Fence futility

These homeowners must be wondering if they have been cursed by God.

Centerpointe Drive on the first curve northeastbound from Calder.

For the life of us, my daughter and I couldn't really understand how this happened, other than to acknowledge that it did not appear to be intentional.  There's a crushed utility marker out of photo view, suggesting an object went flying through the fence from the Centerpointe Drive side.   But it must not have been a very large object, because there were no deep tire tracks in the grass, and the shrubbery in front of the fence did not appear to be damaged.  So the whole "whodunit" is kind of ambiguous on this one. 

But this is the very same location where a crash in mid-2010 impacted multiple residential yards.

From the neighborhood newsletter at the time.

Anyway, for whatever reason, once again it appears these folks will be getting yet another new fence installed, before this replacement fence even had a chance to weather.

We lived on the outside of a street curve in one of my previous residences, and I swore I'd never do it again.  We had two people wreck into our yard inside of the three years that I lived there.  One of them was a teenager who lost his license for a number of years for reckless driving (the police calculated that he was doing upwards of 70 mph in a 25 mph zone).  That's reckless driving, not wreckless driving. 

Why the facelift?

By "facelift", I mean the replacement of Centerpointe Communicator's original frontispiece with this one:

Centerpointe's iconic pine tree with a hint of tract home treasury in silhouette.

When I started this thing, I made a mental note to myself that I would mark the occasion of each additional block of ten thousand new blog hits with a bit of e-renovation.  The twenty-thousandth hit actually happened a couple of weeks ago but I just got around to the update yesterday. 

Now, of course, by internet standards, 20,000 viewers is not very much.  But I've intentionally tried to keep the number suppressed because it's my intention to remain noncommercial and because I would hope not to attract the attention of Blogger, which might try to layer in a commercial element if my numbers suggested that traffic is high enough to support their advertising.

I don't intend to sell ads, but because I'm using a free platform, I don't necessarily have control over what end users see on their screens.  Cartoon from this site.

You may wonder how on earth a blog originating in a neighborhood of just 405 single family homes could possibly generate even that much traffic...?! 

The answer is that blogs are inherently non-local phenomena.  I publish information that is intended to be of use to people here in our area, but the same information is also being sought by other Americans in other subdivisions all across the country.  Rodents, fence stain, paint colors, snakes, landscaping challenges - these are issues that all homeowners face, and they are smart enough to glean the answers to their questions from their peers - not from commercial entities whose primary goal is to sell them some products and whose perspectives are warped accordingly.  People want ideas and evaluations, not sales pitches. 

And from the statistical code that is invisibly embedded in this blog, I can see that those people are, indeed, doing just that.  Knock wood, I've got no bot traffic at this point - I'm seeing just the surfings of ordinary Americans looking for answers to common predicaments.  And that's good, because those are the people I intended to serve when I started this thing.  Serve, as in, provide useful information without expectation of any form of reciprocation.  Not make money at their expense.

So here's to the next ten thousand ordinary Americans, whoever they may prove to be.  Bottoms up, under-the-commercial-radar style.
:-)

Better than you think

In significant measure, I blame reluctant Houstonian Howard Hughes: in a fit of OCD-induced mania, he was apparently one of the first famous people to roundly denounce Houston as a "mosquito-ridden swamp", an inaccurate and dismissive perspective now immortalized in the phenomenal quasi-biopic that was produced in 2004, The Aviator. 

This is the Hughes family plot in Houston's famous Glenwood Cemetery (worth a day-trip).  You can't tell from this photo because I was peeking through the bars to get a clear shot, but it's actually surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence, possibly to keep people from defacing his grave out of frustration for the bad existential rap he bequeathed us.  

So pervasive is this attitude regarding the assumed toxicity of Houston's outdoor life that, on June 4, 2006 when a friend and I kayak'd the six miles of Buffalo Bayou from Loop 610 to  Allen's Landing, not only did we NOT see a single other soul on the water, we realized with a chill that we were among the very first modern Houstonians ever to do exactly that!! 

Can you imagine another city in America where a scene like this would be found??  Six million people in this city, and here was a beautiful Sunday on the water in late spring:  NO PEOPLE!!  Mass misinformation had kept everyone from realizing that this recreational treasure was right under their noses.

For the vast majority of you who will never experience the exhilaration of canoeing swiftly down the channel beneath one of the country's most intense freeways, here's a glimpse of IH-45's Pierce Elevated, as seen from the underside.

Proving that great minds think alike, about six weeks following this trip that we made, the alternative rag Houston Press published their groundbreaking (waterbreaking??) expose titled "Dark Water" (a tour de force in Houstoniana), and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership and other local community groups began intensifying their efforts to raise awareness and promote the bayou.  But I digress.

In fact, Houston's outdoor opportunities are more substantial than most folks assume.  Nobody will argue that we must endure the crappiest summer in the entire country.  But EVERY American place has debilitating drawbacks:  the Pacific northwest delivers bone-chilling rain for most of the year.  Ask me about my native northeast, and I'll provide you with twenty-six different terms describing snow.  Much of southern California has great weather, but the smog is so thick that you can't see your hand in front of your face, and if you live there, chances are that you won't be able to go outside anyway, because you'll be too busy working around the clock just to meet your mortgage payments.  I could go on, but you get the point.

Houston's best offerings are found in what most people would consider the off-seasons: spring and fall.  The secret to having a full recreational life here is to schedule yourself to seize the opportunities when and where they arise, rather than assuming that they are going to occur within the framework of some existing seasonal paradigm. 

With this in mind, I was delighted to see SciGuy's headline splashed all over the front page of the Houston Chronicle's online edition first thing this morning: today will be just about the nicest day of the year!!  Finally, someone else who gets it!!  Days like today are genuinely newsworthy. 

My advice: take the time to enjoy the weather and the outdoor opportunities now, before the Mean Season arrives.  Making an effort to do this now, when the opportunity presents itself, will help tide you over as we suffer through those hundred days of air-conditioned doom that will be upon us soon enough. 

And look to the details for delight:  Houston does not have sweeping vistas with mountains and forests, but on the smaller scale, beauty is still found.  With that in mind, I'll leave you with a few scenes that I've recorded within the past few days of after-work outdoor neighborhood ramblings:

Sunset over Centerpointe Drive a few days ago.
They don't get much nicer than this.



Gypsy broccoli satellites flowering. 



A loropetalum flowers defiantly after having had
most of its leaves frozen off in
the Great February Cold Snap.

A perfect Thryallis bloom.

Welcome!

(Updated August 6, 2013)  This blog began in late 2010 as a non-affiliated general information supplement to our subdivision property owners association, Centerpointe POA. 

However, life is what happens when we are all making other plans, and in the intervening years, Centerpointe Communicator has grown to become an out-sized general information and local watch-dog site that has less to do with our little subdivision and more to do with life in greater Houston Texas (particularly in the Bay Area / Clear Lake / north Galveston County portions of it) and American suburban life as a whole. 

If you're a member of our subdivision, please continue to feel free to submit information, local concerns, and post ideas to centerpointe.blog (at) gmail.com because we do still cover those issues.  My only request is that your suggested topics be community-oriented, and that they not promote specific special-interest or commercial objectives (this is a non-commercial blog).  As blog moderator, I do editorialize routinely, especially on political issues, but the focus of subdivision matters is COMMUNITY - you know, that diverse collective entity that arises when a bunch of unrelated people dwell in close proximity and sometimes actually interact on a social basis!

If you are instead reading this as a member of the wider world, American or otherwise, please enjoy the content, which largely deals with all of those little daily predicaments that impact homeowners.  You can find topical tabs in the right-hand column of the blog. 

Thanks for reading!

Sunset from Centerpointe Drive,
November 2010