Be on the watch for spring

We do seem to be having an unusual rash of bad behavior around here - tagging, street, racing, a brazen (and unsuccessful) home burglary in nearby Victory Lakes subdivision on Monday afternoon (bravo to a watchful neighbor who blew the whistle on that attempted residential coup d'etat), and fellow local blogger Island Drumz is reporting that two young women were recently accosted in two separate incidents within the parking lot of the Kemah Walmart on FM 518.

Probably won't be coming to a subdivision near you:  the suspects in the Victory Lakes break-in.  Photo credit not provided by local media reports, but presumably it's LCPD.  

Does all this represent what happens when spring fever gets thwarted by continuing unseasonably cold weather, or is it just one of those statistical small number blips?

We may never know the answer to that, but we'll see what happens when spring finally does arrive.

Yesterday, I almost got fooled into thinking that we were on the cusp of it.  I had to go to Galveston for a work meeting, and the place was wonderful for at least a few hours.  As I write this, another strong cold front is plowing through our area, but here's a taste of what Galveston looked like during yesterday's brief respite.

Despite the fact that the water is currently a remarkably low 52 degrees, the air temperature was approaching 70, with no wind.  These guys were pretty happy about the weather situation.

 

As the pelicans suggested, the atmosphere in Galveston was positively douce - not the English definition, which loses a lot in translation, but the French, which refers to a particular flavor of agreeable softness.  

I celebrated the momentary douceness by trying the poblano asparagus soup at the locally-renowned Mosquito Cafe. It wasn't bad, although I would have made it a bit spicier (but arguably, that would not have been very douce).  Those elongated objects in this photo are not french fries - they are strips of yellow squash.  A dish like this is best eaten by dunking the vegetables into the soup, because the soup is very rich.

Do you notice how the vegetable medley contains chunks of broccoli stems as well as the crowns?  Only real vegetable connoisseurs know to do that - much of our society assumes that the stems are not edible.  They are actually pretty good, although I'm a fan of peeling off the non-douce outer skin before adding them to any dish that I make.   

Be on the watch for street racers, too

Following yesterday's post about the tagger(s), here's yet another in a series of minor events which, in isolation, probably wouldn't signify anything and wouldn't even really be noticeable, but now we're having an accumulation of minor events that might point to the presence of someone in our midst who is in need of a reality check of the lawful kind.  

Someone tore up Centerpointe Drive last night at 10:48 p.m., racing-style at top speed.

When I encouraged folks to first build their home improvement projects out of cardboard, this is not the kind of thing that I was suggesting.

Screengrabbed from this Cheezburger site.  

If last night had been the first recent time that a racing incident had occurred, I wouldn't think twice about it.  But a few days ago, it was even worse.  Someone was methodically careening around the neighborhood in the middle of the night, treating the cul-de-sacs as skill elements in a slalom course.  You might want to make note of this if you're one of the residents who parks his or her car in the street, because these racers treat those parked cars as course obstacles.  Personally I opt for putting mine inside my garage.

This kind of thing does happen from time to time - have you ever come out of your house on a Saturday morning and noticed that every cul-de-sac in your section has a bunch of fresh tire skid marks on it?  I've seen this in Section 9.  The perpetrators often augment their cul-de-sac spins by fish-tailing down the straight sections of the streets just to emphasize the effect of the skids and to complete their "artistic" calling card (GCDN is getting a lot of paywalled flak for describing the Courthouse Annex tagger as a "graffiti artist").

Anyway, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times would be a pattern.  If any of you hear racing in progress within the subdivision, please report it by calling League City PD at 281-332-2566.  

My husband and I are going to go over our security recordings to see if we managed to capture any footage on that racer from the other night, but that'll take us a bit of time to accomplish.

Be on the watch for taggers

From dog tags to sign tags:  Keep your eyes open for evidence of this kind of activity in and around Centerpointe:

Someone tagged the sign on the piece of property across West Walker from us.  Someone else apparently came along and attempted to paint over it to conceal it.  

When I first saw what happened to that sign a few days ago, I didn't think much of it.  Then there came this morning's story in Galveston County Daily News (paywalled), reporting that someone had also tagged the County Annex on Calder Road!!  OK, that takes a certain amount of undesirable ambition.  Bottom line is that the mischief may be more pervasive than I first thought.  And he, she or they may continue with other local targets.  If you've got security cameras like we do, you might want to check your night footage from time to time to see if there's anything suspicious.

This is what part of the Annex looked like (there was more).  It sure would suck to wake up and find something like this on the side of your house or car, eh?

As the caption indicates, this photo was supplied to GCDN by Judge Mark Henry.  

 

How to silence dog tags

Answer:  To stop dog tags from jingling, use two criss-crossed strips of double-sided half-inch hook-and-loop (trade name Velcro) to bundle them to each other.

The Velcro has a minor disadvantage of getting a bit of dog hair tangled up in it, but that's a small price to pay for not having your dog constantly sounding like the Salvation Army bell ringer.

It won't win an award for attractiveness, but it gets the job done and, in four years of dog ownership, it's the only solution I've come up with that actually works for more than a short duration of time. Our dog managed to rip every other silencing device off her collar.  I can't even speculate how she accomplished this, but it happened.

It's essential that your Velcro be double-sided across its entire length so that each piece will bind both to itself and to the other piece which overlaps (this keeps it from slipping).  Some products are either hook or loop but not one of each on each side.

Make sure you put the loop side of the Velcro on the outside.  If you attach the Velcro with the hook side out, it will accumulate more dog hair.  

I am not the first one to call attention to this exasperating problem, which is especially relevant to us because I jog with our dog.  Without something to quiet her tags, she literally sets every other dog in Centerpointe to barking.  Whether they are inside dogs or yard dogs, they can all hear her as we go by.

Others have tackled this problem, but they haven't necessarily succeeded.

Screengrabbed from this eHow page.  

I tried a couple of the solutions listed in that eHow piece, but they did not work.  This Velcro idea works.

And given that only a few inches of narrow-diameter Velcro are required, this idea costs only pennies to execute, not the few bucks that you'd pay for commercial silencers (if you can even find them to buy, and if they'll even stay on your dog's tags, which mine did not).

This is very similar to the product I used, although I certainly didn't buy 25 yards of it.  You can get smaller rolls at the hardware store.

Screengrabbed from the Zoro Tools website.  

If anyone needs to read your dog's tags, they can just peel open the Velcro.  Piece of cake.

This is what happened on one of my earlier trials when I made the mistake of putting the hook side of the Velcro facing out.  The hooks caught more dog hair.  Putting the loop side out eliminates most of this issue.

To the grocery grave, Part 2

As I begin to write this post, I feel like that dude in the old Verizon Wireless commercials.

Screengrabbed from Google. 

I don't know if anyone is actually going to hear me, but let me say it again, echolalia-style:

Screengrabbed from To the grocery grave, Part 1 (January 14, 2014).  

With that January declaration in mind, imagine my surprise when I saw this front page Chron headline yesterday...

Screengrabbed from the frontpage of www.Chron.com's online edition, March 8, 2014.  It's referencing The Fresh Market, which is also scheduled to open a store in Clear Lake in a few months.  The store that's closing is near Highland Village (Westheimer at Weslayan).  

...and then proceeded to read this part:

Screengrabbed from this Houston Chronicle piece (paywalled).  I would have used the word "irrelevant" rather than "redundant".  

Are you kidding me?!  Seriously?!  Somebody actually (ahem) got paid to make a business decision like that?!  Someone actually attempted to operate a grocery store across the street from THE flagship Central Market?   I had no idea!

Local readers, let me ask you this:  Is there a Houstonian alive today who would have given such a venture more than a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding?

Absolutely not.  There's no way.  Zero chance of any store in that location competing with HEB Central Market.  The reasons are many and the explanations too long to go into in a blog post, but that's the way it is.  And the fact that The Fresh Market made a blunder of that magnitude tells me it didn't do good market research, which doesn't bode well for its future in our area.

Sigh.  Market research.  Let's go there for a minute.

In October 2012, I visited the Hubbell and Hudson specialty grocer in The Woodlands and gave it a resounding thumbs down.  That store proceeded to fail by January 2014.  Here's what I had to say about it at that point, as it relates to the grocery scene we have in Clear Lake Texas:

As I see it, the only way for a g-store to compete effectively with our twin [HEB juggernauts] is by occupying a different niche.  And the niche that we're missing - and that I think Hubbell and Hudson was also missing - is the health niche.

The true health niche.  A grocery store can't make the mistake of settling for the appearance of filling the health niche.  They have to actually meet the market.

I still believe that.  Simply parading out a new grocery store with a big hoity-toity factor isn't going to cut it.  It didn't work in The Woodlands and it's not going to work in Clear Lake.  Especially for any grocer who makes the risky decision to locate on the west side of IH-45 (we saw what happened to Fiesta's flagship because of that fatal decision... that may have been many years ago, but the psychological and logistical factors that contributed to its demise are all still in place).

I've begun to suspect that grocery analysts have given up entirely on the idea of competing with Whole Foods.  If that's the case, then it's a stupid, short-sighted conclusion.  Whole Foods actually has two very soft spots in its corporate underbelly:

Number one - Their pricing structure (which they enjoy by virtue of non-competition in their niche and which has led to their nickname of "Whole Paycheck").  

An amusing Google manipulation - when you Google "whole paycheck", the first return is actually the legitimate website for Whole Foods.

Screengrabbed from Google. 

Number two - The fact that so much of what they do is not supported by factual analysis.

About two weeks ago, The Daily Beast published this excellent article explaining exactly that.

Screengrabbed from The Daily Beast.

Much of what they do is not supported by factual analysis, and the educated portion of its clientele knows that.  But everyone also knows that you have to take the bad with the good in the American retail landscape.  I don't go to Whole Foods for the pills and the potions - sometimes I literally shield my eyes as I'm walking by those aisles, because the pseudoscience makes me so uncomfortable.  I go there because the non-potion products, the ones that are not hype-driven, are simply of better quality than the average grocery store, to a degree that is readily apparent to anyone in possession of taste buds.

Last week I made a huge batch of Cuban black beans (recipe to follow in a subsequent post because I have declared it to be the official dish of Centerpointe Section 9).  My husband was elated because he found this batch to taste noticeably better than my last batch.  I said, "That's because the dried black beans and kidney beans that I used this time came from the Whole Foods on Waugh Drive.  They are organic and specialty-farmed rather than being the factory-farmed tasteless junk for sale in most other grocery stores."

I didn't lead the witness.  I didn't give him any indication that I'd used a different source this time.  He could detect it directly.  

So what's the bottom line on all this rambling commentary of mine?

The bottom line is that we still have a genuine grocery niche deficiency in our area and it's still ripe for commercial exploitation.  I don't know whether The Fresh Market is in a position to become that player, but after reading the Houston Chronicle story (paywalled) yesterday, I'm beginning to have my doubts.  I guess time will tell.

Thus far, despite the other local failure announced yesterday, the indications are that the Clear Lake Fresh Market store is still a "go".  They are recruiting senior staff (e.g., this LinkedIn posting, which was live as of the date of this blog post).  But whether or not they'll actually meet the market is another question entirely.

Screengrabbed from this Houston Chronicle article.  

IKEA Hack, Part 2: Chip off the old chopping block

Question:  How do you stop cutting boards from sliding around on your kitchen countertop?

Answer:  Make them yourself in a better quality than what is commonly for sale in the American consumer market.  This post shows one way to accomplish that.  

*  *  *  

In Part 1 of this trilogy, I showed how to customize a piece of IKEA's Numerar 39" countertop for use in a typical tract home laundry room.  This post continues with a description of what we did with one of the sections of Numerar that we had to cut off to make the main piece fit the space.

The countertop turned out wonderfully, but...

...fitting it to the available space meant cutting off a substantial amount of the original piece.  There was no way I was going to waste all that good stuff.

We made the longer cut first, which meant that the end piece in the foreground of the photo above looked like this:

It was pretty obvious what this chunk was best suited for: cutting boards.  There's my ugly old stained plastic board positioned over the cut-off piece to show the size comparison.

I see no reason why this stuff shouldn't be made into cutting boards.  IKEA developed this product for use in the kitchen intending for food to come into contact with it, so I'm assuming that the wood has not been treated with anything potentially harmful. 

It just so happened that, because we needed exactly 30 inches in laundry counter depth, given that we did the longer cut first, this shorter end piece measured 12" x 30".  Which meant that it was naturally divisible into standard cutting board sizes of one 12" x 12" and one 12" x 18".  Keep that in mind if your own laundry room also proves to require a 30" depth.  When you cut the Numerar down to size, you automatically spawn two standard-sized cutting boards.  

As I mentioned in Part 1, we don't own a table saw.  So this is how we geared up to use the circular saw to get this job done.

Aside:  That animal you see sitting attentively was adopted from our local County shelter.  Please consider adoption if you are planning to get a pet - it saves a life, and a very valuable life at that (our dog is wonderful - we would not trade her for any purebred).  In this previous post I published some tips on how to select a shelter animal with the best temperament for you and your family.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled post:

One of our more romantic husband and wife portraits.
:-)

I'm there to keep the board from slipping.  My massive weight holds it in place.  

You'll notice in many of my posts that I'm often not smart enough to change into old clothes before doing manual labor.  I like to make work for myself in terms of extra laundry, I guess.  

Now you can see the two pieces relative to my existing board.  I would rather have slightly larger boards, but these are good enough given that I didn't have to pay extra for them.  My main complaint with my existing boards wasn't size so much as stability, but I'll get to that in a minute. 

The Numerar came with nicely rounded edges, but of course when you cut into it, you get sharp edges that need to be smoothed down.  

It's easy to accomplish that with a sander (I used a P120 sandpaper).  You just kind of rock the sander back and forth gently over the sharp edges to round them.    

My eyesight is not great, so on a project like this, I judge progress and uniformity as much by feel as by sight.  

The obligatory art shot.  

The offspring now sanded.

Here's where we separate the cutting board men from the cutting board boys and I describe my fuller inspiration for having done this particular project.

These are my existing two cutting boards, one plastic and one bamboo, and you'll notice two deficiencies:
(1) The boards themselves are not substantial.  They have almost no mass (they don't weigh much).
(2) Both of them have tiny, tiny, tiny rubber feet.  Literally, the non-slip feet on each of them are only a few millimeters wide.  Way undersized.  

Years ago when every middle class homeowner had matte finish laminate countertops, cutting boards like those might have performed OK.  But now a lot of us have granite or other stone product with a mirror smooth finish.  And what happens is that, once the countertop gets a bit wet, cutting boards like these will begin skating around uncontrollably.  They slip.  And slide.  Which is a supreme annoyance if you do as much cooking as I do.  I need a cutting board that stays in place.  

There are two ways to compensate for that sliding effect:

Number one - use heavier boards.  An ordinary consumer-grade cutting board might weigh a pound or two, but these two Numerar offspring weighed in at 5.5 lbs and 8.5 lbs respectively.   

Number two, use better feet.  This little gem is actually a pool cue bumper similar to this one.  In other words, it's what you'd screw onto the non-business end of a pool cue so that when you're winding up to take a shot and your pool cue slams the wall behind you, the damage is minimized.

There are a number of different models on the market and I will warn you of one thing:  this one is a rubber similar to tire rubber.  If you have OTHER than stone or granite countertops, this could potentially mark your countertop if it gets dragged across.  Find the product that will work best for you.  

Do you know how some ladies have everyday tableware and special occasion tableware (fine China)?  Well, this lady has everyday drill bits (which tend to get abused and torn up) and special occasion drill bits.  I figured this project called for a special occasion drill bit.  That red mark you see in the middle is not the blood of clumsiness - it's a red Sharpie mark telling me how deep to make each pre-drill hole.    

I set the feet in about an inch from each edge.  

There was an issue with these cue bumpers, however.  My husband attempted to order some off the internet with stainless steel screws, because the cutting boards will get wet (be washed) daily.  However, thems don't look like stainless steel.  

Thems don't act like stainless steel either (I accidentally stripped one, but just one).  They're cheap, soft metal that will swiftly corrode in kitchen use.  If you do this project, take one of the supplied screws with you to the hardware store and tell them you want the same dimensions in stainless steel.  I put the feet on these boards with the supplied screws just to see how they'd look and function, but we will be replacing these screws.  

Here's the finished larger board, upside down.  I nicknamed it "six feet under".  Get it??
:-)

In Part 1, I talked about finishing the Numerar with IKEA's own mineral oil product which is called Skydd (ironic because the one thing I don't want these boards to do is skid).  However, a cutting board is going to receive much more intensive use than a countertop, so I have a two step finishing recommendation for that.

I started by coating the things repeatedly in mineral oil.  By that I mean, at least six successive dousings.  This is raw wood, so it is amazing how much oil it soaks up.  It also tends to do so unevenly, as this close-up photo shows.  So it becomes important to make application after application.  

Once they were thoroughly soaked in mineral oil, I added this product on top:

Clapham's Beeswax Salad Bowl Finish.  

In my experience, all wooden cutting boards will stain with heavy use, but using a sealant that incorporates a food-grade wax will greatly reduce the extent of it.  

And here's the proverbial money shot, the finished and sealed larger board:

Now we're talking - this is closer to being a real chef's board.  I expect it to darken with time, so some of that yellow tone will go away.

This is what I was referring to in Part 1 when I said I couldn't stain the laundry room countertop because I needed all pieces of Numerar to remain the same color.  Design-wise, the kitchen is now tied in visually with the adjacent laundry room because of the cross-referencing (what HGTV designers call "repetition" of design elements), the use of Numerar in both places.  The art of these DIY projects is as much fun as the practicality.

BTW, if you'd like to know about that cooktop to the right of the cutting board, see this post.  It's a very special cooktop.  

The economics of the project start to become more attractive when you take into account what a comparable cutting board of the same dimensions would cost if purchased rather than DIY-made.

Well, that's a bit ridiculous, but the one below is probably more comparable.

Screengrabs from Google Shopping.   

This is probably more representative.  If you want a full six-quarter (inch and a half) thickness in any cutting board, you're going to have to pay for it.  

I may have spent $200 on the Numerar, but look at the value that derives from that investment.  Not only do I have a new laundry room countertop, but I also have two cutting boards that probably would have cost me at least $80 if I'd instead bought comparable quality boards in the consumer market.  And I haven't even used the longer of the two Numerar trim pieces yet, so there's even more value to be realized.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your own IKEA hacks!

:-)

It pains me that this piece of reporting has apparently evaporated from the internet (I can't find it), but IKEA Houston reportedly does a million dollars per year IN MEATBALLS ALONE!  I distinctly remember reading this - I believe it was Houston Chronicle which asked them about their annual sales volume, but they are a privately-held company and they don't disclose that kind of information.  So they replied (paraphrased), "We can't tell you that, but we will say that we sold $1 M worth of meatballs out of our Houston store last year."  Wow, eh?  Wrap your head around what that store's overall revenues must look like.   And I'm betting that they could probably sell twice as much Numerar as they are able to stock (see Part 1 for a description of what appears to be a common shortage of it).  

Two events tomorrow at the Pasadena Fairgrounds

You get two for the price of one, sort of.

Always a popular event.  Mega-popular.  Trust me - a lot more than 11 people are going (I must have screengrabbed this about two tenths of a second after it was posted to FB).

More information here:  

Here is the 411 on both events, screengrabbed from this source.  The rock show is in the main convention center.  The plant show is sort of behind that in another part of the complex.  You'll see signs directing traffic if you go out there.  

If you'd like to know more about the barely-advertised Clear Lake Gem and Mineral Society show, I posted lots of photos from last year's show here. It's really a neat event (here's a Yelp description).

If you've never been to this annual Harris County Master Gardeners plant sale before, dress comfortably, get there early, and be prepared for some major intensity including long lines and lots of waiting.  They have a cult following and usually sell out completely.  If you're not early, you probably won't be able to buy what you want.

Happy weekend.