Dog park data

Oh my word, there's a lot of it - data, that is.  The 501(c)3 group Bark9 graciously provided me with an avalanche of it.  Even to get up to speed on what transpired in the 2007 - 2009 time frame when the first attempt at creating a League City dog park failed is a monumental task (if we don't understand where we've been, it's difficult to make sense of where we're going).

Drawing depicting the original proposed design, courtesy of Bark9, which probably got it from League City.  Aerial photo circa 2007.

The same view in early 2014.  You'll notice that the land in question was substantially cleared such that only mature trees remain.  That's because the City had reportedly already spent about $15,000 on site preparation shortly before the project was cancelled.

Image courtesy of Googlemaps.  

And why was the project cancelled?

From what I can tell, the forensics are complicated and bear all the hallmarks of the typical League City politics.  We may never know the full story.  Pretty much none of the original players are still around today - council has been churned extensively and we've had, what, about twenty-nine different city managers and assistant managers since 2007?!

OK, maybe twenty-nine is a slight exaggeration, but League City is absolutely legendary for its high rate of administrative turn-over.

Screengrab courtesy of KTRK-TV.  

There are a number of different ways in which I could proceed with this analysis, particularly as it relates to Centerpointe subdivision, but it's probably better to wait until we see which direction the public discourse takes before debating any given angle.

In the meantime, if you are either for or against a dog park in general, for or against the 750 Centerpointe Drive location, your contact resources are given at the end of this post.

You should use those resources.  What happens with this dog park will not be solely a result of political machinations - the decisions will be influenced by the net will of the people.  That was clear to me from the 2007 - 2009 forensics.  If you want a dog park, whether it's in this designated Centerpointe location and/or in another location, it's not going to happen automatically if nobody puts in any effort.  League City has a pot of money which by law is earmarked for park development.  How and where that money is spent will continue to be primarily a basic function of two things:

1. Who is trying to milk what angle for political gain. 
2. Who screams the loudest.  

Oh, and just as a coincidental FYI, if you're reading this post on your computer, you can see the 750 Centerpointe Drive location in this blog's frontispiece (cover photo).  It's at that line of trees in the background roughly in the center of the photo.  If you're reading this on a mobile device, the frontispiece may not be visible to you.

Current resources:

• Bark9 website and email at info@bark9.com.  The president of this nonprofit was heavily involved with the previous League City effort and is a walking encyclopedia of dog park information both general and specific.  
• The League City Community Dog Park Wordpress site, as of this writing not active since 2010, but a source of historical information and maybe they will now start posting again.  
• The City Council website for League City, with links to sub-pages with emails for the Mayor and elected members.  
• This blog's dog park label category, where I'll be tagging all future entries on this topic.
• Galveston County Daily News League City category, which will no doubt report on future developments (paywalled site; subscription fees $168 per year as of this writing).  
• Houston Dog Park Association

One thing is abundantly clear to me:  League City is way, way behind the times in not having a dog park.  That nearest push-pin icon you see on this map is the dog park at Bay Area Park, which is exactly ten miles from LC's City Hall.  And not just any ten miles - an unrealistically slow ten mile drive through the congested heart of Clear Lake (thirty minute drive each way).  I never go there - it's just too inefficient a use of my time when I could be using that same hour to do like everyone else in my area does - walk my dog in the Interurban easement that runs on the northeast side of the proposed 750 Centerpointe Drive dog park location.  

Screengrab of the existing dog park map, courtesy of Houston Dog Park Association.  

League City dog park project revived

Galveston County Daily News reports (paywalled) that the League City dog park is back under consideration after several years of dormancy.  This is important for us in Centerpointe because the location, as I currently understand it, is the same as was originally proposed - the tract of land that is sandwiched between us and the new police station.

This drawing is very preliminary and subject to change.  No specific design has been proposed yet by League City, as I understand it.  

This idea gained a lot of traction several years ago, before my family moved to Centerpointe.

A number of groups were dedicated to making it happen, including this blog site, whose current homepage I screengrabbed above.  They were associated with the local group Bark9.  

However, the movement was reportedly overturned by citizen objection.  By word of mouth, I was told that most of that objection came from within Centerpointe.  I have no details other than that.

Bearing in mind that this blog is not affiliated with Centerpointe POA, I personally am not opposed to a dog park at the stated location in principle.  I have not yet researched the issue, but I see no a priori reason to assume that it would be an automatically bad development (and I am one of the residents who is on the far northeast side of the subdivision, within spitting distance of the tract in question).  As I noted on Galveston Daily News, the area in question is already used daily by people with dogs (including my family), especially the Interurban Easement.  The utility companies don't need to mow that thing.  The path down the center of it is perpetually beaten flat by the constant foot traffic of local people walking their dogs.

We all need to see more detail on this thing before we can make up our minds whether we're ultimately "for" or "against".  On this go-round, League City plans to poll people as to whether they want it to happen.  I will reserve additional comment for the moment, but will post more on this as it develops and as I'm able to do further research.

Centerpointe children overwhelmed my temporarily-free-running dog with affection in this popular post from late 2012 where I spoofed the helicopter-style over-concern with dog safety and child safety.

According to GCDN, Councilman Becker adamantly opposes a dog park in League City for safety reasons, but to me, B doesn't follow A on that logic.  If you look at the number of dog-related injuries to humans vs. the circumstances of those injuries, I rather doubt that dog parks are strongly correlated with increased risk.  It's analogous to any other form of abuse - the primary source of concern is not "stranger danger" but rather conditions within a person's immediate environment.  The very recent pit bull attack on a League City toddler took place within that family's private residence, consistent with that idea.       

An update on the Nugent concert controversy

Every once in a while I reproduce on this blog comments that I submit to Galveston County Daily News, for the benefit of those who don't have a subscription (it's a paywalled newspaper, although a while back, a reader pointed out to me that non-subscribers can sometimes access comments even if the news articles themselves are blocked).  That's what I'm going to do below, but first let me orient you on the topic.

TJ Aulds did a good job of writing a summary of where we are with respect to the upcoming Ted Nugent concert in League City, which is scheduled for April 12.  If you haven't been following this controversy, basically what's happened so far is that the City of League City contributed about $20,000 of our taxpayer bucks to help bring Nugent to League City in order to give a concert that will raise funds for a social services organization to build a home for a disabled military veteran.

On February 21, 2014, I published an editorial in which I systematically described why I personally believe that Nugent's recent "sub-human mongrel" comment was racist, and why I think that's important within the context of League City's involvement with him.

Here is an excerpt from that deconstruction.  

In that same editorial, I also advocated for a peaceful public protest during the concert.  But what has transpired in terms of a planned protest is not at all what I envisioned on February 21, which prompted me to re-address this situation today.  For your consideration, here are the comments that I submitted to GCDN.

* * *

This [TJ's article] is a well-written piece - I'm especially glad that the City of Longview's decision [to cancel a scheduled Nugent concert at their own financial peril] was described here. I wish that the City of League City had the courage to take a similar stand. When a guy like Nugent makes racist comments such as "sub-human mongrel" and then a city like LC declines to impose any consequences in response, it reinforces and validates his belief that he's justified in saying things like that. Longview let him know that he crossed the line, whereas League City has done its part to further embolden him, to the tune of twenty thousand bucks and a blind eye turned.

And the citizens of League City share in the responsibility for this situation. I believe that Cobarruvias was the first local blogger to alert to the fact that a protest is planned for the League City concert, which is fast approaching. Neither of us know much about the group which is planning the protest, but from an examination of internet content, the group does not appear to represent a mainstream social position. For crying out loud, at what point in our history did protesting racism and sexism become a "non-mainstream" pursuit?! In my day, "mainstream" college and high school kids would have rallied around a thing like this, social justice being the purview of youth. But maybe these days they're too distracted by Angry Birds and watching Netflix at artificially-depressed streaming speeds to notice what's going on around them.

Just to add insult to injury, it's a terrible lesson we're collectively teaching those same apathetic young people with this event - follow the money irrespective of any other factor. No doubt part of the reason why there's so little local protest is that people are figuring, "Oh, well, a veteran is getting a house out of this, so it's a wash." Sure, but that same goal could be achieved *without* prostituting ourselves to the kind of ideology that Nugent actively promotes. The City of Longview figured out that its citizens could achieve their social goals without his ideology, even if they had to pay to get rid of him. Pity we can't do the same.

Home security system false alarms: One mystery solved

Have you ever had your home security system fail and produce false alarms and you just can't figure out why it's doing that?  If you try to search the problem on the internet, you're going to be hit with an avalanche of sales sites and other useless information.  I'm going to describe one means by which a common type of residential alarm can fail periodically and erratically in a way that was surprisingly difficult for us to determine.  This is one thing you can check for as you are troubleshooting your own system.

Few things in everyday suburban life are as annoying as an alarm system that refuses to function.

Screengrabbed from www.memegenerator.com

Most simple home security systems use magnetic sensors on windows and doors.

They look something like this, usually screwed to the window sill.  If anything interferes with the magnetic signal between the magnet attached to the window and the sensor attached to the frame, the system will fault and produce a false alarm if it happens to be armed at the time when the fault occurs.    

In our case, the fault problem was ultimately caused by an aluminum window blind.  I had initially discounted that blind as a possible cause because of three assumptions that I subsequently learned were not correct:

NUMBER ONE - I had assumed that an aluminum blind was, in fact, made of aluminum (duh) and, as a non-ferrous metal, it would not interfere with the magnet.  I had paid a lot of money for these blinds because they are mounted on our two garage windows.  I wanted all-aluminum to ensure that they would not rust over time (we live in the humid subtropics and so corrosion is a concern).

As it turns out, the blinds themselves are aluminum, but a few of the trimmings are made of steel.  And this particular little trimming just happens to fall exactly where the magnet is located.  

NUMBER TWO - I had underestimated the *exquisite* degree to which the magnet was sensitive to the placement of the bottom rail of the window blind.  Literally a half an inch separated "no alarm problems" from "nothing but alarm problems".  For as long as the blind was 100% lowered, there would be no problem.  But if someone left it just a bit elevated, the alarm system would behave erratically, producing faults.

There's also a third reason why it was very difficult to troubleshoot this issue.  When we first installed those blinds several years ago, they were neat and pretty and new, and everyone in the house basically left them in place, lowered all the way down.  We went for three years with no alarm faults.  Then all of a sudden, things started going haywire.  I'd be sitting quietly at my desk working, nobody else would be in the house, and I'd hear the alarm chime, indicating that a fault had just occurred.  Why would anyone logically suspect window blinds as the cause of a thing like that, given that they'd already been on the windows for years without incident?

But of course what happened over time is that family members had been raising and lowering them, sometimes leaving them in sloppy configurations.  And at one window, some garage equipment had gotten shoved up against the blind, further pushing the bottom rail up against the magnet.  And those changes were enough to tip the magnetic balance and make the sensor connection fade in and out unpredictably.  

This was the only way to reliably fix the weak link in this failure chain (remember, if the alarm faults and you can't get to your phone, the police come to your house and all heck breaks loose):

This will prevent a future family member from "forgetting" and leaving the blind in the wrong position, triggering a false alarm.

Go through your house and check all your window blind bottom rails.  Even if they're not aluminum, they might contain some metal parts that could be contributing to your alarm issues.

We also have faux wood and real wood blinds in our house.  I checked both for metal pieces.  The faux wood had a hollow bottom rail, but no metal was visible in there.  

The real wood blinds had no metal anywhere on or in the rail.  

An upcycling opportunity for CCISD (or others)

We're in a tremendous building phase right now in the League City area, with major new projects including, but not limited to, the following:

• The new HEB store on League City Parkway.
• The $74 million retirement community on the corner of Coryell Street and FM 270 Egret Bay Blvd.
• The new $39 million CCISD stadium, which just broke ground within the past few days.

Perfect, perfect name - couldn't be better.  But before this artist's rendition becomes reality, an extraordinary amount of infrastructure will need to be put in place.

Screengrabbed from CCISD.  

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind folks (directing this post @clearcreekisd in particular) that there are going to be plenty of opportunities for upcycling some of the construction wastes from those projects, CCISD's in particular, supposing you can get the permission to do it and supposing you can find someone (such as a motivated teacher or volunteer(s)) with the enthusiasm to lead an upcycling project (they aren't that difficult to manage, as I will show below).  

Construction sites generate vast quantities of useful materials that cannot be incorporated into the sites themselves, but which do have the potential to serve purposes that are arguably superior (on a dollar-per-dollar comparison basis) to their original function.  But despite their potential value in other applications, they are usually just thrown away unless someone steps in to capitalize on them.    

My favorite of these materials is storm water drainage culvert.  

I am the proud back-yard owner of seven gardens that were built from pieces of drainage culvert picked from construction trash piles (picked with the owners' permission).  These trimmings (scraps) were too short to be used on the original construction site or in any other location, so they had been tossed into dumpsters or onto waste heaps shortly before I got to them and saved them.

This is my beloved herb garden, which is further described in this post (with construction details).  

Here are three more as they looked about a year ago.  At the time, they held two very small blueberry bushes with Swiss chard in the middle.  Description here. 

Here's how that same grouping looks today, after the blueberry plants in the right and left segments had a year to explode into growth.

You can also see a few of my stock tank gardens in the background.  Large stock tanks cost about $100 - $300 apiece, whereas culvert scraps are free if you can get them.  

The CCISD stadium project will probably generate a good volume of scrap culvert.  There should be at least three different diameters of it.  That resource could be developed into a gardening and/or landscaping project that could give Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's analogous efforts a run for their money.

And that would be a tall order given that the Wildflower Center has elevated container gardening to heretofore-unheard-of levels of creativity and artistic expression.  But much the same could be done with culvert.  Personally I prefer the black polyethylene culvert from an artistic standpoint because it creates a more striking contrast with the surroundings.  Stock tanks are less visually distinct.

Screengrabbed from Rock Rose blog, which has a great entry on these famous stock tanks here.  

Well-known reporter Deborah Wrigley waters the student garden at CCISD's Clear Creek High School, but you'll notice right away that she's on her knees.  When large containers such as culvert scraps are used for gardening, there's no more kneeling required as the gardens are raised up to a more convenient working height.  This is especially useful for handicapped individuals.

Screengrabs courtesy of KTRK-TV.  

It's a wonderful garden but you can tell that a lot of taxpayer money has not been spent on the aesthetics of it.  This could be developed further if someone wanted to do that.    

Here's what CCISD's upcycling of some of its own pending culvert waste could potentially teach kids:

1. That we don't have to send perfectly good stuff to a landfill.  
2. That we don't have to default to a retail solution every time we want to accomplish or build something.  If we want to improve our situation, we may not need to rush out to a store and spend money.  The answer might be free and right under our noses.  
3. That upcycling is the ultimate example of thinking outside the box.  It goes beyond recycling in terms of the value that it adds to our environment.  
4. That thinking outside the box is at the heart of entrepreneurship.  Every time you conceive of a way to combine, use, or build upon existing materials in a new way, you're being an entrepreneur.  
5. That we shouldn't allow our pretentiousness to interfere with our creativity.  Value is value no matter where it comes from.  Do you think you're too wealthy or too proud to go dumpster-diving?  Try it (with permission) - it's a liberating experience.  Some of the most amazing art being produced today is being made with items that were thrown away (Google 'found object art' for examples).  
6. That gardens are very cool and raised gardens can be used to grow special plants that everyone loves.

We are eagerly awaiting the ripening of our current culvert crop of blueberries!!!  Blueberry plants require lower soil pH than we have in greater Houston.  It's difficult to create those conditions in a garden which is installed in the ground, but it is easy to do it in culvert scraps.  

Conversely, if there are no teachers or volunteers interested in developing culvert gardens at any school(s) in CCISD, the stadium-derived scraps could instead be cut to garden sizes and then sold to the public in a fundraiser (the other construction sites around League City could also be asked to contribute their scraps).  People would pay good money for this stuff; look at these gardens - they're beautiful as well as uniquely useful!  With a child in CCISD, I've had a decade of dealing with school fundraisers, and what goods are usually sold in them?!  Sugary snacks that are good for nobody's waistline, as well as consumer items and home decor that nobody needs because our houses are already chock full of all that stuff.  I know so many people who would love to get into vegetable and flower gardening but they need a way of jump-starting and simplifying their efforts because they only have limited free time.  A culvert garden would be just the ticket for those folks.  These things would sell like hotcakes.  

Think about it, and if anyone has any questions about this idea, feel free to contact me via centerpointe.blog -at- gmail.

Culvert scraps thrown on the ground at a location in Vermont (screengrab courtesy of this site).  They don't need to be landfilled or shredded like soda bottles - they can be cut to height and used for gardens as-is.  

Five Corners, Part 5: The scooch and the damage done

In post from a few days ago called Five Corners Futility, I made a statement which I will now explain further.  I said, "I tend to look at right-of-way segments not the way they should be driven, but the way they actually are driven"

This is an example of what I mean by that.  This is FM 518 westbound at Highway 3.  I was driving this time (not my teenager), and I stopped at this red left-turn light. I am presenting an un-cropped picture here as taken from my driver's seat.  What you can tell is that my left wheels were well over into the yellow painted exclusion zone, just as this pick-up truck's wheels were also over.

The road is not really supposed to be driven the way both of us were driving it here, but the left-turn lane for Highway 3 southbound is only half as long as it would need to be in order to accommodate normal traffic.  What happens as a result is that drivers naturally choose the lesser of evils - left-turners universally scooch over like that is so that we don't block the center westbound lane of FM 518 because through-traffic proceeds on green even as accumulated left-turners are forced to remain stopped on red.

FM 518 is so inefficient and so under-designed for its carrying purpose that it's just plain *stupid* to block half the traffic merely because that left turn lane is so woefully short.  Therefore, everybody scooches over like this so that traffic can continue to pass.  It's the neighborly thing to do.  And if you watch this intersection, you'll see that it's universally driven like this.  That's the net result of collective informal driver negotiation.  Nobody objects to this, and I personally have not witnessed any significantly elevated risk because of it.  No left-turner is dumb enough to scooch so far as to put their tires into the oncoming east-bound lane, for instance.

In sum, this is not necessarily what the original engineering foresaw here, but the driver adaptation actually works better than what was intended.  There are only two choices - either we scooch, or FM 518 effectively reduces to one westbound lane at this location.  

In sharp contrast, this is what happens instead when concrete prevents people from scooching in order to naturally accommodate other drivers on the road for maximum efficiency:

FM 2094 eastbound traffic at the FM 518 jog now squanders about one third to one half of its green light to lane congestion because drivers can no longer scooch in this area.  The red arrow points to a left-turner who cannot access the lane here because the lane is way, way too short and already full of cars and the new concrete blocks the previous open space.  The middle lane occupied by me and this dry cleaning van was blocked for most of the green light.because of that, whereas it would not have been blocked before the concrete.    

If you've perceived Five Corners to be getting slower and slower lately, this is one of the reasons - the full effects of the concrete are now coming home to roost.  It's happening because we've been effectively reduced to one lane moving for a big part of each green light.  It won't matter how well the lights are ultimately synchronized if the lanes are this significantly undersized to start with.  If left-turners can't squeeze over because of concrete obstructions, they are going to block through traffic - it's that simple.  And how would that possibly constitute a mobility improvement?  

I'm still waiting for answers from League City on what's going on here (they know I've asked).  It's an even more important question than it may first seem.  On my first Five Corners post, someone commented with a link to this page, which discusses in general terms the "access management" project scope.  The corresponding CIP report (2014 Q1) doesn't give any detail as to design, but it does provide a map that I personally dread:

Crummy resolution, but Centerpointe is in the lower section of the grab and that red squiggle suggests that they might also be planning to concrete up the Highway 3 intersection, which means that we would also effectively reduce to one lane westbound at that intersection, too.  In other words, the functional scooch by me and the white pick-up truck in the pic above would also become a thing of the past.  

I'll leave you with an excerpt from that CIP.  I converted to JPG because Blogger won't allow hosting of other content formats such as PDF.  It'll be a bit blurry as a result.  It doesn't describe the scope of the design, but it does indicate that we're spending about two million dollars on this thing.  I await with bated breath someone's explanation as to why that makes even partial sense.

Five Corners fellow sufferers

OK, sometimes I like going beyond the trilogy, especially when new information comes to light.

Translation:  "That ain't our mess."
Now that we have a clearer view of who the responsible party is, I will attempt to get more information on the full scope of the changes that are in progress.  Such as, how much of our tax dollars are being spent on this mess?  

I want to provide you with some additional photographs of this "project" so that you can make up your own mind about what's happening here, rather than just listening to me beat my gums post after post.

But first, a digression for the purposes of expounding on context.

I'm the proud 'rental unit owner of a newly-learner-licensed teenager, and one of the things I've been teaching her is how to evaluate autobody language as it expresses itself uniquely on our different local roads.

Screengrabbed from this 2012 post.  My Dad and I are in a friendly competition to see who will manage to go the longest without having a car accident.  I'm currently at 31 years.  My Dad is at a remarkable 55 years and counting.  There's a good chance that only one of us will live long enough to see who actually wins this competition.   

Learning to read autobody language to the depth that it can be achieved is like defensive driving on steroids.  During Sunday's practice session, for instance, my newbie driver learned that there's a subtle but important difference in driver expectations between SH 96 and SH 146.  The headspace changes the instant one makes the turn from one to the other, and the wise driver accounts for that in his or her own mental state and driving style.

Similarly, left-turning from SH 146 onto FM 518 needs to be done with a degree of responsiveness that isn't necessarily expected at every similarly-configured intersection.  Drivers don't like being on SH 146 - it stresses them out - and they want to get the hell off it ASAP.  If you don't accommodate the implicit demands of your fellow left-turners, they are going to get just a little bit antsy, and when drivers get antsy, surrounding people get just a tiny bit distracted, and then the chances of accident go up for everyone involved.

Five Corners has always been unique in the degree to which procedural expectations and negotiated rules of mutual exchange dominate driver behavior.  Most of the people who drive Five Corners do it daily, so they've seen every possible transactional scenario hundreds of times and they're pretty comfortable with the long-established de facto rules of driver conduct there.

It is that status quo that the curb improvements are interfering with now, and not in a particularly functional way.  In other words, it's not that we're changing to a new status quo that simply happens to be different.  In my opinion, we are devolving.  As my teenager was honing her skills yesterday, here are a few pics that I took from the passenger seat to further illustrate this.

Here's a lesson in exasperation:  This driver is mentally still trying to operate under the pre-concrete rules.  Nobody would have the guts to attempt this maneuver in this spot unless they already knew from previous experience that (a) it was physically achievable and that (b) other drivers would tolerate it without getting antsy.

And it was achievable, right up until the point where that barrier went in.  This is what I meant in my third trilogy post when I said that we can't afford to be forfeiting even one foot of space here and there at Five Corners.   All this fellow needed was another foot of space to complete a legal traffic move.  I see nothing to be gained by not letting him (and those like him) have that foot which was there to start with but which has now been taken away from all of us.    

Here's a lesson in impossibility:  Compare the size of that extended-cab pick-up truck to the width of the opening in the left-turn center lane.  How is that even remotely supposed to work?!  If that pickup were traveling in the opposite direction intending to turn left, could he make it through the almost 90 degree turn that this configuration obligates?  

Here's a lesson in autobody language:  Have you ever taken a plastic laundry basket, turned it upside down, and plopped it on top of a cat who was curled up on your living room floor?  Cats *hate* that.  They get that sour, withdrawn look on their faces as they try to figure out how to flee the situation with some small portion of their dignity still intact.

That was the analogy that occurred to me as I watched the driver of this Toyota.  (S)he was being a nice driver who was doing the things that are expected of drivers at Five Corners - responsive to the needs of the larger situation, aware that there were other drivers to the rear who were also needing to turn left.  So (s)he pulled way up in order to give those other drivers room to also enter this ridiculously small turn space, only to end up trapped in the laundry basket that this configuration represents.  There's no way (s)he could have completed that turn without scraping that barrier or maybe even hopping it.

It's a mystery to me as to how such a restricted turn lane could be placed on a sharp curve such as this one and function, even if it the concrete had been cast correctly.  

In just one single back-and-forth pass through Five Corners yesterday, I took pics of two drivers who were obligated to smack the concrete barriers.  Both of them were acting within bounds according to the unwritten rules that govern behavior at Five Corners.  It's not going to matter whether these barriers are "painted yellow for safety" or not.  They're still not going to help the situation there.

My daughter was initially skeptical that a thing called "autobody language" even existed.  The challenge for her now as a beginning driver is to learn to partition her finite attention resources such that she can register those large-scale manifestations of driver behavior and road conditions and still have enough mental reserve left over to devote to monitoring the fine-scale, subtle behaviors that paint a deeper picture of what's happening in the roadway at any given moment.  It takes years and years to develop that capacity - Gladwell's ten thousand hour rule comes to mind.

In the meantime, Five Corners will continue to give us both a constant run for our money.  My Dad has an unfair advantage in our crashless competition.  He doesn't live in this area, and so he doesn't have to drive Five Corners.

Quote screengrabbed from this post.