Ode to many local wallets

Last June, as the 2010-2011 school year was drawing to a close, I wrote about the costs associated with CCISD's Magnet program busing.  I provided a spreadsheet estimating outlays for the three most common transportation scenarios from which families choose.

The numbers illustrated that the financial impacts to families who drive instead of bus were profound.  This is the kind of slow creeping expense that might not rise to the level of your daily awareness because it gets spread out over 177 annual teaching days.  But if you don't pay attention, you could find yourself effectively spending a few thousand dollars a year for a darned good service that your ISD provides to you essentially free of charge.

So with these things in mind, I was delighted to note that WAVE Magnet bus ridership originating from Victory Lakes Intermediate currently seems to be running at about 150% what it was last year.

So many kids boarded the bus that it sorta looked like it was sinking on its axles.

This could be partly or wholly a coincidence, perhaps has nothing to do with CCISD's proposal to eliminate Magnet busing and nothing to do with my cost analysis.  But regardless of inspiration, it's evidence of many families making a good choice:  not only are they saving themselves some serious money, the increased participation shows the ISD just how valuable this service is.

Heat, lights, camera, action

We are back from a several-week junket to the northern latitudes whence I derived.  Daily high temperatures in our vacation areas ranged from 59 degrees F to 79 degrees F - daily highs, not lows.

This type of escape is necessary for sanity: if you don't do this already, plan to simply get the heck out of Houston for a spell during each Mean Season.  During the entire time we were away, daily highs in Houston remained above 100 degrees F, for a record-breaking heatwave.  One of my Houston girlfriends emailed me that she was fighting heat rash despite never having stepped foot outside.

So here's an odd juxtaposition of images in rapid succession:

Temperature 61 degrees F beside restlessly romantic seas.
Coat, hat, and long pants...
necessary accoutrements for the north Atlantic
no matter the time of year.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Screengrab from www.chron.com frontpage...
Which day?
Pick a day, ANY day...

Back in July, I published a blog entry questioning whether water use restrictions would even be acknowledged by the public if drought conditions continued to worsen.  The jury is still out, but this screengrab from Houston Chronicle echoes those questions.   

Recent screengrab from Galveston County Daily News.
I suspect that people, both individually and collectively, are going to realize that prevailing mindless prohibitions on watering are not well-thought-out and not designed to do what regulation should do, which is to minimize cost-benefit ratios.   Plans must be developed to conserve water while not totally discounting the impacts to public and private investments.  

Screengrab from one of this week's editions
of Austin American Statesman.
This statement has been echoed in other sources which also note that, although this year's drought is the worst on record, other recent years have also been unusually severe (think 2009).  

Despite all this heat-related, there's actually a few tiny pieces of good news for us here in Centerpointe, as follows:

Hallelujah!!!
We actually got 2.1 inches of rain here the other day,
as reported by weather station MD6282,
which is located right here in Centerpointe. 

Less hell AND less high water:
Did you know that Centerpointe tends to be NOT QUITE as hot as the majority of greater Houston?
We used to live in north Clear Lake, and I can definitely feel a difference between there (just six miles away but hotter) and here (cooler and also breezier). We are slightly moderated via our joint proximity to both Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico - water on two sides - but without the extremity of lower-elevational exposures that characterize many other areas that are closer to the coast (personally I see this as a pretty good trade-off - some of the coolness but more of the elevation protection from hurricanes).  Here above is an example of this moderation effect in the form of today's projected high temp map published by the National Weather Service.  

Stay cool.

Don't stay dry.

Stay happy.
(The last of which should be easier for you if you had the good sense to get out of here for a recent northern vacation.)

:-)

Yet another NWS warning graphic.

Hidden benefits of hidden cameras

Back in April, I blogged about the new challenges that accompany new home security technology, specifically the fact that cameras can inadvertently capture domestic details that you'd rather not communicate to outside parties, including law enforcement.
:-)

But they also sometimes capture evidence that has nothing to do with safeguarding your home against burglary, but which is highly instructive and useful nevertheless.

Current case in point:  a courier service claims to have delivered a rather expensive package to us on a specific date, at a specific time, as evidenced by their tracking software.  But we never received the package.  And most tellingly, our exterior surveillance system reveals that no courier truck of any kind came down our street in the time period two hours on either side of the alleged delivery scan.

Curiouser and curiouser, eh?  Not only that, the courier SOMEHOW has on record that "a woman" was at the home during delivery and accepted the package personally.  This information despite the fact that there's apparently no associated delivery signature.

Ordinarily, I might concede that my brain is fallible and perhaps during the chaos of a working-from-home day, I accepted a package and misplaced it, assuming it was just a new toner cartridge or something.

But unlike my brain (but similar to my Dash Cam), the hidden wide-angle lens tells no lies, makes no mistakes.  And the evidence suggests that either the courier accidentally delivered to the wrong street, or some courier employee forged the scan and got a five-finger discount on a high-end consumer item.

Either way, our security system may have just effectively paid for part of itself because, as we proceed with our dispute, it's not just our feeble consumer word against the mighty international package tracking software empire.  We have the proverbial tape.

Big Sister is watching,
from a variety of undisclosed locations.

Barrell o' fun(ction)

This morning, Galveston County Daily News published a story about a Friendswood businessman's installation of cisterns for rainwater collection.  His tanks supply him with more water than he could ever use, even in a severe drought such as we are having right now.

This fact is not at all surprising:  as I explained in an April blog post titled "Rain barrells: What's hype and what's helpful", here on the upper Texas coast, we do not have a water supply problem.  What we have is a water storage and distribution problem.  It's a problem that rainwater capture could alleviate, and for less money than you might think, as this local businessman has now aptly demonstrated.

Still, the use of tanks and cisterns is a new (well, revived such that it appears new) idea, and it will take a while to catch on and gain acceptance.  Personally, I have not yet been able to obtain spousal approval to install that 300 gallon tank that I've been jonesing for, a la Dallas Morning News writer Erin Covert.  But the negotiations continue and meanwhile, as an alternate strategy, I'm contemplating expanding into a fleet of Systerns, of which I still only have our original lonesome singleton (and I've really disliked hobbling through this nasty summer with just one to fall back on):

"Cuz I ain't got nobody
Nobody cares for me,
nobody! 
nobody cares for me
I'm so sad and lonely
Sad and lonely, sad and lonely
Won't some sweet mama
come and take a chance with me?
Cuz I ain't so bad
Sad and lonesome all the time"
--From "I Ain't Got Nobody"
as re-done by David Lee Roth.

Foundations, Part 2

FYI, book-ending this blog's entry of last week titled "No Firm Foundation", GCDN has published a slab-watering guide which seems pretty thorough.

And League City Blog delved into the issue of our chronic lack of water supply.  There, the buzz-word was again our highly-regulated practice of residential "irrigation", without reference to the potential un-regulated consumptive contribution of slab-watering.  If I had extra time on my hands today, I'd sit down and calculate my relative irrigation vs. slab watering needs.  Given that, in a drought, I'm willing to risk the integrity of my lawn via under-watering but I'm never willing to risk the integrity of my house foundation, my gut instinct is telling me that the two consumption numbers might be comparable, but I won't know until I can steal a bit of time to do the actual math.  

Walk softly and cast a long shadow:
You can cut your irrigation use dramatically by allowing your St. Augustine lawn to remain LONG during drought.   Legendarily (although I cannot find a web reference for it), Randy Lemmon explained why: because the pores in the grass must open to allow carbon dioxide to enter.  If the individual blades of grass are too short, the grass loses too much water as it is opening itself to absorb CO2.  If the grass blades are instead kept longer, they have more surface area and don't have to stay open as long, and therefore they lose less water.  In the process, the longer blades also shade themselves and the underlying soil, further reducing water loss.  Such is the oral tradition of Lemmonheads, at least.  

Of pups and PR

It's a curious financial coincidence:  according to reports, the amount that League City's contentious Christmas party cost taxpayers is virtually the same as the amount that the League City Animal Shelter over-ran its budget last year:  about $30,000. 

And whereas the City exhibited no qualms about paying for that party (at least, not until the mainstream news media, legitimate bloggers, and rogue political upstarts all drew attention to it), the extra money consumed by the shelter was apparently seen as grounds for a re-alignment in ordinance enforcement priorities that is expected to result in fewer animal adoptions and increased euthanasia. 

If muni budgets were tight and all you could muster in the way of discretionary spending was thirty thousand bucks, would you rather blow it on a one-night materialistic employee orgy featuring forty-nine door prizes including computers, an iPod, electronic games, and a 42-inch flat-screen TV, or, would you rather spread that sum of money out over an entire year to maximize the humanity and compassion of an indispensible public service that impacts the entire community?

Well, yeah, that question is framed from a loaded perspective, so let's not discuss it rhetorically.  Instead, let's poll it, but before you click the poll at the end of this post, you may want to consider how animal management services do impact the entire community.  Even if you are not an animal lover, chances are good that the general issue will eventually affect you personally - for instance:

Exhibit A, animal management Poster Boy:
My child named him "Guava" because of
the translucent greenish cast to his eye color.

As best as any of us can determine, this dog was dumped in Centerpointe about ten days ago.  Could that have had anything to do with League City's announcement that it will enforce euthanasia of animals within five days of receiving them?  "We are not a rescue facility" ran the tag line in Houston Chronicle.   Guava can't tell us what transpired in his specific case, but with a public relations attitude like that, who wouldn't dump their unwanted animals in a prosperous subdivision like Centerpointe?  Better to let those animals loose in the streets where they have a chance at survival. 

Correspondingly, many of the neighbors on our side of the subdivision are distressed by the idea of taking Guava the canine dumpee to LCAS, because they fear that would mean swift and certain death for this wonderful, happy dog. 

And so we're working as individuals to get him medical attention and find him a home.  Essentially what this amounts to is that a public service function has been transferred in part to the public.  The city is not handling the situation the way many people see fit, and so it falls back on the people.  Meanwhile, it wouldn't surprise me if there were an increasing number of pet dumps in subdivisions like ours - that would be a predictable response to "we are not a rescue facility".  And who among us would want more dumped animals??

Hopefully some improvement in direction will come of the decision to increase the number of individuals on the shelter's Advisory Committee, and the upcoming meeting to further address this issue. 

And while I'm at it, let me issue this disclaimer:  I'm not affiliated with the Friends of League City Animal Shelter and I have no earthly idea why League City chose to cut ties with this local nonprofit which, in 2010, reportedly donated about $27,000 worth of supplies to the shelter (almost enough for a Christmas party!).  This severance is yet another in a long list of perplexing management and PR moves that the city seems to have made.   

With all that said, here's the poll: 

If you were a League City manager with a discretionary $30,000 available, how would you spend it to best serve the public's interest?

No firm foundation

In a recent post, I pondered the inevitable collision between suburban subdivision covenant boilerplate...

Excerpted from:
http://centerpointeleaguecity.com/documents/deed.pdf

...and the unsustainable reality associated with the long-term effects of changing rainfall patterns and reduced water supply:

Excerpted from:
http://www.leaguecity.com/index.aspx?NID=1578

Once again, regarding those St. Augustine lawns, we're supposed to have 'em, but we're routinely not allowed to maintain 'em the way that they need.  Eventually, with rising population and decreasing water availability, the incompatibility between these two legal requirements will grow to become more than the supreme annoyance that it currently is, and something will have to be done to resolve the situation.  We are already at the point where we have those marquis signs up around League City warning about the $500 fine for unauthorized water use.  I personally know of one Centerpointe resident who was paid a visit by LCPD and told to turn off their irrigation system a week or so ago.

Who knows? Maybe it'll be resolved very simply and painlessly when some politician steps forward to do for those bloody St. Augustine lawns what Rick Perry recently did for backyard flag poles and rooftop solar cells: prohibit HOAs and POAs from preventing us from ripping the water-gobbling things out.  Given the increasing local focus on water conservation regardless of our prevailing drought status, that would not surprise me in the slightest.

But there's actually a more fundamental water needs issue in play here than St. Augustine lawns:  our residential foundations.  I'm reminded of this today because the Austin American Statesman ran a very succinct piece on how to help safeguard slabs against breakage by consistently watering them:

Nice graphic.
Austin American Statesman
www.statesman.com 

If you're a new homeowner and don't yet understand the importance of watering, that quote above explains the gist of it.  Concrete doesn't bend very well, and so if it sags, it can break.  And once it's broken, your house will never be quite the same again, even if you spend tens of thousands of dollars on slab repairs.  

Both the League City Water Conservation Plan and its Drought Contingency Plan restrict landscape watering, but they appear to be silent on the issue of foundation watering: they don't authorize it, but neither do they prohibit it.  It's easy to imagine why: how might the splash hit the political fan if residents were told that they weren't allowed to water their slabs?!  And who would be liable for damages if such a prohibition were imposed?  I'm not going to comb through the mountains of contractual paperwork I have on our house to see if it says anything explicitly about that issue, but in general, I note that actions construed as negligent can sometimes void a homeowner warranty.  I'm not sure if failure to water a slab in one of the worst droughts in recorded history would be considered negligence, but nothing would surprise me.

Our slab, like many, is a pain in the butt to water.  We have one of those larger one-story house plans that are increasingly coveted by baby-boomer downsizers and empty-nesters.  As a result of the design, our slab perimeter is the better part of 300 feet!  An hours-long soaker-hose drag-a-thon is required to even make a dent in the water that it needs.  The effort required to water our St. Augustine grass pales in comparison.

Things to think about: if you only had so much water to use, would you rather save your house foundation, or would you rather save a bunch of St. Augustine that's going to look like crap in a drought anyway?

For that matter, if we made it into Stage 4 or 5 (the most restrictive stages) of our local Drought Contingency Plan, realistically, how much water do you suppose people could be convinced to stop using?  When it comes right down to it, do you suppose there would EVER come a time, short of completely disconnecting municipal supply, when local residents would stop using what is needed to safeguard the largest investment of their lives?

Yup.  I vote for xeriscape.