the rights of American citizenship. During those 13 years, I watched millions and millions of illegal immigrants simply walk into the country across an open border. I would fervently like to see the federal government secure the border once and for all and stop all this madness.
Given those personal circumstances of mine, you'd think that I would be counted among those who are the most angry at the specter of tens of thousands more undocumented people streaming across our border at this time. But the situation is not that simple because I recognize my own contribution to creating the conditions that brought us all to this unfortunate juncture.
Before the illegal?? labor-intensive transformation:
Our subdivision lot in League City, prior to the start of construction. How many of you have had the amazing privilege of building your own home? It's a remarkable experience, especially if you're able to take a base architectural plan and transform it utterly into an almost-unrecognizable one-of-a-kind custom home, as my husband and I did with ours.
A hard hat, buckets of fresh joint compound, but no worker:
I have almost two thousand pictures of our home in progress, but only three of those pictures contain any evidence of human presence, and those three photos show no faces. That's because every time I would show up with my camera to document each day's building progress, the tradesmen would hide themselves away until I was done. I was always very careful to be discrete and respectful about what I was photographing, because it's not proper behavior to frighten vulnerable people, especially when they are working fourteen hours a day seven days a week on your behalf.
Nameless, faceless, and furtive:
It was plenty warm out that day, as the mason in the blue T-shirt indicated by not wearing a jacket or even a long-sleeved shirt. But his low-skilled helper felt compelled to pull up his hoodie so his face could not be seen. Why might he have done that??
I have absolutely no evidence that our builder or its subcontractors used any illegal construction labor. I can only report the behaviors that I saw and the statistics that characterize the industry, those being that a full 50% of Texas' construction workers are undocumented (PDF link).
I signed our home build contract. I put up all that money that was used to stimulate additional demand for the services of those construction workers, including the very young man shown above who felt compelled to hide his face. We have most definitely made our own suburban beds on the illegal immigration issue. Now we have to lie in them.
Good advice:
League City's building inspectors did not suffer fools gladly during our construction process, but this is good advice for everyone - Ms. Vickers, City Council, and everyone else who forms an opinion on our current illegal immigrant issue: WAKE UP! Wake up and see your own wider role in our collective situation.
Instead of devoting energy to the actual needs of League City, Council is squandering resources on the kind of culture war activity that cannot, by definition, lead to a measurable benefit for taxpayers.
Even Judge Ed Emmett used the term "grandstanding", for crying out loud. For those of you not familiar with local politics, Judge Emmett is not even our county judge, but he's a respected local Republican leader, and people in greater Houston pay attention when he speaks.
Notice the way the news media refers to League City as "this Houston suburb", in a pejorative sense. Not a real city in manifested character, more like a red-headed stepchild of the suburban sort.
Trying to usurp that authority makes them look like foolish foot-stompers. A lot of public resources have been squandered on previous attempts, but both the regulatory framework and the case law are settled.
And whose fault is it that we have this line-up in office? Emphatically, ours.
Election results from 2011. which is when four of the current seven were elected. Note the "total votes" column.
Screengrabbed from this page.
Voter turnout during that election was a memorable 9.47% (PDF link). Voter turn-out was naturally a bit better in 2012 (PDF link) because the other three Council positions were voted during the general election, when people were already at the polls for federal voting purposes. But even with a federal election drawing people to the polls, look at the number of undervotes:
I believe that a lot of LC residents had no idea of who these people even are, and so they didn't vote for any of them. The effective voter turn-out was closer to 30%.
I know what a lot of residents are going to want to say in response to this - they're going to claim that it's very difficult to obtain enough detail about a local candidate to make an informed voting decision, and therefore they don't vote for Council members at all. This response is understandable - I myself feel that I went into the 2012 election as an ignorant voter, despite my candidate research efforts. It is hard to get relevant information. We don't even have a real newspaper in League City despite the fact that our population is rapidly approaching six figures, so it's very difficult for facts (as opposed to campaign propaganda) to get disseminated.
The juggernaut that hasn't yet come into its own. Arguably, we are large enough to do better than what we have been.
Screengrabbed from Google.
Our local blogging community is even worse than our newspaper situation, as most bloggers activate only within the context of narrowly-defined personal agendas, and then quickly grow dormant once any given election cycle is concluded, leaving nobody to monitor what's going on most of the time. And then what happens?? We elect our local reps by partial ignorance and accident, and League City ends up in the international news portrayed as child haters and Constitutional rights violators.
My husband likes to tell me that I'm a crappy political blogger and that I should stick to the suburban lifestyle content that was my original intent and which continues to be my forte. To which I reply that I don't do political commentary because I envision myself to be any good at it. I do it because there isn't a single other soul out there who is lifting a finger in this regard. If I give it a shot, hopefully that meager effort will help contribute to a tipping point of awareness which will inspire more people to make contributions (a scenario that becomes increasingly likely by simple statistics as our population continues to expand).
I've leave you with a meme-type graphic that I doctored in order to emphasize my bottom line. There aren't enough sufficiently-informed League City residents electing our local reps, but here's what transpires when people choose not to vote.
How many of you feel like you've had sausage involuntarily thrust into your voting mouths after watching LC's ongoing tedious series of guns, God, and grandstanding efforts?
Let me explain the graphic in a bit more detail. In my opinion, Canada is the world leader in double entendre, where the practice is considered acceptable and even desirable within the public discourse. I've modified the original intent of this humorous offering from Fairvote.ca, and the resulting communication is rather shocking by American public standards, but you get the underlying message loud and clear, don't you? And that's the point.
