Halloween downpour

My two rain gauges registered right around four inches, which was enough to turn Centerpointe's dry-bottom storm water retention ponds into very wet ponds.

And where there's water, there will be Great Egrets. 

And ducks.  This always amazes me... where do they come from, and on just a few hours' notice??  364 days a year, there's no standing water here, but as soon as it appears, so do they. 

The 747 jumbo jet of the local bird world.  Very photogenic but also very camera-shy. 

The same conditions that produced that remarkable deluge also gave us one of the best sunsets of the year.

Water Street (name coincidental to the day's events) in Webster.  Picasa had no processing suggestions for me on this one - it was optimized as-is. 

NASA Road 1 looking toward The Hop nightclub in Webster. 

My photographic attention was pulled in three directions simultaneously, as we celebrated candy-time with the kids.  Hope everyone had a good one.

My favorite costume of the evening.  Notice the intentional head lean to amplify the overall effect.  Given the overwhelming popularity of The Walking Dead, I expected to see more zombie-like costumes last night, but they were few and far between.  I guess that zombies are a bit intense for the Superman set. 

Annual Clear Lake Gem and Mineral Society show

This is a placeholder post in part, because the event it describes has already occurred for this year, but I'll refer back to this summary when future annual events roll around.

The Clear Lake Gem and Mineral Society show took place the weekend of February 23, 2013.  I'm mentioning this because it's really a nice event but it receives virtually no publicity.  Of those internet sites that do mention it, there are no photos and little to indicate what the show comprises.  For instance, here's the official show page, a recent Galveston Chamber announcement, and an Ultimate Clear Lake blurb from three years ago, but there's not that much in the way of additional info on the net at this point. 

It's held every third or fourth weekend in February at the Pasadena Convention Center.  For many years now, my family has referred to this as "rock show weekend". 

The Pasadena Convention Center is an older, smaller facility but it's really a neat place and immaculately maintained, almost as if it were frozen in time. 

  The participants run the gamut from rock and mineral dealers...

...to jewelry-makers, both suppliers and finished product purveyors, to fossil dealers...

Regardless of your lifestyle, there's always room for ammonites. 

...to special artistic displays...

The "rock food table" created by a couple from Robstown. 

...to interactive opportunities...

Breaking open a geode - what's behind this ancient door #1?

...to activities for the kids...

There is usually also a Scout table. 

...and also collecting opportunities for kids.

Three for two bucks... that can't even cover the dealer's costs.  Try finding the likes of that on eBay. 

Of course, I can never resist the kids' tables.  Here's what I picked up at this most recent show so that I can give them away to neighborhood kids (my perpetual ulterior motive:  the promotion natural sciences education).  It's good to take a picture like this so that the kids will have something to refer to as they learn to match the name to the specimen.

I don't have access to a typical annual dealers list, and there doesn't seem to be one on the internet.  I was only able to grab a small number of cards during the show this year.  The exhibitors are mostly from Texas and here are those represented by the very few cards I grabbed:

• Bitterroot Rocks and Minerals (no website found)
• Galveston Bay Mining Company (eBay store)
• Xquizit Minerals
• Lone Star Meteorites (eBay store)

One regular exhibitor who was conspicuous by his absence this year was independent jewelry artist Walter Cooling of Uvalde.  His booth was set up, but he was not present on Sunday when we attended.  Dealers adjacent to his table reported to me that they had no information on where he was.

I can't find a webpage for Mr. Cooling, but here's a screengrab of some of his designs from this site.  There's an Etsy reference for WC Designs but nothing active. 

I had acquired a couple of Mr. Cooling's works over the years (always a fan of local independent micro-enterprises).  Mrs. Cooling and I had several long chats at previous shows about their husband-wife artisan business model.  She would hunt for rare mineral specimens on the internet and procure them, and she would also handle much of the selling, thus allowing her husband to concentrate on developing and executing his high-end but reasonably-priced designs.  I now see from internet announcements that Mrs. Cooling passed away a few years ago. 

Anyway, there's some info on yet another great local recurring event.  Even if you're not into rocks, minerals, fossils, and jewelry yourself, it's a great place to stock up for future gift-giving to either free-ranging neighborhood children or for more formal events such as holidays and birthdays. 

Houtopian resources

Just a quick, sloppy post here to convey two related bits of information, given that one of them takes place tomorrow.

(1) If you ever get the chance to visit Houston's Green Building Resource Center, it's well worth a drop-in. 

1002 Washington Avenue, a short distance off IH-45 near the city core.  Public Works and Engineering does a lot of city permit administration out of this location. 

Not only is the building itself an absolute marvel of modern architecture, they have all kinds of cool stuff that's interesting to see whether or not you consider yourself to be concerned with "green" initiatives.  I'm mostly a fan of innovative and efficient living products, designs, and methods rather than "greenery", but it so happens that "innovative" and "green" often go hand in hand. 

There are displays of various building materials and techniques...

...all very artfully arranged, plus there's actual art all over the place as well, and I'm also a fan of art... 

...especially if the art has a local connection and is designed to serve a specific purpose. 

Here's some art of the wall-hanging type, made to look like graffiti, but you recognize it, don't you?  You've seen that configuration before.  Cross-referencing is king.  In this case, king of the highway.

Sometimes I find displays of neat stuff in there that I wouldn't otherwise stumble across...

...such as this device by Gro Pod, which could be made to work well in microscopic back yards such as we have in Centerpointe, where folks might like to do a bit of gardening but don't know how to squeeze it in.  And not only that, I believe this device might be available for less money than you'd pay at a retail big-box home improvement store for an analogous product. 

Anyway, my mention of these exhibits is a prelude to the fact that:

(2) The Houtopia festival is tomorrow from 12 pm to 6 pm.  Booths, live music, all that jazz.  Here's a YouTube embed describing it, with hat tip to Houston Green Scene on Facebook. Blogger, in all of its infinite Google-driven glory, is unable to index this on YouTube, so this might come across as an improperly-sized embed:

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).