Houston anti-hype

For a number of years after I first moved to Houston, I didn't know any better and I listened to people when they told me not to go outside. 

Houston was where people moved for a low cost of living and great jobs, but that was all it had to recommend it, they said.  Houston was hot.  Humid.  Full of mosquitoes.  They'd give you diseases like St. Louis encephalitis.  Howard Hughes famously said of Houston, "the whole place is just pestilential swamp" and he didn't even live long enough to really see invasive fire ants hit their peak, let alone crazy Rasberry ants.  "Stay indoors," many people said.  "Work hard and then use your savings to fly to a better place if you want to go outside." 

For a number of years, I drank that Kool-Aid.  But then as I got older and wiser, I realized that the people who deferred to Howard Hughes's conclusion had neglected to qualify his quote by noting that he had OCD.  I also learned that, unless we're at the absolute peak of a mosquito hatch-out (which only happens a few times a year), it's simply worth going outside.  Here are a few pics of what I'd be missing these days if I didn't at least step out into my own back yard.

Might as well put the most outrageous flower first:  Hibiscus.

The two bell peppers I added to last night's spaghetti sauce.  We call this intense color "radioactive green", except it's fully natural, the color that properly-grown bell peppers are supposed to exhibit (the photo is not color-enhanced). 

Okra blossom. 

Yet another anole. 

I forget the name of this stuff, but it makes a really cool container plant. 

Mint from the herb garden.  Them's good eatin'. 

Bark shedding from a crape myrtle (unmurdered). 

"Lizard porn!" my teenager snorted and guffawed when she saw this photo.  This is why we have so many anoles in our garden.   

Bat-faced cuphea, in abstractia, sort of. 

Sweet potato vine in recent rain. 

Parent and child cuddled up next to a garden hose on a stacked-stone landscaping wall. 

Newly-planted collards with yesterday morning's dew.  Local grocery stores be damned. 

The sky over Centerpointe Drive yesterday evening at 6:35 p.m.  Did you notice it as you were driving home from your high-paying Houston job??  Or at that point were you still thinking that there was nothing wonderful to experience outdoors in greater Houston??

Smog smut

This may sound strange, but I've always hoped to get stuck in traffic at the top of the south Sam fly-overs to southbound IH-45.  What a photo op that would be!!  I actually have a friend who did get stuck at the very top.  They were driving home during the Christmas Eve 2004 snowstorm - yes, a "snowstorm" (a very mild one) in Houston. 

While I was running madly through the streets taking pics of Houston's first ever white Christmas, my buddy and his family were involuntarily pondering the scene from hundreds of feet in the air... 

...because, by the time they got to the top of the fly-over, the icing conditions were so bad (remember the old mantra "bridges freeze before roads") that all of the traffic simply halted and stayed put for like an hour and a half or something!!  None of the drivers wanted to risk tobogganing out of control down the other side of the fly-over, and who could blame them?  I can't find any published accounts of how tall that ramp is, but it's huge. 

This Texas Freeways site uses the term "Full Stack" to describe that array of ramps, and in the passionate language known only to highway enthusiasts, they note, "Sprawling, high flying ramps, symmetric. Could this be the perfect stack?"  Perfect for taking photos, supposing you have a legitimate reason to stop there. 

Anyway, nine years after that event, I finally got a quasi-chance yesterday when traffic slowed to stop-and-go.  I couldn't get out of my car, but at a dead stop, at least I could point my camera out the window and make an attempt to capture the impressive scene.

So close, and yet so far...

 But for the love of Pete, why was everything so blurry and hazy??  Because someone set Veracruz on fire, apparently.  Dang the luck - I finally get up there, and I'm enveloped in smog and smoke. 

Oh well.  Maybe it will snow again soon.  Not.

Better luck next time. 

 

How to avoid mosquitoes in Houston

Answer:  Schedule yourself around them.  Plan your life so that you intentionally capitalize on those significant intervals during which mosquitoes are not present in our outdoor environment.  Conversely, plan indoor and out-of-town activities for those times when you know they will be at a peak.

Hell on wings.  Screengrabbed from Wikipedia. 

I'm serious.  The mosquito management mistake that greater Houstonians often make is to assume that there's a way to make the mosquitoes bend to their schedule.  We humans (at least, those of us who live in western cultures) assume that we can engineer everything at will, of course. 

But in this case, folks would be better off if they could simply side-step the whole issue.  All the aerial and ground-based spraying in the world isn't going to get us where we need to be, from a quality-of-life perspective.  Our public mosquito control methods may improve the situation somewhat, but they don't make the problem go away.  Not even close. 

Let me emphasize this point in a very practical way.  Do you know what this is??

It's a photo of the sun rising over my suburban neighborhood yesterday morning (Saturday April 13, 2013). 

Why was I outside watching the sun come up yesterday instead of snoozing a weekend sleep-in?  Because several related reasons illustrate why the time to be outside is now:

1. The weather is extraordinary.  Low humidity and highs in the 70's.  It doesn't get any better than this.  Ever.
2. We have not yet had our first mosquito outbreak of the spring season, in part because we've been in yet another drought phase. 
3. A few days ago, the League City area got about 2 inches of rain.  This was our first significant rainfall since December 2012.  What this means is that we are probably about T minus one week away from our first major mosquito swarm.  I saw the sun come up and spent about ten hours outdoors yesterday because there's an excellent chance that a repeat performance will not be possible for me next weekend due to the mosquitoes that will come. 

The next time you hear someone bitching and moaning about Houston's heat and mosquitoes, ask them what they did to capitalize on the last mosquito-free period which, in 2013, happened to have been the period between January 1 and approximately April 20 (wow - almost a four-month mosquito-free period!).  Chances are they'll reply, "Well, not much".  And you can say, "Well, there you go!!  You have to take your opportunities when they come, because they're not going to be there on demand."

Ask them, "Did you do anything with yourselves in the month of March 2013, bubbas??  Because there wasn't a single friggin' mosquito on the wing during the entire month.  And we had no bad weather, either."

Screengrab of historical treatment schedule from Galveston County Mosquito Control. 

This is just the essential nature of Houston.  We have, indeed, been lucky in this respect this year.  Last year, Houston Chronicle was publishing stories about how our first mosquito wave descended by the beginning of March.   Holy crap!  The beginning of March!  And here we are April 14 and there's not a single one of them in sight - not around Centerpointe, anyway.

Happy Sunday.  It looks like it's largely going to be a repeat of yesterday's splendor, weather-wise.  Enjoy the hell out of it while you still can. 

I ain't lyin'.  Here's a screengrab of Galveston County Mosquito Control's current treatment schedule.  As in, there still isn't one. 

Whole-house ceramic tile

You may have spotted an unusual consistency across a half-dozen or so of my recent home design posts:

From a post on choosing a modern pendant lamp. 

From a post on making over an art niche.

From a post on developing an artistic coat rack solution.

From a post about finishing a room that must serve at least four different functions.

From a post about using area rugs as wall art. 

From a post about keeping expensive area rugs clean and free of dog smell. 

Yup.  We have ceramic tile throughout our entire house.  When we placed this order, our builder (Meritage Houston) announced to us that we were the first customer ever to order a house with tile in every single area - every closet, every bedroom, every square inch.

Not only that (and this is critical from a design perspective), it's the same tile throughout.  There are no seams or breaks across the entire expanse of the house.  That kind of visual continuity is really being emphasized in modern home design because it's clean and it visually expands and unifies all spaces, especially in an open concept or greatroom design. 

There's plenty of debate about the use of ceramic tile on the internet (such as this thread), with most commenters apparently coming down on the "no" side of opinion.  Let me explain the rationale for our "yes" decision:

• Ceramic was not my first choice.  I wanted polished concrete, but our builder did not offer that option, and we had ordered so many other changes to our architectural plan that I couldn't see tying the builder in knots by bringing in a third-party contractor for the floors. 

Here in the southern U.S., most suburban homes are built slab-on-grade and so, by default, we end up with gorgeous concrete floors - which we then proceed to cover up with horribly cheap finishes such as nylon wall-to-wall pile carpet!!!  This option shown above is right under your feet and right at your fingertips, supposing you could find a contractor to do the finishing for you.
Screengrabbed from Texas Concrete which is doing business in (where else) Austin, Texas.

OK, polished concrete being off the table, I evaluated my remaining options thusly.

• Natural stone would have been preferable and potentially more timeless, but just about all of the stone that is "financially attainable" for residential flooring is some grade of travertine.  Travertine has the following limitations:  It's soft, it's porous (it will stain unless you have a sealant, which means maintenance), and worst of all, it's almost always got a natural pastel yellowish cast to it. 

I have a good friend who has probably 2,000 square feet of travertine on the ground floor of his large house, and it looks much like this one shown above.  That floor is beautiful in its own way, but it throws yellow tones throughout the entire house.  Yellow would have been utterly incompatible with every color scheme I had planned for our home.  This kind of soft yellow backdrop is pretty much going to constrain you to using neutral and pastel color schemes, and I'm more of a primary-color person myself.  Unbreakable design rule: DON'T mix pastels and primaries. 

Travertine also looks very traditional and I was instead shooting for modern / contemporary / transitional style.

Screengrab above from this site. 

Wood flooring would have posed multiple design problems and burdens: 

• It would have been cost-prohibitive to have wood run through every space in the house.  The c-tile we chose added only $10,000 to the base price which, when you're building a house, is manageable and a tiny percentage of the total mortgage.  A good quality wood flooring could easily have been two to four times that price (I would not have considered laminate or cheap grades of engineered product).  That would not have been a wise investment at our suburban price point. 
• Wood also presents an undesirable color constraint.  I wouldn't have wanted a dark wood on such a massive scale, which meant I'd have to get a light wood, which would also have presented a yellow tone problem similar to travertine. 
• I haven't shown most of this in any of my posts to date, but several of our rooms are dominated by natural wood furniture.  To have wood flooring beneath a bunch of wood furniture would have represented death-by-wood.  Wood overload.  No design contrast or balance could have been achieved. 

Look again at this photo:  How would this room have looked with a wood floor??  Not good.  I already have two wood tones in the four visible pieces of solid wood office furniture.  Without question, I needed a stone-looking floor to counterbalance all that wood.

Also, look very carefully at this overall color scheme.  This wood furniture is throwing all kinds of yellow tone.  What would have this looked like if the floor (supposing it had been travertine) had also been throwing yellow tones?  The result would have been death-by-yellow.  This is one of the most common design mistakes that I see suburban homeowners making - allowing too much yellow into their designs without corresponding tonal counterpoints.  This floor had to be an utterly neutral canvas if the result were to have any kind of sophistication to it. 

The neutral floor has the effect of legitimizing the blonde furniture in particular.  The blonde furniture "pops" against the neutral floor and looks "intentionally blonde" as a result.  If the floor itself had also been yellowish, the blonde furniture would have instead looked out-of-date (it's 20 years old, from back when "natural" oak was popular). 

• We have a fairly large dog and I garden extensively.  Both of us dash through the house with muddy feet.  Wood floors would not have been able to withstand our collective abuse.  One of my previous houses had white oak through most of its first floor, including the kitchen (installed by the previous owner, not me).  Even though it was a commercial grade of white oak, it was an absolute nightmare to maintain that stuff in a wet environment like a kitchen.  We literally had to move out for a week to get it refinished, and the kitchen floor was still visibly wearing out much, much faster than the rest of the house, so where would that have left me in the long run if I had kept that house?  Doing wildly-expensive custom repairs at some point to re-match new sections of kitchen wood to the rest of the first floor.  This is way too much overhead.  Not practical. 

So our final choice basically came down to process of elimination.  In order to achieve the desired durability, color control (again, notice that there are no yellow floor overtones in any of my pics above), cost control, and design impact, ceramic tile was the only sensible option.  We chose as generic a concrete-looking tile as possible, and we chose it in the newer 18-inch size so it would look more in-style over the long term. 

I can't tell you how happy I am that we chose ceramic tile.  Here is my personal myth-buster opinion list in response to the most common ceramic tile criticisms:

1. It's a safety / slip hazard:  In three years, not one of us has slipped and fallen down (except the dog as she's careening madly around corners).  This argument simply doesn't parse in most foreseeable scenarios.  Almost all tract-home suburbanites already have ceramic tile kitchen and bathroom floors by builder-grade default, as well as ceramic tiled entryways.  How often have you fallen down on those?  Not often, eh?  So why would you think it would be a problem in the dry areas your house when it's not an existing problem in your wet areas?  If you're very sloppy in your house, if you let small children drag food around your house and smear it on the floor, yes indeed, you might have a problem with slip hazards.  But I would not foresee a significantly elevated risk under normal circumstances of cleanliness. 
2. It's hard on the leg joints:  We haven't noticed any issues.  Again, most of the leg-work people do in their houses is in the kitchens, which already have c-tile floors.  I tend to wear Tevas or tennis shoes during my marathon cooking sessions, for arch support.  I would do this regardless of how the floor was finished, because I'm old. 
3. It's cold on the feet:  We live on the subtropical upper Texas coast.  A cool floor is a godsend for us.  I believe it helps to keep our home cool during the summer months.  The ground beneath the slab is cooler than the prevailing outdoor air.  Having a carpet on the floor would insulate against that subterranean coolness from penetrating through to the house. 
4. It imparts a cold and sterile atmosphere to your house:  This is only true if you fail to complete your house with area rugs, furniture, drapery, and accessories.  Look at the pics of my house above.  Look at the living room with its 8' x 10' wool area rug.  Does it look cold, sterile, and impersonal? 
5. Your house will be an echo-chamber if all the floors are ceramic:  This is only true if you fail to complete your house with area rugs, furniture, drapery, and accessories.  When you walk into an empty fully-tiled house that has no furniture, yes, it's an echo chamber.  But that's not how it's intended to be lived in. 
6. It would be bad for resale value.  My realtor tried to argue this.  He said, "You know you're never going to sell that house with c-tile in the bedrooms."  My reply was, "You know I've never sold a house without a bidding war on it.  We are just a bit ahead of our time with this one.  By the time we need to sell this place X years from now, solid flooring will be de rigueur, and we will already be in line with the market's expectations."  I've been with my realtor for 20 years and he's handled six of our eight residential transactions in that time.  All four of our historical sales were by bidding war.  Even if solid flooring does not become de rigueur, there is already a sufficiently large buyer pool with asthma and other health conditions that would refuse to buy a house with wall-to-wall carpeting.  They would jump at the chance to buy a "done from top to bottom" place like our Centerpointe house. 
7. Ceramic tile cracks if you drop anything on it.  More accurately, it will chip, but you have to really screw up to have this occur.  For instance, my husband dropped a heavy steel claw hammer from a height of eight feet and it carved a quarter-inch divet in one tile.   It's not something that people notice, although we may eventually get a tiler to replace that tile.  If you have a problem with ceramic tile cracking, then there may have been a problem with your initial installation.   

Anyway, there's lots more I could say in favor of ceramic tile, like how incredibly easy it is to keep clean (massive money and time savings on the cleaning aspect alone), but this post is getting long, so I will close for now. 

Unsupervised children overpower helpless dog

A roving band of children cornered and seriously entertained a loose dog yesterday in the League City, Texas suburban neighborhood of Centerpointe.

It is suspected that the children were between six and nine years old.

Neither the dog nor the children were subject to any obvious control or supervision by hovering adults at the time of the incident.

The dog was rendered blissfully passive as she was alternately rubbed, scratched, and petted.

Witnesses report that the children and the dog also spent close to an hour engaging in games of chase and fetch within the public right of way, also without direct adult intervention, and without the dog being leashed.  The children had no prior knowledge of the dog's training or temperament, but successfully negotiated the play interaction with the animal despite this limitation, as evidenced by their constant screams of delight.  The witnesses refused to identify themselves for fear of social, legal, or regulatory reprisal. 

It is believed that no similar incidence of spontaneous, unchoreographed play has occurred anywhere in League City since approximately 1984, prior to the time when stranger danger paranoia swept American society. 

In the intervening years, normal children's activity has become increasingly criminalized, as evidenced by the case of the Virginia mother who was interrogated repeatedly by police for allowing her children to play unsupervised within their own yard. 

Much closer to home, a La Porte, Texas mother recently made national news when she was arrested and jailed for allowing her two children to play unsupervised on their suburban street despite her defense that she was, in fact, visually monitoring her children from her position in a lawn chair that may have been situated out of the public's direct line of sight.  Her children are the same ages as the children depicted above, and La Porte is located just sixteen miles from League City.

What prompted yesterday's bold demonstration of trust and affection is not known.  However, greater Houston's primary English language commercial news network, local ABC affiliate KTRK-TV, recently distinguished itself by documenting the "free range" parenting movement and showcasing with actual statistics the degree to which "stranger danger" fears are unfounded, and follow-up reporting by independent sources emphasized these facts.  It is possible that some local parenting attitudes are quietly evolving in the face of this compelling information.

League City police are not investigating yesterday's incident. 

Neither the children nor the dog were harmed during the event, although the dog's owners now wonder if her future expectations for affection will become a bit over-inflated. 

Hallowed suburban ground

We in Centerpointe Section 9 passed our final litmus test of "subdivision viability" last night: for the first time ever, we had streets teeming with kids trick-or-treating for Halloween.

The scene near dusk with the first wave of the smallest kids.

It was only around May of 2012 that this section's last spec house sold, which means that for the 2010 and 2011 Halloween nights, there were fewer participants.  Nobody wants to have to navigate their kids around muddy streets, waste piles, mountains of mortar sand, and orange construction fences, so many people simply went elsewhere for our first two formative years.

I had well over one hundred kids and had to turn off our lights before the evening was over because I completely ran out of treats. 

I'm a bit of a radical in handing out fresh popcorn as well as candy.  I always put my address on each bag (house number concealed on this photo but not on the actual bags) so that parents will know where the stuff came from and hopefully will realize that no aspiring Halloween ax murderer would bother to identify themselves this way.  I don't know what parents ultimately think of this idea, but the kids absolutely LOVE it because it's something different. 

I popped eighteen bags of Boy Scout popcorn, with each bag being enough to stuff about three of these zipper baggies.  My house will probably reek of popcorn for the next month! 

As with previous Halloweens in other subdivisions where I've lived over the years, I did notice many, many unfamiliar faces last night.  This is a well-known trend (here also) and it's not always graciously received by folks.  The speculation as to why lower-income people trick-or-treat in neighborhoods like Centerpointe often comes round to the notion that lower-income people can't afford to pass out candy and therefore, if those kids go around in their own neighborhoods, they won't receive much. 

I tend to doubt that.  Have you looked at the price of candy recently?  It's dirt cheap.  To hand out two pieces of candy costs about thirteen cents per child, and that's assuming you buy it in a name-brand store at full price, like I did at the last minute yesterday.  I suspect that most people could swing this magnitude of an outlay regardless of their prevailing socioeconomic status.

I suspect that the real reason is much simpler in many cases: people can walk in places like Centerpointe.  Remember, Halloween is hands-down the single most intensive pedestrian social activity in which we engage as a culture.  Many people get out and walk on Halloween who never set foot outside their houses any other day of the year.  Most kids walk with a few parents or older siblings in "pods" - little groups of people who know each other and travel around together.  It's almost impossible to safely herd a group of over-excited cats, er, kids, in places where no sidewalks are present.  We have sidewalks here and sidewalks don't exist in many lower-income areas.  The impact of that cannot be overstated. 

Regardless of the reason, I certainly wouldn't begrudge those unfamiliar, wide-eyed little faces a helping of goodies.  Including popcorn that I hope their parents realize is safe, like basically all of the goodies out there regardless of whether or not it's prepackaged junk or home-made stuff that's actually much healthier (here is the Snopes article describing how there's never been a genuine random case of kid poisoning via Halloween goodies). 

Bats, birds, and bellies

I had two health-related epiphanies inside of two weeks.

The first derived from a trip my daughter and I took outside of America.  We went to a location where people still tend to get around by (gasp!) foot.  A proverbial pedestrian environment.  After twelve days of largely walking, I was darned near dead.  My knees were swollen and I had to spend some time each day with my legs elevated. 

And here's the unsettling thing:  this happened despite the fact that I'm physically fit.  I'm not the slightest bit overweight.  I go to the gym several times a week.  I have visible muscles.  I do elliptical training, I swim, and I do yoga.  And (as my neighbors will confirm) I do plenty of heavy yardwork. 

But I don't walk very much as a lifestyle component, and so I'm no longer used to it.  (I do walk our dog, but usually not miles at a stretch.) 

The second epiphany came an eighteen-hour window of time late last week, a period in which I'd encountered two different associates, each of whom had recently lost forty pounds.  One of them was one of my daughter's extracurricular teachers, and upon seeing him, I almost said, "Who the hell are you?!" because he appeared so transformed (for the much, much better). 

How did they lose forty pounds apiece, and without really stressing themselves in the process?  By lifting their forks to their mouths less frequently (and with healthier stuff on those forks when they did lift them), and by exercising, including walking.  One guy is a fan of the Clean Living Diet, which I hadn't heard of previously, but it basically appears to be a fancy way of saying "healthy eating".  I also have a girlfriend who reports that she's in the process of losing weight.  She's a fan of the 10,000 Steps program.

So following these epiphanies, I resolved to do more walking. 

The area surrounding Centerpointe is well-suited for walking.  Not only is it accessible with a fair number of sidewalks, it's also highly entertaining, as I found out last night.  Check this out:


OK, so it's my worst cell phone close-up pic yet (you can cut me some slack because it was almost dark when I took it).  But can you guess what it is??  Hint: it's a bird, and there are little pointy bits on top of his head, which you can just make out in this pic despite the grainy-ness.   

It was one of these:


A Great Horned Owl.
Photo from Wikipedia.

He was sitting in one of the towers in the electrical lines (aka the Interurban easement) on the other side of our retention ponds.


It was really quite dark by this time, but I lightened up this photo so that his silhouette would be more visible.

Last night for the first time, I walked south along that easment.  I can't believe I've lived here for two years and never got around to doing that before.  I routinely walk north to the Post Office and to divert into the nearby Pecan Forest subdivision, which has massive trees full of squirrels that our dog loves to watch.  But until last night, I'd never walked south. 

I noticed something else on this walk last night, too.


Bats.  Lots and lots of bats, all feasting on the insects that congregate at the retention ponds.
Yes, another crummy pic, but I tried my best to get some digital evidence just for you, my loyal readers (all three of you).  That nondescript blur with the circle around it is a bat on the wing.

This is a delightful development because of the potential it has to moderate our mosquito population.  I wonder where they are congregating?  I got used to seeing bats when I lived in Austin...


Bats boiling out from under the Congress Street bridge in Austin.
Screengrab courtesy of videocityguide. 

...and I also enjoyed seeing them en masse around Memorial Park.  There's a thriving and closely-monitored colony under the Waugh bridge.  (See also this link).


This is really, really cool!!
You can read the whole story here.
Screengrab courtesy of KTRK.

Immediately I wondered - where are these Centerpointe bats coming from?  Do they have a local roost, or are they part of the Waugh colony?  Obviously if they can make it from Waugh to IAH, they could make it to League City if they wanted to!

Anyway, I'll post more about walking options and associated adventures later.  This is enough for one rambling blog post. 

The cold light of day

This post is dedicated to all the folks who live toward the northeast side of Centerpointe Section 9, none of whom could possibly be sleeping right now.  Promptly at 6:37 a.m., the first six ready-mix trucks arrived...

There's a resident's driveway somewhere behind that line-up...

...and the slab pouring began.

The sun ain't even riz yet!

People ask me frequently if I mind living in a perpetual construction zone.  With about 14 houses under simultaneous construction, Section 9 often feels a bit like Beirut on a bad day.

With all due respect to the people who suffered in this conflict, life in Section 9 at times feels a bit like this - only in reverse, with our stuff going up instead of being brought down.

Beirut photo screengrabbed from:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/07/18/world/18cnd_beirut.html

About 95% of the time, my answer to that question (do I mind living in the middle of this) is "no".  This is the deal we all signed up for when we decided to commission our own houses to be built.  The months (over a year, in our case, as we were in this section first) of the thunderous racket and the blowing dust and the strewn trash and congestion and the running of the right-of-way gauntlet in and out of the neighborhood are all part of it. 

But every once in a while, when there is an unearthly shattering of the dawn, we all look forward to the day when Section 9 is finally completed, and the world will once again be relatively still.