Are you hearing strange noises at night?

And I mean really strange noises, sounds that almost defy description.  You might have noticed them if you are on the east side of Centerpointe or the west side of Oaks of Clear Creek.

They're coming from this (the pipeline, not the dog).  Let me explain.  

The pipeline company working in the nearby Interurban Easement is welding together their new line in the field prior to burying it.  As of last night, they had a continuous segment of between a quarter and a half mile in length.

Well, it's a black-coated pipe and during our hot summer days, it heats up considerably, expanding as it goes.  Then at night, it cools down again and contracts.  It weighs many tons, and is supported by oak dunnage pedestals spaced at regular intervals.  In order to contract, the thing has to overcome a massive force of friction imposed by its own massive weight.  As it shrinks bit by bit, the incrementally-released forces make a bizarre sound somewhere between a loud SNAP and a SPROING, and then the resulting shock wave proceeds to reverberate up and down the entire half-mile length of pipe.  I can't say that I've heard anything quite like it before.  It's a bit unnerving.  

My husband did a back-of-envelope calculation and reckons that it probably needs to shorten itself at night and re-lengthen by day to the tune of 6 to 12 inches because of these temperature changes.  Try sliding a half-mile heavy pipeline over structural supports by that amount of distance - it's going to make some noise.

Furthermore, the workers appear to be welding at break-neck speed such that, by this evening, it could be the better part of a mile long.  Which probably means even more strange noise.

That which was laid out in segments last night is now one continuous length, as they worked through Saturday on it.    

So, note to @LeagueCityPD, if you get any strange noise reports in our area, it's not actually an alien spacecraft landing, which is how some callers might describe it.  It's just a very long pipeline segment going snap, crackle, and pop.

Sagging closer to home

Check this massive thing out:

Hwy 3 at Walker Street, passing by the library (no kidding) this evening around 6 p.m.  Sorry for the blur - we were both moving. 

You're not even seeing the full extent of this trailer here.  It continued on beyond the right hand side of the photo.  I've never seen any of these mega-vehicles outside of freeways and larger regional highways. 

Three days after I wrote a post about sagging traffic lights being lifted in a heavily-industrialized area near the Houston Ship Channel, I run into the very same process three quarters of a mile from my own house.  At least one bucket truck was playing hopscotch with this load, jacking up the traffic lights in succession so that it could pass safely beneath each intersection it encountered. 

It's weird how life is often like that - you don't see a phenomenon at all, right up until the point where you see it multiple unrelated times in rapid succession.

Anyway, I've no idea what that object is, or why it warranted such a complex haul through suburbia after dark on a Sunday night, but it sure must have been important to someone.   My husband and I looked at this photo and thought, "Wouldn't it have been cheaper to dismantle it and re-erect it on site??"  Apparently not. 

Why traffic lights sometimes sag

Have you ever driven through an area where the traffic lights spanning each intersection are slung so low on their guide wires that they look like they're dangling from the bottom of a hammock?  And you wish you could say to the municipal authorities, "Bubbas, hitch up your signal lights - they're sloppy!" 

I'd show you what I mean, but every time I Google 'sagging traffic lights', I end up with a bunch of hits about sagging pants.  Butt it's a similar idea with traffic lights. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Well, it appears that there's actually a method to that madness, a fact I learned only yesterday when I encountered this bizarre scene on Clinton Drive in Houston:

The guy in the oversized Toyota was partially blocking my line of sight, but lo and behold, two guys in bucket trucks had jacked this particular set of loose lights up into the air for reasons that weren't immediately clear. 

But those reasons soon became clear, and so did the mystery of the sagging lights. 

Holy crap - look at the size of that thing!!  I have no idea what was inside Pandora's epic box, but it was headed into the Port of Houston. 

Jacking job done, the bucket trucks folded themselves back up again.  These particular lights are not slung as low as some that I've seen, but it's clear that, if the guide wires had been any more taut, there wouldn't have been enough slack in the system to raise them to a height sufficient to let this thing pass. 

Indeed. 

Before yesterday, it never occurred to me that those lines may have been left loose for a reason.  More than two decades after I started working in Houston's vast and fabulous industrial sector, I'm still learning new things on a daily basis. 

Texas flags improperly displayed

My unflagging curiosity compels me to ask:  What's wrong with this picture?!

Car dealership, IH-45 northbound frontage road south of Dickinson.

Let me give you a hint:

This Texas flag appears to be the wrong dimensions, making it not the flag of Texas. 

Inset thumbnail from this Wikipedia site and annotated to illustrate proportionality. 

The actual flag proportions are precisely defined by regulation:

Text copied from this site and then annotated. 

I'm not a flag fanatic, but I do feel that if the flag is going to be displayed, it should be done with a purity of intention and a bare minimum of respect, which arguably ought to include basic accuracy in the construction of it.   I started noticing these pseudo-flags, particularly along Houston's freeways, because many car dealerships and other large businesses have begun to deploy them.  They are massive mega-flags - you simply can't miss them as they billow provocatively over the freeway. 

And it's the distorted dimensions, specifically the extra length, that makes that billow as visually striking as it is.  Which leads me to suspect that the businesses displaying these things are more interested in catching your eye for the purpose of drawing you into their showrooms than they are in respectfully celebrating our collective Texas heritage.  That may not be illegal, but in my books, it's bad taste. 

There are examples of these pseudo-flags all over the internet.  Here's a miscellaneous stock thumbnail also annotated to show an extra third of length.  This ratio is not 2:3 - it's closer to 1:2. 

But here's where this issue goes from a purposeful perplexity to a full-blown vexillological vexation.  In conjunction with this post, I thought I might write an email to the car dealers who fly these things so that I could encourage them to re-examine their motivations, as follows: 

"Dear Mr. Car Dealer:  Rather than exploiting an exaggerated representation of the Texas flag as an attention-getting device for your businesses, why not instead host an authentic patriotic display?  If you must leverage your customers' flag fondness for your own commercial gain, it would arguably be in better taste to obtain an official flag, one flown over our Texas Capitol, and present it to your customers in its proper respectful context for all to enjoy."

You can actually purchase these things if you want to.  The flag shown above has been folded and foreshortened by wind in this photo, but it does appear to have the correct aspect ratio.  Or close to it...

Image from this Wikimedia site. 

And then in my email I was going to give those car dealers the source for such official flags, but guess what I found while searching for that source?!

Oh, dear God!  "A properly-folded 3'x5' Texas flag"? Apparently the House of Representatives apparently doesn't know the proper flag dimensions either!  2:3 is not equal to 1:2 is not equal to 3:5.  Close only counts in horse shoes, doesn't it?

Screengrabbed from this site as it appeared on July 20, 2013, and annotated. 

So, thumbs down to the flag floggers, and I don't even know what to say about the House.  Perhaps they have confused the Texas flag with area rug standard sizing? 


Almost eighteen thousand 3' x 5' rugs to choose from, none of which look a danged thing like the flag of the great state of Texas.

Screengrabbed from an Amazon search, and annotated. 

I asked my husband about these things and he said, "Yep - many of the flags out there don't conform to the regulations that define them.  It's been that way for years."  Apparently this is just a quirk of our society, but it seems odd to me that even the governing body that defined the issue in the first place doesn't seem to be strictly conforming to their own specifications (as they state it on their own website, they are close, but it's the principle of the thing).  

Agog at Google

On June 5, 2013, the Google car cruised through Centerpointe, as I described in this post.  As of today, we still don't have an updated Streetview photo set, but a curious thing appears to have happened in the intervening time:

Google seems to have re-processed its older images.  The sharpness, contrast, and saturation all appear enhanced now. 

West Walker at Centerpointe Drive.  Construction of Centerpointe Section 9 (shown as the empty field at left) had not commenced at the time this photo was taken, estimated to be 2008 or 2009.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps Streetview. 

Here for comparison is the same screengrab from June 5, 2013.  Note the more fuzzy appearance. 

Why would Google go to the immense trouble of image-processing all the data that it will soon discard in favor of an updated set?  I suspect it has something to do with quality control and feature-matching, which perhaps will be made easier by superior historical image quality, no matter how obsolete it may be by this time.  And what (if anything) this procedure might have to do with Google's driverless car initiative is anyone's guess, but it's fascinating to watch this technology unfold. 

A strange and surreal local Googlemaps image

Every once in a while, I stumble across something on Googlemaps that completely drops my jaw. Their new oblique aerial coverage caught this commuter jet flying quite low over a subdivision under construction north of Houston, which in itself is not terribly weird.  But you can tell that Google is stitching their photographic coverage down the centerlines of suburban streets, because their image processing chopped off both wing and stabilizer, leaving the viewer with a most unsettling impression, indeed.

It sorta gives Dali a run for his money, doesn't it??

I haven't found this one in any of the weird Google image compilations, so I may have been the first person to spot it. 
Screengrabbed from Googlemaps. 

Space Cleaners fire

This will be all over the local news soon enough, but I thought I'd post a few pics just for the learning value.  I don't know how fire responses work, or why they do what they do (or why they do it when they do it).  But here are a few bystander observations on this one. 

4:19 p.m.
I walked out of the office supply store at NASA 1 and El Camino Real, only to note this in front of me.  Not something you see every day. 

4:20 p.m.
There appeared to be one small fire response vehicle on scene at this time (out of photo frame to the right).  The establishment was the Space Cleaners building.  No other structures appeared to be involved.  There's debate on the internet as to whether this address is located in Houston or Webster. 

4:22 p.m.
Forest Bend FD arrived on scene (times are approximate and per my cell phone).  I had never heard of these guys, but their website says they serve unincorporated south Harris County. 

4:28 p.m.
League City FD arrived on scene.  Your tax dollars at work.  Around this time, Seabrook also came in from the east side (out of photo frame).  Seabrook had a really cool boom truck with a room for a fireman at the top of its telescoping arm. 

4:33 p.m.
Into every emergency, a little randomness must fall:  a person pushing a shopping cart wandered through the traffic blockade and proceeded northward along El Camino Real, seemingly unimpressed by the goings-on. 

4:34 p.m.
Forest Bend FD got its boom stream up and running. 

Like I said, I have no idea how these things function.  I don't know why it took 12-ish minutes to get that overhead water stream going - perhaps they realized the building was a loss at that point, so no rush, perhaps the technology just takes that long to operate, or perhaps they were waiting for command orders.  Who knows?

Anyway, here's an embed.  The ads seem to spool according to a queue, but if you're lucky, you'll get the privilege of viewing a Mattress Mac ad ahead of this chopper footage.  Ma-ma-ma-mayo furniture!!
:-)


UPDATE 20130324: Bay Area Citizen seems to have published the most comprehensive coverage of this fire to date. 

Mail mysteries

The League City Post Office continues to perplex me, as it did back in December when we were having serious issues with it. 

This latest issue involved a critical document that one of my subcontractors Express Mail'd to me for delivery by noon.  This early delivery cost me about twenty-three bucks and I was actively waiting for it.

The mail carrier brought the envelope to my door, rang the bell, and then immediately walked back toward the USPS truck with envelope in hand (it required a delivery signature), without so much as a token effort to see if someone actually answered the door. 

I could see this event unfolding through my front window, because I was sitting eleven feet from the door.  I sprang at the door and yelled something that was reasonably civilized but clearly exasperated, "Um, you might want to wait just ten seconds after you ring the bell to give folks time to answer."  No comment from the carrier - just a slow shuffle back toward the front door and thankfully I was then able to sign for my envelope.  If I had been twenty feet from the door instead of eleven (I measured it), I'm not sure that I would have been able to get to the door on time. 

Perhaps I'm just overly suspicious of this Post Office because of what happened to us in December, but this whole thing struck me as a little weird.  It's entirely possible that there was a sudden and compelling reason for the carrier to wheel around and return to the mail truck without any reasonable attempt to wait for the door to be answered.  If so, I don't know that circumstance might have been. 

The above discourse represents my subjective personal opinion as to what transpired in this instance.  One of our security cameras recorded an objective version. 

It's not actually communicating with the mother ship

Ever get a creepy email like this one?

Were they sure it was 31,448 miles?  Not 31,450?

When I first saw this, I had a "big brother is watching" type of Maalox moment, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors, one of which dates me more severely than the other. 

Seriously, I thought it was one of those onboard car computer stunts that I keep reading about, such as in this piece provocatively titled "Your car as a witness for the prosecution", except instead of just recording details without my (or any other owner's) express permission, maybe the damned thing was now also transmitting that information to the dealer so that he could then justify sending me guilt-trippy emails about my (ex)laxity.

But a rising-dread dash to the garage revealed that my car doesn't actually have that many miles on it.  In fact, they must have recorded my mileage during previous service visits and simply extrapolated to arrive at that number, because the actual total is not even very close. 

They sure fufilled their purpose, though, didn't they?  They got my attention and got me off my butt with a privacy-invading flair.  As the retail giant Target recently found out the hard way by essentially announcing to a family that their teenage daughter was pregnant (oopsie!!), even if sales algorithms are sophisticated enough to glean remarkably personal information about a given customer, it's not always a good strategy to announce those results to either the target (pun intended) customer or to the world.

Where does the car stop and the computer begin?

Microsoft clip art. 

 

Debunking de beach debate

I wish I could.  Debunk it, that is.  But the fact is, I have no real "feel" for the bottom line on the beach debate.  And the longer I ponder it, the more my head hurts. 

Let me re-cap briefly my unsophisticated understanding and analysis, and then proceed with the mental fruits of the walk I took yesterday evening.

Back in July 2011, I published a post called "West end wackiness" which crudely summarizes the state of the mess surrounding the challenges to the Texas Open Beaches Act. 

Things apparently haven't gotten much clearer in the intervening period of time.  There was a subsequent judgment in March of 2012 affirming that the "beach" had indeed become private property (if I'm understanding it correctly), but I'm not entirely sure that anyone really understands what that means on a practical level at this point.  The mainstream news media hasn't been all that helpful because they've tended to view the issue through the lens of whether or not "the public" is allowed onto "the beach".  But apparently it's not that simple. 

Pic from that original July 2011 blog post.  The whole thing started because of legal debate over the line of natural vegetation and what happens following abnormally-intense erosive events, such as hurricanes.  Like Ike, for instance.   

Here's a similar view taken yesterday - a bit farther up the coast but you can still see the same water tower as a point of reference.  The amount of vegetation gained during this intervening period of time is impressive, at least to my un-trained eye.  But what exactly does this mean for private property claims?  I'm not sure. 

I'm still perplexed as to why this beach is allowed to be treated as a right-of-way.  There's so much vehicle traffic that they've basically carved a superhighway through the vegetation that reportedly means everything in the eyes of the law. 

And yet signs like this are present, apparently of a post-Ike vintage (judging from their shiny and new appearance).  But of course, if that property being torn up by vehicles is actually private property, I'm betting that there would be little grounds for enforcement.  Not from a municipal authority, at least. 

But if it's private property, one would think that it has a very high monetary value, because it's beach frontage.  So you'd think that the private property owners would be motivated to preserve that value.  So why do they collectively appear to be allowing people to drive vehicles all over it and tear it up??

In sooth, I got the feeling yesterday that I really was in a type of existential Twilight Zone.  I can't fathom any of these things.  Like, what is it?  Whose is it?  What rules apply?  Yesterday, it felt like I was in No-Man's Land. 

As I was trolling for the latest updates on this issue, I found this FAQ produced by the Texas General Land Office.  According to that source, the "wet beach" (the portion below the high tide line) can still be lawfully accessed by the public, regardless of any recent legal judgments. 

That being the case, at least we've preserved the rights of future generations of Texas children to be able to collect shells...

...and see all the fascinating evidence of life in the littoral zone, even if they have to wait until low tide to do it. 

But if we extrapolate that thought, that statement regarding dry-beach access restrictions, out to its full extent, the picture it paints is very bizarre.   What would families do if we were all held to this wet-beach-only access restriction?  Would people line their cars up on FM 3005 and sit patiently waiting for the tide to recede before they could get out and legally trek to a narrow ribbon of damp sand?  It would be the beach-analog of being relegated to the steerage section of the Titanic, a scenario that strikes me as a particularly ugly form of classism. 

And if I'm understanding things correctly, the thought experiment gets even weirder from that point.   Because, wouldn't private property owners themselves be held to exactly the same restriction?  Sure - the microscopic subset of beachfront owners would be able to claim exclusive rights to their own fifty-foot chunk of dry beach - but apparently by this new set of rules, they would not be allowed to walk on anybody else's fifty-foot chunk of dry beach because, after all, it's private property. 

So if they themselves wanted to take a proverbial walk on the beach, technically, wouldn't they have to exit their beach-front houses, trek across their own miniscule section of dry beach, and enter the wet beach with all the rest of the steerage class people? 

But realistically, would they even be able to do that much?  Because if a bunch of steerage-class Texans saw a property owner emerging to walk on that very same paltry strip of wet sand to which they themselves had been relegated, I'm guessing that the resulting social situation would not be very comfortable for the beachfront owner.  The word "lynching" comes to mind. 

So OK - perhaps in light of that little existential hurdle, perhaps all the beachfront owners could band together and mutually agree that they could reciprocally walk on each others' dry-beach private property.  Even if we set the resulting insurance ramifications aside for the sake of argument (but it's debatable as to whether those issues could ever be discharged), how would the rightful beach-walkers be able to distinguish each other from steerage trespassers?  The average west-ender might be familiar with a few of their neighbors, but most of these west-end houses are only occupied part of the time.  Furthermore, they tend to be occupied by extended families, friends of those families, and/or weekend renters, so we're talking about an impossibly-large pool of people to potentially identify.  They'd have to wear wrist bands or forehead tattoos or something, wouldn't they?  Which would also be problematic, because that would further heighten the ability of the steerage beach-goers to visually identify them as potential targets of wrath. 

And even with all that, who would enforce the segregation?  Certainly not the taxpayers.  So theoretically, would the dry beach property owners perhaps have to band together to hire private security or something, to enforce private propery access? 

But even if they did that, what if an owner or an entitled visitor forgot to get his forehead tattooed on the way to Galveston?  What if the tattoo machine was temporarily broken?  Or what if a dry-beach owner had their wrist band accidentally torn off as they were frolicking in the surf?    What then?  Would they even manage to make it back to their own beach-front houses?  Or would they be apprehended by their own security team?  Would difficulties such as this maybe prompt them to start microchipping themselves instead, like dogs?  Because microchips can't wash off in the surf. 

But then they'd have to pay for microchip readers to be installed at the high tide line.  Microchip readers that the steerage class beach-goers would then be inclined to vandalize. 

And on, and on...

Am I missing something here?  Has anybody really thought this whole wet/dry scenario through to its logical end-points??  That's the question that was foremost in my mind yesterday, as my beloved dog and I walked for over an hour on a deserted narrow soggy strip of Every-Man's Land, the strip that exists at the bleeding edge of No-Man's Land. 

We don't yet have transparency on the bottom lines. For the time being, we'll have to settle for transparency in this delicate feather.  

Sign of the times

So I'm mired in traffic at Five Corners around 7:00 a.m. this morning, and I spy this billboard in my field of view:

FM 518 WB at FM 270.

I'm not a doctor.  I'm not a medical practitioner of any kind.  I don't represent any medical institution.  But I'm sorry - I personally do not agree with either the sign or the sentiment that it conveys.  In my observation and opinion, good health does not begin with primary care - it begins with healthy lifestyle, of which the main components are diet and exercise.

And you may be thinking, "Oh, good grief - it's just a marketing slogan - why do you care?!"

I care because human beings are exquisitely sensitive to environmental cues and messaging.  Exquisitely sensitive.  A year and a half ago, I wrote a post that discusses at length the "broken windows" theory of criminological behavior, which asserts that signalling has a dramatic effect on behavior. 

By analogy, I also postulated that environmental signalling  might be the reason why Walnut Pointe has a higher historical incidence of petty crime than any other street in Centerpointe.  Walnut Pointe is usually littered with un-garaged cars.  This jumble of jalopies signals would-be thieves that the area is ripe for the imposition of additional disorder.  By making itself into a physical path of most resistance (clogging up the street and sidewalks), Walnut Pointe made itself into an existential path of least resistance (for crime).

This is just a theory, of course.  But it's one that has precedence. 

That UTMB billboard above sends a signal that, in my opinion, is dis-empowering.   All the "primary care" in the world is not going to help the person who doesn't take responsibility for their own health by engaging in appropriate self-supportive behaviors.  Healthy diet.  Daily exercise.  No harmful levels of alcohol or recreational drugs.  No smoking.  The billboard doesn't promote those kinds of things, with primary care being the obvious incrementally-empowering adjunct.  Instead, it shows a woman with submissive body language clinging to the telephone instead of reaching for her own internal resourcefulness and self-discipline and then counting the telephone connection to her doctor as just one of a collection of health-promoting tools available to her. 

That segment of FM 518 handles about 30,000 vehicle transits a day.

Or at least it did as of 2004, per this H-GAC reference.  It would not surprise me if it's higher now.

Is it in the public interest to have that kind of message seen by that many people every day?  Absorbed through the corner of the eye like subliminal advertising?  Or absorbed straight-up consciously, as it was with me?

It's just an isolated example of a little thing, yes.  But when you start adding up all of the "little things" that characterize our society, my bet is that there can be some big impacts derive from the antagonistic sum total.  And then from there, who knows what bizarre things might result.  Maybe even a 36% national obesity rate. 

Peculiar preemption

In the "random local weirdness" category, there's this blurry cell phone picture of a construction sign erected this morning on the west side of League City on SB Bay Area Blvd. at FM 518.  This one had my husband and I so curious that I just had to research it, and if I go to the trouble of researching it, might as well blog. 

Sorry about the poor pic quality, but it reads "No Railroad Preemption".  Ever wonder what the heck that phrase actually means??  Apparently a lot of people have wondered - because look at the autofill suggestions on Google:

I only got first four letters of "railroad" typed before it knew exactly what I wanted. 

A railroad preemption occurs when people driving trains are able to over-ride a road intersection's traffic light signal pattern in order to freeze the progression of vehicles as they are passing through.  The train itself preempts the normal flow of traffic, in other words.   This is something they do ostensibly to increase safety. 

Here's the weird part, though:  there's no railroad within three miles of that particular intersection.

Huh?!?
(Screengrab from Googlemaps)

This is my best guess as to why the warning sign was posted there: Because the construction crew couldn't put their hands on the correct sign, so they used the closest available approximation. 

There's a fire station near the intersection, and fire trucks are another type of vehicle that sometimes has the ability to preempt the normal flow of traffic so that they can get through the area quickly.  It should have read something like "No Emergency Vehicle Preemption" but maybe their supplier was out of those signs.

That's my best guess, anyway.  But I could be wrong, so if anyone happens to see a train flying down west FM 518, please drop me a line because I'd love to hear about it. 

Pickers

I first became aware of the growing phenomenon of pickers (as of this post, Wiki didn't even have a page describing this activity yet) several years back when my husband and I were consolidating our houses.  We had two houses full of stuff that we had to skinny down into one house.  Much of it we gave to friends or charity, but some furniture and tools and other items just did not seem worth the time to drag down to the local Goodwill donation center, and so we'd just set it out by the curb for heavy trash day, which in our area is Saturday.

Lo and behold, a steady stream of people would materialize to collect this stuff in the early morning before the trash collectors arrived.  These people were as methodical and as objective as a marching stream of fire ants.  Some wanted only scrap metal.  Some wanted only furniture.  Some wanted only old tools (as I found out, there are many tools that Goodwill won't accept).  Some wanted only building materials (to the point where one of them actually accepted a bunch of old railroad ties from us so he could use them in his landscaping). 

We learned that a true picker wants no trouble and will not steal from you - a picker is much closer to being a mobile freecycler-of-opportunity than a thief (see the Clear Lake Freecycle group if you'd like more info on that).  If an item is even one foot onto your property, they will not touch it - they only take what's at the curb.  If they had doubts about what was legitimately available for picking, they would simply knock on our door and introduce themselves in order to get permission from us.  It was not uncommon for us to see pickers driving $50,000 customized pickup trucks.  Probably some of them were compulsive hoarders, but none of them appeared to be living in poverty or criminally-inclined. 

Fast forward a couple of years and the competition among pickers has apparently picked up significantly.  As we recently learned here in Centerpointe, they don't come in the early sun-shiny morning any more.  They come in the middle of the night to ensure that they get there before any other pickers do, such as this couple who recently came to our house:

This is a screengrab from one of our security cameras.  I had to downsample (image-degrade) and crop it in order to disguise certain features of our system, but you can clearly see a dude loading some of our trash into the back of a rather fancy (low-rider?) extended-cab pickup truck.  It appeared to be a man and a woman working together.

Watching the tape, we were amazed at how laid back they were about this whole business.  They took their time in front of our house, methodically and carefully loaded up a few larger recyclables, and then flipped open our main trash can to see if there were any additional goodies in it. 

In true picker style, they did not enter our property, did not touch anything that was left on the lawn (I sometimes forget my gardening tools out there), and did not go through individual trash bags the way a dumpster-diver would if looking for an identity theft opportunity (such as discarded and un-shredded personal papers... remember to always shred your papers).  They just wanted saleable or useable items. 

Anyway, there you have a fascinating commentary on a rapidly-evolving facet of our suburban sub-culture.
:-)