Take a few minutes for medical literacy

Last night when I was walking home from the LC holiday parade, I was reminded of the words of Stanford ageing specialist Dr. Walter Bortz:  "Old people don't need to take a pill - they need to take a walk." 

If you count the parade itself, the muster point for which was at Kilgore's Hardware, then my dog and I walked about two and a quarter miles - which is only about half as much as is considered a healthy daily amount.   If I had also walked to Kilgore's at the beginning of the evening, then I would have been closer to the ideal. 

I've come across a couple of related health perspectives lately and I thought I'd share those as a follow-on.

First, this piece called "How doctors die", which describes the fundamental differences that medical literacy can make in managing the dying process.  NYT did a shorter story with the same title about a year after the original was published.  

Second, this provocative piece by Sanjay Gupta in which he describes the substantial moral hazard created by health insurance, in that it furnishes a powerful disincentive to healthy living.  That one resonated deeply with me because I know from personal experience just how true it really is.  People often ask me how I'm able to muster the motivation and the discipline to keep eating well and exercising almost every single day of my life.  My reply: "Piece of cake.  I grew up in a country where it is difficult ranging into impossible to access socialized medical services.  I learned to take care of myself because I knew without question that nobody would be there to catch me if I voluntarily opted to fall on my own lazy ass."  Imagine where America could be today if its people had been given an opportunity to embrace such a valuable lesson.  Instead, they languish and pay out the nose for HMO coverage, the costs of which are not sustainable anyway. 

Third, I had an interesting conversation with a new doctor I recently decided to try out.  I did something that few health clients (I detest the word "patient") ever do - I asked for the best available definitive perspective on breast cancer risk in women of my age group so that I could make an informed personal decision about whether I want to follow current detection protocols or basically take my chances based on the statistics. 

Let me explain the basis for that question in more detail.  In the past number of years, I've watched a surprising number of female friends and associates get sucked into the industrial medical machine whereby they go through a living existential and financial hell of surgery only to find out that some entirely ambiguous speck on a mammogram was nothing more than an ambiguous speck. 

And each time one of them tearfully confesses their story to me, their astonishment is replicated when I tell them that X number of other women recently told me the exact same story, and every bit as tearfully.  That many women are getting shuttled through this process?!  It's hard to believe. 

It raises the question as to whether the implied chances of cancer are real or not - or even if they are, whether there's a significant risk even in many of those cases where certain indications of cancer are found.  In his essay "The Picture Problem", Malcolm Gladwell wrote (emphasis mine), "In 1987, pathologists in Denmark performed a series of autopsies of women in their forties who had not been known to have breast cancer when they died of other causes. The pathologists looked at an average of two hundred and seventy-five samples of breast tissue in each case, and found some evidence of cancer—usually DCIS—in nearly forty percent of the women. Since breast cancer accounts for less than four per cent of female deaths, clearly the overwhelming majority of these women, had they lived longer, would never have died of breast cancer."

Forty percent?!  The plot, like the breast tissue, thickens.  Something is clearly not adding up here. 

So anyway, I related these concerns to this new doctor.  I made the observation that I was no longer certain that what my previous health care providers had recommended was really in the best interest of my personal health.  I suspected instead that the protocols had more to do with minimizing liability throughout the entire medical supply chain than in minimizing the risks for me as an individual. 

In response to my question, the doctor directed me to the National Cancer Institute's Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool.

Pretty simple, isn't it??  I find it very telling that in the decade that I've been advised to follow standard cancer screening guidelines, not a single health care provider ever volunteered that this government-endorsed tool existed.  I had to ask for it. 

Screengrabbed from this page. 

That tool is definitely a start, but it's important to note how much personal information it does not capture and incorporate into its risk calculation.  There's no place for entering the amount of exercise a woman does per day, other lifestyle factors, diet, or her body fat percentage.  And in my case, all off those factors depart substantially from the unhealthy American average.  And they all influence the rate of cancer. 

Speaking of health, I've got a new cauliflower coming up this morning.  It's still a baby right now (and it's one of the green varieties, which I haven't tried to cultivate before).  I started planting my cruciferous crop earlier this year, hoping to extend the growing range.  So far I've harvested two broccolis, both of which were sweeter than average for reasons unknown to me.

Moral of that story:  Ask questions.  Assume nothing.  There is no substitute for good medical advice as it applies to your specific health situation, but there also is no substitute for your own brain in the process. 

I'll leave you with my favorite Dr. Bortz clip.  It's only three minutes long, and it's much more candid and unscripted than some of the other longevity-promoting material he has produced.  It is the clip in which he makes that memorable statement, "Old people don't need to take a pill - they need to take a walk."  Each one of us must make the best health management decisions we can in collaboration with our doctors, but I think that Dr. Bortz's message is worth contemplating within the greater context of our lives and our society.

Dr. Ned and Fay Dudney Nature Center

What is this place, and who are the people it's named after? 


You've no doubt noticed the gate and the sign while driving down the stretch of FM 270 between Five Corners and NASA Road 1.

It's a 148-acre tract of largely wetlands adjacent to Clear Creek, roughly that elongated blob you see at photo center. 

League City's web entry describes a bit of the history of the property, but not much about its namesakes. 

Dr. Ned Dudney was a local physician who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of League City.  He was also instrumental in the formation of the hospital now known as Clear Lake Regional Medical Center, which holds a special place in my heart as it's where I gave birth to my daughter. 

In a nutshell.  Screengrabbed from this League City Historical Society newsletter. 

League City's current website is rather discordant, hosting this page which contains almost no information on the park, which in turn does not link to this page which does, but which is curiously anecdotal.  You'll notice that they make reference to the fact that this property was formerly called "the Davis tract".  That seems a propos of not much, until you consider that, at one time several years ago, League City had a loose ambition to acquire and link multiple wetland tracts into a larger system, of which this was only one tract, hence being called out as the so-and-so tract as distinct from the such-and-such tract.  My memories of those ambitions are both faint and incomplete because I was neither a League City resident nor was I extensively involved at the time.  But I do remember hearing about a larger plan along these lines. 

If you peruse Googlemaps, you'll see a number of analogous vacant tracts sandwiched between built-out areas and Clear Creek, including this tract north of the Clear Creek Village subdivision. 

There's not much that can be done with these tracts from a "developmental" standpoint.  They're situated partly within the Clear Creek floodway and almost entirely within the 100-year flood zone, and are seriously encumbered by their status as jurisdictional wetlands.  Therefore, the idea to obtain and connect a string of them as parkland made perfect sense. 

You're going to get a rude shock in a diversity of financial and logistical senses if you try to build something adjacent to the likes of this.  Pic taken from one of the Dudney Center's bird blinds.  Those are white pelicans in the background. 

Like I said, I don't know what happened to that original plan.  New Mayor, new Councilmembers, who knows??  If anyone knows, please email me a short-version summary and/or some links.  This issue has been tied up in the hike and bike trail plan, the evolution of which I'll need to address separately in a future post.  Meanwhile, let me leave you with a few non-spoiler pics I took at the Dudney center late yesterday afternoon.

I hadn't been to the place in a few years, and I had forgotten that it's a good place to walk dogs, which are permitted in the park as long as the waste and leash ordinances are observed. 

The main trail is wonderful - wide and paved in concrete, which makes it suitable for kids on tricycles, people in wheelchairs, parents pushing strollers, etc.  This one low section is finished as an elevated boardwalk. 

Yesterday afternoon was not the most peaceful time to take a walk, however, as Wings Over Houston was rehearsing in preparation of today's events!!

As usual, I was largely interested in macro photography.  The park contains quite the diversity of native and invasive plants.  It's adjacency to Clear Creek means that a lot of suburban seeds get washed into its boundaries and take root. 

Bumblebee on goldenrod.  Not to be confused with honey bees, the kind that gets Africanized, although they were certainly present, too. 

This guy above may be some species of Leschenaultia, which is apparently also known as a big black hairy fly (ya don't say!).  I don't know what they do for a living, but they were present in abundance. 

Urban hike Houston

Yesterday was a typical gorgeous Houston spring day, and so the husband and I went on a three-mile ramble from the Children's Museum by Houston Garden Center (not the retail outlet of similar name) and then through Hermann Park, past the Houston Zoo, alongside Texas Medical Center, and then we wound our way through the Rice University campus before looping back and having lunch at Za Za's outdoor patio  (service was slow but the food was worth waiting for... I had the "One Hot Chick" sandwich).   Here are a few pics from that pedestrian patter.

This is on my list of the six thousand or so local attractions that I have not yet seen despite living in greater Houston for about twenty years now. 

We didn't go inside (and I don't know if it was possible to do so yesterday), but we checked out the associated rose garden. 

Hermann Park, heading toward the zoo.  This is what properly-maintained live oaks are supposed to look like.  Compare to a few of League City's neglected examples here. 

Lovett Hall, Rice University.  Hard to believe anything in Houston is one hundred years old. 

Rice can be absolutely stunning during azalea season, but we are having such horrible dry weather (again, grrr) that this year's display seemed a bit underwhelming to me.  Here's a close-up of some well-formed blooms, but most of the azalea vistas were not up to the calibre of what I've seen at times in the past. 

Speaking of this interminably dry weather, some of Rice's younger trees were wearing these creative diaper-like devices, where water could be added to then slowly seep into the root zones. 

I want one of those!!  I particularly like that the "roots" of the sculpture are poking up through the pavers.  It has removeable stainless steel dishes set into it, which presumably are bird feeders and waterers.  Alice's Garden, Rice campus. 

After hiking this Hermann loop, we did stop by the 2013 Sustainable Living Festival at Market Square Park in downtown Houston, which I mentioned in this previous post.  We were generally underwhelmed by the festival - it was more hype than happenin' - but we saw a few neat things in the process of visiting that area of town.

This is the Courthouse district.  What a stunning building (and also one hundred years old).  And those live oaks!

This is one of those older areas of Houston that offers a juxtaposed experience of disorder and order, crime and prosperity, wealth and poverty.  A very expensive stainless steel art-inspired city bike rack is home to a frame picked clean. 

A short distance away and in rather sharp contrast, here's one of the new Houston bikeshare B-stations.  I wonder how this effort will pan out?  We did notice that these bikes have been rigged to minimize the chances of stripping.  Good thing. 



Generally we found SusFest to be too loud, too crowded, and too de-focussed, with not enough emphasis on the nuts and bolts of sustainable or innovative living.  

In other words, it was more a party than a presentation.  It's nice that they had vendors selling clothing, jewelry, and skin care products, but what's that stuff really got to do with sustainability on the scale of a lifestyle?  Maybe I'm just spoiled by the high quality of the outreach at 1002 Washington, but I'd love to see these guys set up a real show with cohesive and organized sourcing displays and vendor participation in a facility properly designed to handle the flow of visitors to such an event. 

I did enjoy these artistic interpretations of trash cans which a number of high school teams had entered into a city contest. 

But the real show-stealer at Market Square Park yesterday was actually this playful pooch whose owner indulged him in a game of water spray.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Incredible Levitating Dog!!

He was intent on catching that water stream in his jaws...

...and was willing to engage in whatever contortion was required to achieve his goal!

Get outdoors and enjoy the hospitable Houston spring weather.  You have to carpe diem while you can around here, because summer will be bludgeoning us soon enough. 

Pedestrian Pete

A man after my own heart, to be sure.  Pedestrian Pete leverages his unique personal history and name recognition to draw attention to the abysmal condition of Houston's sidewalks.  This FOX clip (embedded below) is fun to watch.  Perhaps I should develop a sidewalk-promoting alter-ego, too, instead of merely ranting about it ad nauseum.  Oh, wait - this blog is my alter-ego. 

Houston weather, traffic, news | FOX 26 | MyFoxHouston

World's narrowest sidewalk?

I've had plenty to say in this blog about our sidewalks - the way ignorant homeowners treat them, what people do to push back, the price we Centerpointers collectively paid for the rare and locally-popular segment of sidewalk along West Walker Street, which I refer to as the Bridge to Nowhere because it doesn't currently connect to much else, the consequences of our society's general lack of sidewalks, the specific growth impediments caused by League City's lack thereof, and impacts of threatened future failures to include sidewalks. 

Today, for a new twist on an old theme, we have this gentleman to ponder.

Out for a stroll during rush hour - but that's a narrow curb he's balanced on, not a sidewalk.  Because there are no sidewalks here, either.   
League City Parkway westbound before West Walker. 

Being a student of human nature, I watched this gentleman tightrope all the way down League City Parkway to his destination which was apparently the Gas Dude, and then all the way back eastward to an unknown location - never leaving the curb, the flat top of which must be all of about six inches wide.  No shoulder to the road and cars rushing by at about 50 miles an hour within about three feet of him.  As he walked with an apparent beverage raised in his right hand. 

In terms of self-preservation, this strikes me as an exceptionally poor strategy, but he seemed to come through it OK.  This time, at least.  I still think that my pic of those young people walking in the traffic lanes across FM 270's Clear Creek bridge with their backs to oncoming vehicles is the most hazardous non-sidewalk scenario I've photographed to date, but this one is perhaps a close second. 

Resolution road blocks

It's almost the witching hour for New Year's resolutions, and the most common resolutions include health, fitness, and weight loss.  Even our federal government is responsive to the pervasiveness of these themes, with four of thirteen common resolutions listed on this page invoking those goals directly, and some other resolutions (such as stress reduction) being ancillary to them.

Here's the question I have:  What are the local environmental influences that stand in the way of people attaining weight loss and fitness goals? 

I posed this same question to TJ Aulds, an editor with Galveston County Daily News who is documenting his weight loss experiences in a blog called "Fat Boy" (and who has lost 145 pounds to date).  Rather than regurgitating the rationale behind my question, here's a screengrab of it:

Like the rest of GCDN, his blog is now behind the paywall. 

Reality is never ALL one way or ALL the other way.  I myself do believe that personal responsibility is by far the largest variable influencing weight loss and weight gain.  But it's been demonstrated time and time again that human beings are exquisitely sensitive to their environments, usually without even being consciously aware of it.  Our surroundings play a pivotal role in the American obesity epidemic. 

I don't want to lead any witnesses, but at the same time, I'd like to provide a few examples of what *I* see as being deleterious local environmental influences. 

1.  Nowhere to walk.  A residential street with no sidewalks or shoulders telegraphs the message "No walking.  This is not for you.  This is only for cars.  You are not supposed to traverse this area unless you are sitting motionless in a car.  You are not meant to move around in this area." 

This nonverbal directive gets amplified when ignorant and belligerent people use their personal vehicles to block what few sidewalks are available, and when both innocent children and adult pedestrians get killed because they are forced to share the roadway with motor vehicles.  The environment says, "Not only is this not designed for walking, it's not even safe for you to walk here.  You need to retreat back to your house and resume sitting on your couch in front of the TV." 

Taking his life in his own hands:
A dog-walker on Wisconsin in League City.

Another unnecessary tragedy waiting to happen:
Pedestrians cross the Clear Creek bridge along FM 270.

Walking is not the only exercise option available to people, but if people cannot safely begin with walking, the single most fundamental and instinctive human exertive activity, it doesn't bode well from that point forward.  Walking is THE gateway to greater physical participation in life, but a lot of our surrounding environment has been structured to discourage us from doing it.

2.  Lack of healthy food availability.  For one thing, we have no healthy grocery chains such as Whole Foods within 30 miles of League City.  But the other problem is simple lack of stock among the mainstream stores that are located here.  In this post, I presented a collection of photos of some of the healthiest products that are chronically sold out.  And what I described there was just one blog post.  I face this barrier every time I go to the store - every week, every trip.

 

Here's yet another product I did not feature in my initial post on this issue:  Applesauce.  My family eats significant quantities of the stuff, and the only kind I buy is the kind with no added sugar.  Applesauce is naturally sweet.  It doesn't need more sugar than what the apples themselves provide. 

But our consumer environment makes it damned near impossible for me to procure applesauce with no added sugar.  Note the following about this photo above:
1.  The no-added-sugar product is sold out, whereas sugar'd products are still offered in abundance.  This is frequently the case.
2.  The no-added-sugar variety is placed on the very bottom shelf, making it hardest to find and hard to retrieve.  Sugar'd products are instead placed within easy reach. 

A few weeks ago, I faced an situation like this one shown above, and I got down on my hands and knees to check the back of the shelf, to see if any product was remaining.  I accidentally obstructed another female shopper in the process and so I said, "Excuse me for just a sec - I'm just trying to see if there are any bottles that maybe got pushed back out of sight - I'm looking for the no-sugar-added applesauce."  Startled, she stared at me and asked, "Sugar free? Are you serious?  In America?" 

Doesn't that speak volumes?  A sarcastic wisecrack with an undertone suggesting that perhaps I should have my head examined for striving to avoid unnecessary sugar in my food choices.  This is how far we've fallen as a consumer culture.     

When I have to thwart supply and demand trends by timing my grocery shopping trips and hoarding food... when I have to crawl around on a grocery store floor in order to snag a lower-calorie sugar-free product - I'm sorry - those are very real environmental barriers to my dietary regime and overall health.  The ultimate responsibility for weight management may remain mine, but the world sure is playing hell with it. 

 

3.  A culture that pushes high-calorie foods using every conceivable psychological tactic.  This can overtake a person in the most unexpected ways.  I never eat junk food or fast food - never - but the wrong products still sneak into my house despite my strict controls and obsessive food label-reading.  A few weeks ago, one of those in-store grocery vendors, a sweet Grandma type person, managed to sell me a pizza-making kit.  I was so disarmed by her Grandma sales pitch and her cute little in-store toaster oven and warm, bustling Grandma demeanor handing out free samples that I bought the kit, realizing only after I got home that both the sauce and the pizza crust contained excessive amounts of added sugar (excessive in my opinion), to the point where the "whole wheat crust" (I was fooled by that phrase and neglected to look more deeply) actually tasted as sweet to me as a piece of pie.  It was supposed to be a bread - but instead it tasted like a dessert product. 

 

If I, an over-educated and constantly-diligent consumer, get suckered like this, what chance does the average American have?  I have a Masters degree in science and the so-called advanced wisdom of age, and I still get taken in!! What defense does the average American have against unhealthy products getting cleverly slipped into their lives?  Sure, it's their personal responsibility to eat healthy - but stuff like this works against them at every moment. 

 

4.  A culture that is recalibrating taste expectations even in non-food items.  Our culture is establishing an expectation that every food should taste like sugar - even pizza.  But it doesn't stop there.  I recently had to flush an entire large bottle of mint-flavored Listerine down the sink for this same reason.  I brought it home without examining the label, only to discover that it contained enough artificial sweetner to make it taste unbearably sweet (to my perception).

Sodium saccharin in the "Cool Mint" variety.
Screengrabbed from this site. 

For comparison, here is an excerpt from a description of the original Listerine, the one us old-timers grew up with in the age before rampant obesity.  Notice that it contains no artificial sweetener.  Caramel is the smallest-percentage ingredient chiefly in there for color. 
Screengrabbed from this site.

When people are conditioned to expect a sweet taste from every item they put into their mouths, even when it's not a food item, how is that going to influence their consumption habits and resulting weight management??  Humans are a bit more sophisticated than Pavlov's dog, but this kind of relentless conditioning still has an involuntary impact on people. 

 

5.  A culture that is increasingly developing sinister associations between weight management the expenditure of large sums of money.  I know I'm likely to get dumped on for this one, but what I see happening is the cultivation of an intentional association between fitness and wealth.  Almost everything we do in our culture has a pronounced commercial component to it.  If we're not being asked to pay for something, we wonder what value it could have. 

 

This is an aspect of TJ's weight loss that I find troubling: he had to pay a huge price for surgery ($29,000) and one of his primary physical training venues also comes with a monthly fee that I find to be huge - it exceeds my average electrical bill (as of today, they were advertising a "reduced rate" of $137 per month on this page).  Some folks, because of their personal health circumstances, may indeed require that kind of programmatic approach to weight loss, but not everyone does, so why aren't we seeing simpler promotions as well?  The answer is - because nobody can make any money from them.  It doesn't cost anything to go for a very long walk or a jog every day. 

 

Postscript inserted January 8, 2013:  Here's a screengrab from the GCDN homepage today:  "You do not need an expensive gym membership".  Thanks, guys!

Here is the URL (paywalled). 

It doesn't cost any extra to buy no-sugar-added applesauce (if you can find it).  But these ideas don't get any airplay because the rabidly-consumeristic culture in which we live drowns them out (said the small, insignificant blogger). 

 

So through various promotional campaigns and wildly-expensive "success stories", American people are coming to expect that having lots and lots of money is a prerequiste to effective weight management, and that subtle messaging becomes a psychological barrier, yet another imposition of the environment. 

 

And all of those individual little environmental impositions add up to a bigger imposition.  They do.  And unless we admit this, nothing will change. 

 

 

I could go on with additional examples of the environmental forces that are steering us away from healthy choices, but you get the picture from the examples given above.  I'd love to hear some additional assessments of what other people perceive in this regard, here or preferably on TJ's blog where they'd get wider exposure (said the small, insignificant blogger).

 

Happy New Year!  And may it be a healthy one. 

Every time you hear me say something that sounds a little wing-nutty to you, recall this photo above, contemplate the fact that I'm almost 50 years old, and then conclude that I must be doing SOMETHING right.  Yes, I avoid every unnecessary calorie, even if it means engaging in somewhat bizarre behaviors such as stalking unsweetened applesauce as if it were a Schedule 1 commodity.  I do those things because that's what it takes.  We have a lot of factors working against us in this culture, so it's important to be diligent about those practices and precedents that we can control. 

 

Pedestrian peril

Back when I first started publishing my "Dash Cam" series in which I used my car's continuous-loop DVR to showcase what was happening on our city streets, I used to get emails from people I've never met - people who were dumbfounded.  They would tell me, "OMG, I just never noticed how bad that situation was." 

I've got a special computer folder titled "stuff I don't dare publish".  I really thought long and hard about filing these next two photographs, the second one in particular, in that folder and just sitting on them, because I see stuff like this and I get a bit afraid of what the fall-out might end up being if people are really able to wake up and parse the ramifications. 

So in this case, I will split the difference.  I won't say who, and I won't say when, and I won't say why.  But you can see for yourself where (NB FM 270, obviously), and you can see what. 

Welcome to your world without sidewalks, where our government agencies (and our taxpayers by extension) are too cheap to add a shoulder to the side of even our newest, most improved roads - not even a shoulder, let alone a sidewalk.  The billboard in the background is advertising a physical fitness regime, making this scene just a little bit surreal. 

I can hear in my mind some people snapping, "Oh, now, that's just plain stupid.  Noboby should be walking across that bridge with cars coming up behind them at 50 miles per hour in the same lane - that's just too dangerous."

Really??  What the F are these people supposed to do, exactly?  If folks find themselves with an immediate need to get into Harris County via this route, do you reckon that they should clamber down the bank and swim across to the other side of Clear Creek?  There IS NO other physical way across, except this right here.  This is all we've got. 

Approximately four thousand American pedestrians are killed every year because of issues like this.  We tend not to worry about them, though.  Instead of preventing the preventable, we like to collectively obsess over what to do about incredibly-rare and unpredictable events that take two orders of magnitude fewer lives, such as school shootings. 

This is just one of the reasons why I will continue to be so focused on sidewalks.  Because I happen to think that those four thousand Americans killed per year are worth caring about. 

Walking wonderland, Part 3

OK, following up on this post, I finally managed to get into the danged CAD in order to look this up.  The tract I had in mind for walking is marked as a right of way with no assigned parcel number.  It does not appear to be anyone's private property.

Near the top of the photo, do you see the words "40' R.O.W." (those letters stand for "right of way")?
And the Interurban easement running perpendicular to it to the lower left.  This strip is accessible from the Interurban.

That's just a wonderful little "secret passage" type of route connecting the Interurban to State Highway 3.

NICE!
It's about 700 feet in length.  This is the best-kept local secret I've stumbled upon (literally) in quite a while now. 

 A walk along this segment has something special associated with it:

Instant walking companions!!  Bonus!!
:-)
I remember back in January when I was sifting through records trying to track down who was developing the Gas Dude property, I stumbled upon a record for a nearby tract which actually had an ag exemption on it.  "Holy crap!" I thought to myself, wondering who was attempting to skirt their property taxes.  "There's no livestock near Centerpointe."  Well, someone slap me, because yes there is!  It's amazing what you discover when you actually get off your suburban duff and explore the world.  This is an absolutely beautiful 15-acre tract that is owned by someone who is very lucky to have both the land itself and these happy and very curious bovine munchers.  This is the northwesterly tract that the R.O.W. runs along. 

And following up on this other recent post (which I'm delighted to say was tweeted and read by like-minded folks world-wide), here's a very telling vignette from my yesterday.  While I was getting my head shaved hair cut, I mentioned some of this walking stuff to my stylist barber.  He paused thoughtfully and asked, "Is it safe?!"

Again we see an expression of fear based on a statistical misperception.  Nothing in this life is completely safe - even writing blog posts carries risks (what if the ceiling of my room spontaneously collapsed on my head?!  What if the house caught fire and I couldn't get out?!).  But walking around in daylight in our suburbs is pretty darned safe, especially with a feisty shepherd mix at the end of the leash. 

I didn't vet the quality of these particular data, which were screengrabbed from this site, but for the sake of argument, let's take them at face value.  Basically what they show is that the odds of getting murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted around here are statistically miniscule.  But that's not the perception that folks tend to get from watching the evening news on TV.

Anyway, the Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market is beckoning, so I must close for the moment.  Happy walking!!  It sure is a perfect day for it. 

Walking wonderland, Part 2

Good grief, Galveston Central Appraisal District (CAD) is a pain in the lower anatomy sometimes.

This error message occurs frequently.  And it often persists for days at a time.  Screengrabbed from what should actually be http://www.galvestoncad.org/Appraisal/PublicAccess/.   

I wanted to provide some additional ideas on walking routes around here, but in order to do that, I first have to verify which parcels are owned by whom, to ensure that I'm not accidentally describing something that would have the potential to be a trespassing scenario.  And that verification can't be done with an apparently-crashed CAD server.  Again. 

Anyway, what I'll offer instead today are a few cool pics of our neighboring subdivision, Oaks of Clear Creek. 


It's that subdivision due east of Centerpointe, on the other side of the retention ponds and the easement.
Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.

This development is almost 20 years old, and land in League City was a heck of a lot cheaper back then.  What this means is that this subdivision ended up with a larger ratio of common area to single-family lots compared to what Centerpointe has. 

This subdivision can be accessed on foot via the Interurban easement which is just on the other side of our stormwater retention ponds.

There's a foot gate in the wrought-iron fence that surrounds the subdivision's common areas.  It's got collision posts to prevent any type of small motor vehicle (such as ATV) from passing through from the Interurban easement. 

In a previous post, I questioned the strict legality of walking in the Interurban easement (I don't know the answer to that), while at the same time noting that it's not posted and many local people walk there on a daily basis.  Furthermore, at least half of the easement-flanking properties in Oaks of Clear Creek were constructed with back fence gates allowing property egress directly into the easement, as was this community park.  There is substantial evidence suggesting that this was conceived as an area where the public would, in fact, walk. 

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's common areas?  Well, I do.  The pool and park areas are HUGE by present-day subdivision standards.  It's so cool to see open areas like this.  Kids can throw balls here and whatnot - there's enough space for that.  Unfortunately, we don't have this kind of resource in Centerpointe. 

They didn't call it the OAKS of Clear Creek for nothing.  I don't know who the developer was, but the number of shady oak trees in the park is just fantastic.  The subdivision is also unique in that some of its single family homes have water oaks in their front yards, instead of the usual live oaks (and there's a street in the subdivision named Water Oak).  Water oaks are native and grow quickly into absolutely massive, upright trees - they can reach 100 feet in height.   

Free rodent control for the surrounding homeowners!! 
Lucky them!!

I did notice that one of the park's playscapes seemed to have met with some kind of recent misfortune.  Vandalism?  Arson?  I don't know.  I didn't hear anything about this in the local news, but then again, I don't hear about a lot of local things that happen, in part because League City doesn't have its own newspaper yet. 

Back in April of this year, I described a public outreach initiative pertaining to a new pipeline installation that was scheduled.  Initially it was suspected that the pipeline would be in "our" Centerpointe easement, but in fact, it's probably due to be installed in the Centerpoint  easement, which we think is the Interurban easement. 

I haven't seen any physical activity to date regarding that, but unless plans have changed, there's a good chance that there will be some construction-related disruptions in this area in the future.

Until such time, if watching sunsets is your thing, there's hardly a better wide-open location than this.  This is the view last night, looking west across the fields toward Centerpointe.  You can see our iconic pine tree just left of photo center.