The immigrant effect

The kind of analysis I've done below either fascinates the hell out of people, or scares the hell out of them, or offends the hell out of them, depending on their personal world views.  But having watched the situation reflected by the analysis unfold in real time and in person, I fall squarely into the first category, but first let me first explain why I made these charts presented below in the first place. 

I was vetting a local contractor who has done work for someone else in this subdivision, but that contractor was not authorized to share his Centerpointe client's identity with me (I wanted to cruise by and evaluate the exterior work the contractor did on their house). 

Thinking this was relatively harmless, the contractor did mention that client's first name to me, and it was a less-common first name.  No problem with me taking it from there - I simply went to GalvestonCAD, pulled every property tax record for Centerpointe, spreadsheeted them and did an "edit,find" for that name.  I literally had the address inside of 5 minutes.  Welcome to the Information Age. 

But having gone to that trouble, I then decided to parse those CAD records semi-quantitatively to illustrate something that I already knew from direct experience: that there is a subtle but visible difference in the ethnic make-up of Section 9 relative to all the other sections of Centerpointe. 


I made these homeowner ethnicity estimates purely by evaluating the most likely derivations of each owner name, and there's no doubt a healthy degree of error in these results, which of course are not guaranteed to represent reality - these are just very quick estimates based on CAD data.   The uncertainties would derive from issues such as mixed-race households, ambiguous names, etc.

We have a higher proportion of immigrants, especially first-generation Asian immigrants, in Section 9.  The reason for this is not difficult to understand:  you had to be God to qualify for a mortgage during the time period represented by the Section 9 development.  It was insane.  The American mortgage crisis and resulting world-wide recession arguably began around September 13, 2008 - the same day as Hurricane Ike came ashore.  We pre-qualified for our mortgage less than one year later in July or August 2009.  Nobody was getting mortgages at that time unless they were utterly stainless. 

We were one of the initial dirt-sale contracts in Section 9, so I get to claim some measure of "we were here first" empirical wisdom.  I tried to go around talking with each new homeowner as their individual builds (or buys) cropped up.  It was a fascinating people-watching experience, because each and every one of them (regardless of ethnicity) had some story to tell of iron-willed personal financial discipline.  I've lived in many subdivisions over the past 20-odd years, but these new Section 9-ers were the most focused and driven group of suburbanites I've ever seen assembled in one place at one time.  The mortgage crisis was an incredibly efficient sorting mechanism for post-crisis suburban developments such as ours. 

My personal theory is that the Asian immigrant work ethic and thrift-related values gave them a slight edge in the brutal mortgage qualification process, resulting in today's higher percentage in Section 9.  Some folks will no doubt take offense to a statement like that, and I don't intend any offense.  But there is some truth to the Asian stereotype I'm referencing.  As the linked article above notes, "Reports on census data are one of the few times it is permissible to discuss immigration and race without risking accusations of prejudice. After all, the census data do not lie."  I don't have Census data on the fine scale of this subdivision, but I have what is perhaps the next best thing:  CAD data.  And they do not lie. 

For what it's worth in fascination or other impact.  This is an impact of American history still resonating and reverberating like a giant reality bell having been rung, right here on our streets.  Have a great day.    

Healthy freezer-based diet management strategy

In this recent post, I jokingly compared my enormous black upright freezer to the monolith in the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

An artful representation of the 2001 movie monolith, screengrabbed from this site. 

The movie monoliths did not have the words "Kenmore Elite" stenciled on them, nor were sweet-potato-curing wine refrigerators and Buc-ees insulated grocery totes stored on top of them. 

This comparison is not as superficial as you might first think, because the parallels are more than black-metal skin deep.

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia.

My freezer monolith did, indeed, trigger a considerable shift in the evolution of my hominid family's eating habits.  It became a tool, a weapon for fighting unhealthy weight gain, and it all started with a life-changing conversation I had with one of my best girlfriends. 

At the time, I was formulating a strategy for going back to work full-time after the birth of my baby, who had been born about five weeks prior to the birth of my girlfriend's baby.  Girlfriend and I despaired about my all-too-common-American-working-mother predicament:  how on earth would I be able to maintain my family's pattern of healthy eating if I were working full time?!  There simply weren't enough hours in the day - let alone enough physical stamina - to do full-time employment AND cook healthy meals every evening.

"You're going to have to do most of your cooking on Saturdays and Sundays and store the stuff for serving during the week," my girlfriend concluded emphatically.  "There simply isn't any other way."

And so a freezer management plan, which spawned my system of specialized freezer-friendly recipe development, was thusly born. 

Tragically, my girlfriend was dead of cancer just two years after our conversation.  She didn't even get to live long enough to see her own baby's first day of kindergarten.  My monolithic freezer and its carefully-crafted contents are a big part of her legacy of creative gifts to lucky me, the one of us who is still alive for the moment. 

What I want to impart to you in this post is a general visual impression of how this freezer strategy can be undertaken successfully.  As I've noted in other posts, I've observed Americans to be very biased against an eating lifestyle that incorporates a high proportion of food freezing.  Americans associate freezers with cheap "TV dinners" and mass-produced junk food.  I mean, isn't that most common type of stuff one finds in grocery store freezers?  The kind of food people turn to as unhealthy indulgences (think of the many frozen pies, ice cream, and cakes) or at least as a last unpalatable resort for the sake of convenience? 

Most of what's in these is, indeed, absolute crap, in my opinion.  But there's no law that says your freezer has to resemble these. 

Grocery freezer pic screengrabbed from this Sodahead site.

There's no law that says your freezer has to resemble the frightening things you see in the average grocery store.  Its contents might instead evolve somewhat along these lines:

Piggybacking on my late girlfriend's wise legacy, I've taken my approach one step farther in that I actually grow a portion of the vegetables we eat, grow them in my microscopic Centerpointe back yard.  Tomatoes and onions have been among my more successful micro-crops. 

"We are not both growing okra again next year, because there's just too much of it produced," a very-much-alive Centerpointe girlfriend said to me late last summer as we eyed our respective harvests.  "We need to divide and conquer, each growing different vegetables so that we can swap the excess."

A large batch of jambalaya chock full of those same vegetables pictured above, plus fresh Gulf shrimp, which I usually buy from Rose's Seafood in Kemah.  Have you ever noticed that you cannot walk into a single grocery store in Clear Lake and buy fresh Gulf shrimp?  It's all either frozen and/or farm-raised inedible junk (in my opinion) from Asia.  THAT is frightening: here we have this fantastic resource just a few miles from us, and what are they selling in local mainstream grocery stores?  Farm-raised Asian shrimp.  Gag! 

In this previous post, I estimated we had ninety-three Pyrex storage dishes.  I was wrong.  It's actually well over one hundred.  Into which goeth the jambalaya pictured above. 

Everything labeled and dated.  This is an essential step in operating a large-capacity freezer effectively.  If you aren't strictly organized, you'll end up wasting quite a bit of food, and you don't want to do that when paying top dollar for organic produce and local seafood. 

The top pieces of tape describe the contents and give the date when those containers went into the freezer.  The second blank piece of masking tape on each is for recording the date on which the container came back out of the freezer.  If you wait until the container is removed from the freezer to add that second piece of tape, condensation on the lid will inhibit it from sticking. 

This is the part where I get to spoof the movie in yet another way: 
"My God - it's full of food!!" 
:-)

When I open up my freezer and show folks what's inside, this is very much the expression typically seen on their faces, as they wrap their minds around the fact that it's all home-made and all top-quality and mostly all-organic. 

Screengrab from Google image search showing the famous photo of actor Keir Dullea portraying the character of astronaut David Bowman. 

Do you wonder why on earth (or in space) any suburban homeowner would purchase over one hundred Pyrex storage dishes?!  Now you have your answer:  because forty-four of them are visible in just that one freezer freeze-frame above.  In other words, a lot of them are needed.  I have found that, in order to manage a large freezer effectively, I have to be absolutely consistent and systematic.  I can't use a bunch of random storage dishes that don't stack well because they just become a jumbled and non-intuitive mess.  I have to use the same series of dishes organized consistently by date and contents.  And they have to be able to go from the freezer to the microwave to the oven to the table to the dishwasher with maximum possible efficiency and minimum possible thought.  No fuss. 

Seriously, my Pyrex-based food management system is very much like an intermodal container management system, only on a very fine scale.  Notice how all those container boxes are the same boxes - only the color varies.  That's because it would be impossible to manage them if they were all different sizes and shapes.  Intermodal containers seamlessly move from sea to rail to truck to storage, just as Pyrex dishes go from freezer to microwave to oven to table. 

Combined screengrab (incorporating this and this) from Google image search for the search phrase underlined in the first sentence above. 

Hopefully this gives you an introduction to thinking outside the freezer box.  I'll provide additional expounds in future posts. 

Replacing the cord on pull-down attic stairs

This might not seem like a very important topic for you, but it might become a bit more front-and-center-of-your-attention if your pull cord suddenly snaps like mine did yesterday.

See how this man's right hand is pulling the cord that dangled from the underside of the stairs in this screengrab from a This Old House DIY webpage?  A similar common style of attic-access staircase was installed in our house by our builder. 

Before yesterday, I never really realized how flimsy that pull-down cord was.  Really, it's not much thicker than a piece of string or a window blind cord.  And it snapped as I was lowering the stairs.  Our house is just over 3 years old and we don't access the attic very much, so there wasn't that much wear and tear on this before it failed. 

Fortunately in my case, I was able to grab the edge of the stairs and pull them the rest of the way down by hand.  If instead the string had broken while they were still well above my head, they would have slammed back up into their ceiling frame and then I would have been looking at a more difficult situation.

The side-springs on these particular stairs are very tight, and the stair unit sits flush with the frame.  If it had slammed shut without a pull cord in place, I would have had to climb up there and try to wedge something into the crack to pry them loose.  Or maybe I would have had to screw on a solid gripper handle while they were still up in the ceiling, which would have been a pain. 

So my advice here is - check your pull cord, and if it's flimsy, you might want to replace it proactively with something heavier so that you can potentially avoid this snapping scenario.

I drilled out a larger hole for a better cord. 

This is a piece of mooring line intended for a small sailing dinghy such as a little Sunfish, perhaps.  I ran the line through and tied a bowline around a metal washer to keep it from pulling back out.   

If you don't know how to tie a bowline, it's worth learning because they never slip and yet at the same time, you can loosen them easily.

On the grab portion of the cord, I cut a section of my old split garden hose to use as a more comfortable hand-hold. 

Given that I was forced to do this maintenance on our pull-down stair unit, I scanned the internet in order to see whether there was anything else stair-related for which I ought to be on the lookout while I was at it.  I did find references to a class-action lawsuit (e.g., here and here) that alleged premature hinge failure.  Our stairs do not appear to be of the age referenced by those actions, but I'll be eyeballing our hinge from time to time anyway, just in case, because a failure of that type had never occurred to me as a possibility. 

Yet another minor mishap transmuted into an equally-minor missive of the blogging variety. 

A great day to be born

The culmination of all my milkweed-growing and Monarch-watching becomes apparent in these special ten minutes.  Happy Saturday - it's a glorious one. 

Description from YouTube:
A Monarch is born during a spectacular sunny afternoon on April 20, 2013 in the Centerpointe neighborhood of League City, Texas. 

The video frame position does not change, so you can see just how fast the wings expand.  Rhythmic contractions of its abdomen are visible as fluid pumps from it to the wings.  By the end of this 10-minute sequence, the wings extend beyond the lower edge of the field of view. 

Raw video from a Nikon D3100.  The noises in the background are shutter clicks from another still camera. 
http://centerpointeleaguecity.blogspot.com/

The Centerpointe Drive - West Walker construction

As I was sitting at my desk working yesterday, my goose-neck lamp was doing a subtle version of The Hamster Dance, with the bulb fixture jiggling and jumping at the end of its flexible arm. 

No, it wasn't a random swarm of 1.0 events on the Richter Scale - it was actually this:

They were laying down a short section of board road and unloading an excavator at the intersection of Centerpointe Drive and West Walker.  All that movement of heavy equipment was vibrating the ground and making a lot of noise. 

You might first guess that this has something to do with the nearby Public Safety Building construction which is now in full swing (webcam here, if you are interested), but I don't think it does.  I think it actually has to do with the new pipeline that's being installed in the Interurban easement. 

Recall this post from (coincidentally) one year ago today.  That talked about a new pipeline that was going into the "Centerpoint" (i.e., the Interurban) easement which was initially confused by some with the "Centerpointe" easement.  They appear to be just now getting around to laying that pipe, if you'll excuse the expression.  And our right-of-way intersection at Centerpointe Drive appears as if it is being developed as one of their access points.  There are fresh markers delineating some existing lines in the easement, which suggests that this project is now proceeding.

Anyway, I'll post more info as it becomes available. 

In the meantime, enjoy those hamsters.
 

Left from League City Parkway, after a spell

This is becoming annoying.  With the increased real estate development in our area and the corresponding intensification of transit needs, the left-turn lane from League City Parkway (SH 96) eastbound onto northbound West Walker is no longer long enough to accommodate normal traffic patterns.  Even when it's not rush hour, it's often a two-light wait for this left turn because cars are blocked from entering the short left-turn lane.

Under the current light sequence, all eastbound SH 96 faces simultaneous red lights regardless of whether there's an intention to proceed left or go straight. As I took this pic, I was blocked from entering the left-turn lane by the string of cars waiting to proceed east. 

So what happens with increasing frequency is that I watch that first green arrow sail away like a ship into the sunset, while I'm stuck behind the line of cars.  Other people behind me who need to turn left are similarly blocked. 

What'll happen eventually here is that so many left-turners will get bottlenecked like this that they'll start spilling over and stacking up in the center lane, which will completely foul mobility on this heavily-used arterial.  Hopefully League City and/or TxDOT will be able to intervene responsively and adjust this lane and the signal patterns before that happens. 

Whatever happened to Hans Mongolian?

It was a familiar sight in an unlikely location for twenty years:

SB IH-45 south of NASA 1 - "the old Fiesta shopping center", as Clear Lake Lifers tend to call it. 

 

In a complex that mostly included outlet and big box retailers, it succeeded despite being a non-mainstream cuisine and very difficult to access (the location, location, location issue being originally cited in the Fiesta closing of many years ago). 

According to the word on the street, the man who founded it in 1992 (reportedly, his name actually was Hans) decided to retire.  He then sold the business to his nephew, who "ran it into the ground", is what some people have said.  I have no idea whether there's any truth to that.  I did a brief internet search and while some of the ratings sites note that it closed, there doesn't seem to be a story available anywhere. 

Anyway, it's frustrating for us healthy eaters in Clear Lake because this makes at least three key healthy restaurant closings of late.  The two others that come to mind are:

• Dimassis Clear Lake
• Korean BBQ

Well, at least Hans Mongolian BBQ managed to have a good run (and a minor cult following).  I'm sure glad it lasted as long as it did. 

Closed Mondays.  And every other day, too, unless someone steps in and takes it over. 

And by the way, just as a post-script, like Hans, that original Fiesta Mart store was revolutionary for its time.  Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:


Screengrabbed from this sub-site.