Beacon beckons

An interesting case of community action is unfolding as a special interest group called Families for the Responsible Development of Beacon Island (FRDBI) wrangles with a developer's plans to install high-density residential assets on League City's long-undeveloped "lighthouse" island. 

How it is, and how it might be: 
Googlemaps screengrab compared with the developer's concept.  You might be able to access the plans here if the paywall doesn't kick in. 

This is the kind of thing that doesn't impact Centerpointers directly, but I like watching these cases evolve because it basically "shows us how it's done".  I don't know that we'll ever need to petition regarding any development that may be proposed for our subdivision's vacant adjacent tracts, but it's nice to have a template, and it's instructive to follow the logic of what works or doesn't work in terms of dealing with the City.

FRDBI's chief concern is with the relatively high density of proposed development.  As I commented on a report in this morning's Galveston Daily News (paywalled), my immediate concern was the potential future impacts of Biggert-Waters, aka the Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012.  Here we are moaning and wailing about how Biggert-Waters will catastrophically destroy real estate values in vulnerable areas, and yet at the same time, League City is entertaining a development proposal that, at first glance, puts a lot of real assets on or near grade in what appears to be a vulnerable area.  One of the most comprehensive local news reports (paywalled?) concerned the financial impacts of Biggert-Waters on the City of Nassau Bay.  Well, you could practically hit Nassau Bay with a rock from Beacon Island.  Would a lot of Beacon Island's improvements as proposed still be insurable four years from now after we get done with the delays and political obscurations surrounding Biggert-Waters?  The answer to that remains to be seen, but it's an important consideration for the viability of the development. 

Sooner or later, waterfront homeowners are going to have to pay the federal piper, and they're going to be paying a lot. 

Cute graphic screengrabbed from this site. 

More wings over Centerpointe

It wasn't Shuttle Endeavour this time, but it was one heck of an impressive sight nonetheless. 

What is that??  A cracked windshield, maybe?

Not a photo of busted glass.  It was a classic energy-conserving V-shaped flock of migrating birds flying at an impossibly-high altitude.  An impossibly-large number of birds.  That's just one arm of the V-formation shown in the photo above. 

Even with a long lens, I couldn't do this one justice.  They were probably between one and two thousand feet high. 

They were so far up that, if it were not for the sharp eyes of my 5-year-old neighbor, I never would have seen them.  But he knows I enjoy wildlife, and so as we were in the middle of washing my car this past Saturday evening, he pointed to the sky and shrieked, "Get your camera!"
:-)

They are probably either white-fronted geese or snow geese.  I increased the contrast in the photos above to improve visibility, so they don't look very white.  But those are two of the more common species that traverse our area in large numbers each autumn. 

"Snowbirds" in the most literal sense of it:  Both species migrate from the high Arctic to the Texas Gulf Coast.  And some snowbird people make that long journey as well. 

Map screengrabbed from this page. 

Snow goose photo from Wikipedia. 

Goose on the loose will soon be geese on the lease, as they don't have much farther to go from here before they touch down for the winter months.  I've seen amazing flocks of them foraging in the wetlands down around the Matagorda area.  Here's hoping they find good eatin' given that freshwater inflows along the coast are not optimal right now. 

Rain barrels: What's hype, and what's helpful, Part 2

Wa-ay back in August 2011, I published this post which fact-checked the issue of rain barrels for use at single family properties. 

These things.

My conclusion was obvious: that rain barrels are likely to pay for themselves if used consistently over the long term, but "save you money on your water bill", as the popular PR song and dance proclaims??  Not really. 

Screengrab from the first hype post. 

Well, it turns out that the situation is even less cost-effective than I initially forecast, at least with respect to the barrel that I bought, which was a Systern model. 

This is what happened to mine within the first year of its use. 

Let's see a close-up of that.

No bueno.  The shell cracked under the weight of the water contained within it.   

I was willing to overlook this as a one-off failure, especially given that the manufacturer replaced my barrel under warranty at no charge (I now use the original cracked one for dry mulch storage and the crack conveniently lets accumulated rainwater drain out of it).  But a year later, my replacement has also started to leak.  It didn't suffer a photogenic stress failure as the original one did.  Rather, it seems to be a maddening pin-hole this time, which I haven't been able to locate and fix. 

However, what I can locate is a perpetually soggy spot adjacent to my slab as the stupid thing slowly bleeds out after every rain.  Not only is that not useful, it's actually worse than useless because you don't want to have any areas of differential moisture around your slab.  That could lead to uneven soil settling, which could eventually lead to slab damage.

So now my warranty replacement follows its older sibling straight out the window, and not only have I not achieved anything "eco-friendly" with this effort, I've actually generated a lot of wasted plastic, wasted money, and wasted time. 

I've looked at other consumer-grade rain barrels on the market, and I don't have sufficient confidence in what I'm seeing to purchase any of them.  I bought the Systern because I did the research and concluded that it was one of the more robust models on the market.  You have to remember that a full rain barrel will weigh 8.34 lbs/gal * 55 gal = 460 lbs!!  Four hundred and sixty pounds!!  I look at some of the thin plastic brand names being sold in big box stores and other places and I don't believe they would stand up to that kind of a weight loading for very long.  If the Systern can't take the heat, I doubt that any of the others could either. 

I do believe there are non-consumer options out there that could work very well in a residential setting, but I will save that discussion for a subsequent post.  In the mean time, I suggest that you take the continuing flow of local news stories like this one with a grain of salt. 

Halloween downpour

My two rain gauges registered right around four inches, which was enough to turn Centerpointe's dry-bottom storm water retention ponds into very wet ponds.

And where there's water, there will be Great Egrets. 

And ducks.  This always amazes me... where do they come from, and on just a few hours' notice??  364 days a year, there's no standing water here, but as soon as it appears, so do they. 

The 747 jumbo jet of the local bird world.  Very photogenic but also very camera-shy. 

The same conditions that produced that remarkable deluge also gave us one of the best sunsets of the year.

Water Street (name coincidental to the day's events) in Webster.  Picasa had no processing suggestions for me on this one - it was optimized as-is. 

NASA Road 1 looking toward The Hop nightclub in Webster. 

My photographic attention was pulled in three directions simultaneously, as we celebrated candy-time with the kids.  Hope everyone had a good one.

My favorite costume of the evening.  Notice the intentional head lean to amplify the overall effect.  Given the overwhelming popularity of The Walking Dead, I expected to see more zombie-like costumes last night, but they were few and far between.  I guess that zombies are a bit intense for the Superman set. 

Something stinky, Part 4: Warm crap in a bag

I don't get credit for that provocative tag line - Houstonia does.

If you don't read Houstonia, you should - it's awesome.  It's like a local Texas Monthly except it doesn't take itself quite as seriously and it sets the journalistic creativity bar much higher, particularly with respect to humor and the kind of Gestaltic insight that can only derive from a passionate sense of place. 

Screengrabbed from one of their Facebook entries of this morning; referenced story here. 

I'm borrowing the phrase for use as a tag line because last night saw me carrying that very substance (much more than Avogadro's quantity of it) for a longer distance than I would have preferred.  Except mine wasn't the much-maligned Frito pie - it really was warm crap in a bag. 

This kind of bag.  Leak proof, thank God. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

See, I like to go jogging on either Sunday or Wednesday evening because that's when I am guaranteed to find at least a few trash cans set by the curb for pick-up the next day.  Therefore when my furry jogging companion makes her inevitable solid waste deposit, I can bag it and promptly slip it into someone else's can without having to carry the warm, mushy thing a full mile back to my own house. 

But here's the problem with Wednesday night jogs:  As I've noted previously, League City's trash contract is very inefficient and not many people bother to put their trash cans out, because we really don't need two trash collection days per week and Thursday is perceived as our "second" trash day and therefore that's the one most people ignore. 

I don't know how those poor buggers on the corner of Elm Pointe and Heather Pointe feel about having been designated the primary dog dumping ground in Centerpointe, but their side yard is scent central.  Many dogs, including mine, will intentionally hold in their goods for the chance to deposit them at this common canine marking ground.  If you guys see dog poo remaining on your property, it's from someone else's dog, not mine - I pick up hers every time. 

And after I pick it up, I carry it to the nearest trash can.  The while line shown on the screengrab above traces the distance from the point of deposit to the nearest available can last night. 

I had to jog eleven hundred feet past two dozen houses last night before I found a trash can set out for collection.  That's how few cans were set out in that area of the subdivision for this week's second collection event. 

As of this morning, the situation was slightly improved, at least in Section 9, where 37% of residents had set out their cans (they tend to be younger and more enthusiastically ritualized here, given our section's recent genesis).  But of course, as has historically been the case, most of those cans were holding just a single small kitchen bag of trash.  If we'd wanted to, we probably could have consolidated the entire section's 75 homes worth of trash into about five of the 96-gallon rolling bins. 

But take heart: there's now only four more years to go on League City's current waste management contract.


I'd like to dedicate this post to the fine folks in Republic Waste's corporate headquarters, the folks who have been following my commentary regarding the League City trash agreement, which some of us have interpreted to represent warm crap in a contract for reasons I will not recapitulate here but which can be found under the Trash label in this blog. 
:-)

Bamboo privacy hedge, Part 2: Pleachy keen

"What a difference four months can make!" she said, as the great b. malingensis experiment continues.  Take a look at these before-and-after shots:

Starting conditions, screengrabbed from Part 1. 

Same view, June of 2013. 

You don't have to "ignore the present shapeless mass" any longer.  This past weekend, my husband and I got a wild hair because we were sick of looking at The Great Bamboo Blob.  It might be too soon to begin the pleaching process (we are afraid we will discourage height if we trim out the bulk), but what the heck - we took a chance:

Yes, that IS the same view, just four months later!  It's a bit scruffy, but it's still less than two years old right now.  Additional refinements will come with time. 

It's still growing more radially (as opposed to upright) than ultimately it needs to be trained to grow, but you can start to get a better idea of where this effort is headed.  The point in this very narrow space between the houses is to create scale and privacy while not appearing oppressive when viewed from either my property or my neighbors' property. 

Here's an example of an even narrower space where the bamboo has been trained to serve as an artistic focal point as well as providing visual privacy by extending the existing fence upward. 

Screengrabbed from this excellent Australian article on bamboo pleaching.   Note that the word "pleaching" as applied to bamboo differs from the mainstream landscaping definition. 

Obviously I have a larger space and a more substantial height requirement than what's shown in this wonderful example above, so I have a bigger pleaching job ahead of me.  But it's looking promising so far. 

Up and up and up she goes
Where she stops, nobody knows.

As I mentioned in Part 1, I don't know how tall this malingensis will get, because I'm the only person I know of who is growing it in north Galveston County, in these soil and microclimate conditions.  But one thing is clear - it hasn't topped out yet.  The new culms are coming in around fifteen feet. 

Stay tuned for future bamboo babblings.  Who knows what the next four months might bring?!

:-)

New grocery store for League City

It's not the announcement that many of us have been hoping for, but perhaps it will stimulate a higher degree of healthy free-market competition:  GCDN's Laura Elder reports that a new HEB grocery store will be built at the corner of League City Parkway and South Shore Blvd.

As reported, it'll go in that vacant tract you see roughly in the center of this screengrab from Googlemaps.  That light-colored building you see near the top of the photo is the existing Kroger Signature store, which is why I say "healthy competition" - they will aim to take customers from each other, so perhaps they'll accomplish some of that edging-out-the-other stuff by actually offering edible fresh vegetables for sale. 

At the very least, this is potentially good news for every suffering Leaguer who lives on the east side of the freeway!!  We Centerpointers have an easy jaunt to get to the existing west-side HEB - we just zip down the IH-45 feeder.  But there's only one way to get back home from it, and that involves taking one's life in one's hands by dealing with a forty-year-old obsolete freeway cloverleaf (and God knows when TxDOT is ever going to fix that mess), plus navigating the interminable construction on FM 646.  In sum, it's a short but acutely miserable transit experience to which I will gladly say good riddance. 

Even by Houston's perpetually-under-construction standards, this has been the definition of suck.  They waited wa-ay too long to improve the cow path that had remained FM 646 even as development along it increased by orders of magnitude.

Screengrabbed from TxDOT's project page. 

But this is not the Whole Foods that we have been hoping for, nor does it sound like it's going to be the Central Market that we were hoping for as a consolation prize. 

Oh well.  Each new day brings us closer to a chance at a happier announcement.