Centerpointe on HGTV, Part 2

People have been asking me for DETAILS, DANG IT!!  I thought it would be enough to publish the date upon which that particular House Hunters episode first aired (September 18), but folks still couldn't find reference to it.  So here's the 411 as best I know it...

... complete with a screengrab from this HGTV page just in case it evaporates.  I can't blame people for asking - this sub-page was not easy to find. 

No, I most certainly do not know how you might program your DVR to automatically record Episode HNT-7712H when it next airs.  I don't even know how to program my own DVR.

:-)

I will tell you one thing, though:  Being on HGTV is not all fun and games.  When I went drilling for information on this episode, HGTV wasn't the first reference I found.

Uh-oh, it's the inevitable M4M Craigslist solicitation.  Whatever you do, don't click that link!!! NSFW!!!

And this amusing reference:

Well, dude, if you DO decide to ever live in League City, the first step in any successful coping strategy for dealing with "teaparty central" is to start reading this blog, eh? 

Screengrabbed from a Google search. 

Anyway, that's all I got right now.  I'll check back from time to time to see if HGTV has posted the vid on their site, and if they do, I will snag it for you then.  Unless, of course, teaparty central manages to inspire the Second Coming such that we're all summarily dispatched to our final destinations before I have a chance to embed it. 

:-)

Best robot vacuum for residential use

This is purely my personal opinion here, and it will almost certainly change in the future as technology continues to improve and evolve.  But having owned and experimented with several different robot vacuum models, my qualified favorite is the Neato, of which the near-current edition appears to be the XV-14. 

Sam's Club in LaMarque (not the one at El Dorado) recently had it for a good price.  Note the words "one time buy".  I don't know if they still have it.  Presumably they were selling out the stock so that they could replace with the next model number. 

Note the use of the word "qualified" above.  Again, this is all just personal opinion, but here's what I feel are the relevant observations on the Neato XV-14: 

• Our Neatos have not lasted long-term, but we got our value out of them anyway.  We've lived in our home for 3.5 years now and we are on our second Neato, the first one having been bought shortly after we moved in.  The first one required repairs and even with them, it remained dead after about 2 years of use.  But do the math:  If it vacuums your house every week for two years before it dies, that's 100 vacuums for $300 or approximately $3.00 per whole-house vacuum.  It takes at least an hour to vacuum my house and so this is simply worth it to me.  I would have to pay a human laborer several times that amount to do the same work, not that I could ever procure a la carte housekeeping services (we are two working professional parents who choose not to hire a maid service - I needed something to lighten the overall load, which is why we tried the Neato in the first place... I'd rather spend my home time gardening and cooking healthy meals). 

• Our Neatos have come with their share of minor aggravations even when they do function.  Scenes like this are fairly common: 

For the most part, the laser guidance system is very impressive, but entrapments still occur, and I often wonder how in the the hell it ever managed to insert itself into those places. 

• Our experiences with this product may not be the same as in your situation.  The Neato does a really good job of picking up dirt, but we have ceramic tile throughout our entire house.  Furthermore, we intentionally chose that tile to be as low-maintenance and easy to clean as possible. 

This is a low-light photo to show the matte surface texture of the tile.  Notice that there is no rough texture, heterogeneity, or deep grooves in which dirt can become trapped.  The matte surface is extremely easy to clean while minimizing the potential for being slippery. 

By design, these are near-ideal floor conditions for any robot vacuum (or any conventional vacuum).  I don't know how the same device would perform in a home dominated by wall-to-wall carpet (it also does a very good job of our wool area rugs, but those are low-pile). 

My suggestions for future improvement on this product are as follows:

• The dirt cup should be larger.  I generally have to empty it three times during a vacuum of our house (we are outdoorsy people, dragging in lots of dirt, plus we have a large dog).  But having to empty the cup is OK, because...

• If the dirt cup is made larger, the battery should be correspondingly larger.  It generally takes two to three battery charges to complete the vacuuming of our 2,500 square foot house.  I have empty the cup every time I put it back on the charger.  We were originally hoping to repair our first Neato so that we could divide the house between the two of them for greater efficiency.  But that's a time-sink that hasn't happened yet. 

• There are still some glitches that need to be worked out of the software.  "Neato fail!" is a common human refrain around here.  Messages such as "please clear my path" sometimes occur when there is nothing blocking its path.  It just gets befuddled and needs to be reset. 

• The Neato doesn't specialize in edge cleaning.  I have to do that manually myself, but I have to do it a lot less frequently than I would otherwise.  Sometimes I just take a broom and sweep all the edge dirt out into the middle of the floor where the Neato can reach it. 

Bottom line:  Far from perfect, but as long as the Neatos continue to perform as well as they have been to date, I'll keep buying and/or repairing them. 

 

Vid below:  Neato flashes a recharge directive even though its battery bar shows that it is already fully charged.  A minor irritation.



Galveston ramble: Bishop's Palace and Moody Mansion

They're both worth seeing, but Bishop's Palace is more about art (in its architecture), and Moody Mansion is more about history (with its place in Galveston lore).  We are art people, and so we preferred the Palace. 

Rainy Saturday and scratch another one off the Bucket List.  I didn't feel like fighting Houston traffic in the rain, so we headed south down an empty freeway to the island.   My husband and I have both lived in greater Houston for a gazillion years but neither of us had seen this previously.  It's one of those things that fell into the "one day" category that we never got around to. 

Did I say art?!  What was this mason smoking?!  Many different unrelated styles and stones, and yet it all works together perfectly. 

We are also not very big on velvet rope, of which there is more at Moody Mansion, where the tour we took was closely led by a narrator instead of being self-guided and self-paced, as it was at the Palace.  If you have small children, the Palace is probably your better bet because they might get fidgety during the long but interesting Moody discourse. 


For all their wealth, the Moody family didn't make a huge spectacle of their living quarters.  The third floor of the mansion remains unfinished to this day because they reportedly never needed it. 

Note that you better buy your tickets early in the day for the Moody tour because it sells out. 

No interior photos to show you in this post, because photography was prohibited inside both places.  I could have spent another hour just examining the exteriors, the craftsmanship is so fascinating.

I'll go back one day for a closer look when the sun is out.  Yeah, "one day". 

Micro-targeting the macro-wannabe

My husband and I stared at each other in amazement when this showed up unsolicited in our mailbox the other day:

Regular readers are probably throwing back their heads and laughing out loud. 

Stuff like this invokes memories of that milestone moment in consumer marketing history best explained in the feature "How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did". 

I've got no buns in the oven, but I've sure got plants in the ground.

Screengrabbed from Forbes. 

Every time one of these micro-targeting efforts hits the bulls eye, my husband and I try to figure out how in the hell they were able to do it.  What's especially interesting in this case is that the personalized advertisement showed up in my husband's name, not mine.  But I do 100% of the shopping for landscaping and gardening supplies (much of which I pay for by credit card, which is fully data-mine-able).  But if these guys are as sophisticated as I suspect they are, then they probably know that, even though I didn't change my last name for professional reasons, I'm traditional enough to generally refer to our homestead as the "[my husband's name] residence" and therefore that would, in fact, be the correct marketing default, even though the purchasing forensics might suggest otherwise on their faces. 

If they know our names and address, then they certainly know that we are situated on an ordinary subdivision lot that cannot possibly support the "farm" for which they are marketing personalized apparel.   But if they are as sophisticated as I suspect they are, they also recognize a farming wannabe when they see one, just as Target recognized a pregnant teenager.  And pairing one's last name with a lifestyle aspiration is the ultimate appeal to vanity. 

So did their exquisitely-sophisticated targeting work?  Let's just say that, after staring wistfully at the postcard for several minutes, my husband admitted, "I wouldn't mind a hoodie."

Let's take a closer look at that logo.  There's a barn where a four-car garage currently sits, and a silo where the chimney ought to be.  But otherwise, it is oddly reminiscent of a tract home property, isn't it?  Especially if one is predisposed to view one's own property production potential through cauliflower-colored glasses, it's an irresistible juxtaposition. 

Avian feeding frenzy

So after seeing a hummingbird in my front yard stacked stone garden at the end of August, I invested in a HummZinger Highview Mini which I hung on September 3. 

My first observation is that this is, indeed, a superior hummingbird feeder.  I have had zero problems with fire ants or bees.  My last hummingbird feeder was a generic thing that I bought at a big box store.  It was not designed properly and it quickly became swarmed with hundreds of quasi-killer bees (bees are even more drawn to nectar than hummingbirds are, if they can reach it).  It was so bad that we had to spray the feeder itself with wasp killer from a distance and then dispose of it in the trash. 

My second observation is that I don't think there are many people around Centerpointe who feed hummingbirds, because my little guys have been clueless.  Hummingbirds are not born knowing how to feed from an artificial source - they have to learn it either by figuring it out, or by watching other hummingbirds demonstrate how to do it.  It took two solid weeks for them to finally get the hang of it, but the results have been worth waiting for.

Except there is one slight problem:  Hummingbirds are famous for fighting over resources - they are little birds with big attitudes and no tolerance for sharing.  Many people who feed them use multiple feeders to relieve some of the inevitable squabbles.  This poor guy showed up with some of his neck feathers hanging off after having had an altercation with a rival. 

I'm not entirely sure, but this might be his rival. 

These are ruby-throated hummingbirds, obviously. 

Right now, many of them are passing through en route to points south.

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia. 

It started raining today, and today was really the first big day of hummer feeding competence, so I didn't get many pictures before my front window became streaked and blurry with water.  But here's one more for the time being.

Wonderful iridescence.  Remember, this critter is only the size of my thumb.  I was basically pressed up against the glass as I took this shot, and I was using a long lens to boot.   

Centerpointe on HGTV

I've said it many times to my husband:  "I watch so darned many home improvement shows that it's only a matter of time before I see someone I know featured on one of them.  It WILL happen."

And so last night it came to pass in a proverbial 'all new episode' of House Hunters (is there any such thing as a 'half new episode'??).  Except it wasn't the person that I knew, but the house. 

Does anyone still have an e-mail address for the H family?  If so, please forward them this postlink.  They might get a kick out of seeing their old house featured on HGTV. 

Screenshots courtesy of HGTV with my television on pause. 

And in this case, it was not one house that I knew, but two.

As the camera panned into the back yard of this different Centerpointe sale contender (not the H's house), I was like, "WAIT FOR IT!!!"  And right on cue, the potential buyer uttered those immortal words:  "Ugh, this is not what I wanted.  It's too small."  Welcome to the world of microscopic back yards, dude! 

But nevertheless, the wise buyer made the decision to invest here anyway:

YAY!!!  HE PICKED HOUSE #1!!!
:-)

But I suck, don't I??  I blurred out the danged house number on this screenshot.  And don't a fair number of our 438 fine homes look very similar?  Will you ever be able to figure out which one this is?  Will the suspense kill you outright or will it merely torment you psychologically?! 
:-)

HGTV keeps the identities of their guests confidential, so I decided to follow suit (I knew where this one was because I jog in Centerpointe, plus there were other clues).  If you know who this relatively new neighbor is, don't spill the beans in the comment section below.  I'll just remove any identifying info.   

Anyway, a hearty welcome to the buyer from the blogger you'll meet in the near future.  And there's a guy over here in Section 9 that I need to introduce you to as well, because he's the subdivision specialist in growing the kind of trees you are so eager to cultivate.  He lives up the street from that other house you looked at. 
:-)

Groceries in Clear Lake: More ugly pictorial truth

I think I found a way to document conditions inside Clear Lake grocery stores without getting arrested for trespassing and/or dragged into litigation:  I simply have to purchase what is not fit for human consumption and document it within my own home instead of on site.  Not naming individual stores in the process, of course. 

I wanted to do this to book-end my Whole Foods-related posts of August 6 and September 15, among numerous others.  In those posts, I lamented the lack of accessible reasonable-quality groceries in our area and extolled the virtues of stores where such dietary resources can, indeed, be procured. 

Here is my concern after writing those posts:  I'm afraid that some folks are going to read my opinions and criticisms and simply discount the allegations with something along the lines of, "Oh, you spoiled elitist pansy - complaining about groceries while living in one of the richest bedroom communities in the richest nation on earth."

The situation is not entirely what it seems, though, and that's my ultimate point.  True, we are the richest nation on earth - but where food is concerned, we are in a genuine state of nutritional poverty which only seems to be getting worse.  Even if our individual subdivisions are not situated in formally-defined food deserts, the problem is that much of the fresh food to which we do technically have access is simply not edible.

It's difficult to read this because of all the overlapping colors, but it's a screengrab from the USDA's food desert atlas.  Centerpointe is roughly in the middle. 

So here's the methodology I chose to substantiate this bad groceries claim of mine: 

• I examined fresh produce in 4 of the reputationally-best grocery stores in Clear Lake, all within the same 24 hour period. 
• From the g-store that many Clear Lakers declare to be THE best, I purchased three fresh vegetables with which I desired to prepare a recipe: 
• baby bok choy
• Swiss chard
• Snow peas. 
• Furthermore, I selected the best available representative of each vegetable type.  I didn't want to simply pick the first selection I saw and then have people respond, "Oh, you just picked expired produce that the staff hadn't had time to clear from the shelves and discard."  To avoid this, I pawed through each display pile and picked the best of each lot, as if I were actually planning to (gulp) eat the stuff. 

Here are my very telling results:

This is the baby bok choy.  It was in such poor condition and the sky was so pretty this afternoon that I decided to offer it up to God, because God knows that this isn't fit for human consumption.  Maybe He could figure out what to do with it instead. 

That overall wilting you see was just the beginning of this story:

Here is a close-up.  If it looks yellowish and slimy, that's because it was yellowish and slimy.

This is me pressing my thumbnail into the bok choy, but the bok choy is so old and rubbery that it just depresses rather than yielding with a skin-snap to the fingernail the way a fresh vegetable would. 

OK, let's move on to the Swiss chard.

This is green Swiss chard, the best I could locate. 

That's some of my home-grown red Swiss chard from last year on the left, and the store-bought stuff on the right, just for comparison.  Red, white, or yellow, that pic on the left shows what Swiss chard is supposed to look like. 

Cut ends of the store-bought Swiss chard.  How many weeks ago was this stuff harvested?!?!  It's *ancient*!!!

Last but not least, the snow peas:

A single badly-wilted snow pea.  It's so degraded that it had the consistency of rubber. 

A snow pea is much like any other pea cultivar - if you bend it, it should respond with an enthusiastic fresh-sounding SNAP.  But this one was so old and rubbery that I could curl it into a ringlet without it splitting. 

I wouldn't feed any of those vegetables to my family.  Hell, I'm not sure that I'd feed those vegetables to a horse.  All of them went straight onto my compost pile where they belong.  Chalk up the expenditure to public service of a sort.

You might at this point wonder what obsessionary neurological condition inspired me to visit four local grocery stores inside 24 hours. 

Well, you see, I got a wild hair.  I enjoy fresh Gulf shrimp very much, and I decided I wanted to make shrimp and snow peas for my family, a dish I hadn't made in many years.  But I wanted to make it the healthy way - not smothered in grease and calorie-rich gob the way you'd find it in most Americanized Chinese restaurants.  And the healthy way necessitates quality ingredients. 

Garlic, garden-fresh chopped green onion, sesame oil, olive oil, Marukan rice vinegar and/or sherry, soy sauce, plus a lime and seafood seasoning marinade (I used Old Bay because I had nothing else on hand)... that's really all this dish needs if the macro-ingredients are good quality and tasty.  Serve with fresh steamed white or brown rice and fresh fruit as a completion.

I had hoped to find a bit of bok choy to throw in here as well to bulk it up a bit, but there was none to be bought. 

Is this really the dinner of a spoiled elitist pansy food snob??  Or is it closer to being pretty basic no-frills healthy fare? 

I went to all four of those grocery stores because I needed edible snow peas.  I actually found some that were acceptable, but only in the fourth store I visited:

They were not perfect but I was able to use them successfully in the dish shown above.  Expensive, though - on a per-pound basis, they were on par with grass-fed beef. 

If you count the fact that I had to go to Rose's Seafood in Seabrook to get the shrimp, this whole exercise is clearly elevated to the level of the absurd:  I had to go to five stores to get two ingredients for one dish which is not all that exotic.  I'm not talking about making fresh paella or anything - I'm just talking about Stir Fry 101.  Stir Fry For Dummies.

Clearly elevated to the level of the absurd: An unsustainable time-sink that no working parents could ever find the time to indulge on a routine basis.  Parse this example and you start to understand better why so many Americans are obese. 

But wait - it gets even better.  If the content above didn't hit a home run with you, this ought to put your deeper comprehension of this fundamental edible food shortage issue right over the top.  I clearly can't buy decent vegetables in Clear Lake, but I can buy this:

O.. M...G...  when I saw this, I literally heard the Twilight Zone theme in my head. 

DING DING DING!!! HELLO!!!  Do we have any neurons firing among the readership??  Do you see how one of these items might influence the development of the other??

The epic struggle to eat healthy in the bustling Houston Texas suburb of Clear Lake continues.  Stay tuned.