Droughtful, just droughtful

Earlier this year, I saw it being done from the ground in Galveston:

FM 3005, May 10, 2011
In lieu of natural rain, two guys in bucket trucks washing salt and debris from electrical insulators to prevent short-circuiting and resultant power outages. 

This morning I read about it being done yesterday using choppers, also on the west end of Galveston.

But it appears as if the same chopper featured in that news article is on the north side of Centerpointe as I write this:

Looking east across a yard adjacent to West Walker Street.

Looking north across the north retention pond.

One wonders how they prioritize their washing.  Salt and sand I can see as being big issues on Galveston Island and in near-coastal Texas City where outages a couple of months ago threw some major refineries offline, but do we actually have similarly-problematic debris accumulations here in League City, 25-odd miles inland??  (Obviously we're closer than that to Galveston Bay, but prevailing winds tend not to come from the direction of the bay).  Interesting.

It sure does look like hazardous work, and it can't be cheap.

Would YOU want to be that guy hanging off the side??

Yet another reason why we're all hoping for the resumption of rainfall.  For bookend and posterity, here's a grab of the most recent Texas drought map which is available here:

Shoulda looked left and he shoulda looked right

I don't know why my daughter fell for this ruse of mine, because it's the automotive equivalent of "pull my finger".  It started with a seemingly innocent exchange:

"Mama, why are you stopping in the middle of the road?!"

"Well, open your car door and take a look, sweetie."

Dead snake in the middle of the road,
Dead snake in the middle of the road,
Dead snake in the middle of the road
Centerpointe Drive northeast of Lilac Pointe.

A fraction of a second later, the inevitable bellow issued forth as follows:

"MAMA - THAT'S JUST DISGUSTING!  

WHY DID YOU MAKE ME DO THAT?!"

Because parents must inflict revenge upon teenagers by occasionally turning the torture tables in ways like this, sweetie!

But seriously, folks, there's a few lessons to be learned here, and the first one is nicely represented by her equally-retortive follow-up question:

"MAMA, WHAT WAS THAT DOING 

IN THE MIDDLE OF A 

SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD?!"

Easy answer: it was here doing what all wild things do - it was chowing down.  Where there is food, there will be something to eat it, every time and in every place - it's that simple.  Particularly in times of drought like we've been having, I expect we have many more of these in our midst.  All our fine citizens have been watering their landscaping diligently, and did you notice that we have a bumper crop of toads this year?  On a moonlight night, they make jogging hazardous.  And for snakes, them's good eatin'.   A veritable bufo buffet.

Those "No Soliciting" signs near the Calder entrance to the neighborhood?  Those signs don't apply to snakes and they sure as heck don't apply to water moccasins in particular (because nothing ever does), which is what I suspect that one was.  He's pretty much been obliterated, but when I see a stout dark snake with a rapidly-thinning tail like that, my money is on moccasin.

Incidentally, one of my very early descriptions of local snakes has inexplicably become one of the most popular posts this blog has ever produced (re-tweets aside).  Apparently there is a dearth of local information regarding Suborder Serpentes and so Google returns that one as a first- or second-page hit, depending on search string.  So you can refer to that post for general info about some of our most common venomous representatives, which are all found in subtropical suburban abundance.

Or if that doesn't float your boat, I can instead leave you with a thematically-inspired video.  Upon seeing that technicolor snake earlier today, it occurred to me that some of you have not had the social benefit of being die-hard Loudon Wainwright III fans for the past 35 years, as I have been.  In order to rectify that, what I'd really prefer to do is supply you with one of his live videos, but there isn't a good one on YouTube.  In place of that, I offer this creative interpretation (loosely defined), which uses the original studio version of his 1973 hit song "Dead Skunk" set to someone's home-made excuse for a video which is so bad that it actually starts to be good!
:-)

  

Fire away

A few words here about the League City Fire Department, it's current search for a paid Fire Chief, and some comments from a city resident whose house burned about nine months ago.

Last fall and winter, these signs appeared along Centerpointe Drive, near the pool and other areas:

Up until seeing these, I had no idea that our city's Fire Department was a 100% volunteer organization.  This surprised me, because with our upper-middle-class tax base, I guess I unconsciously expected a more formal or robust department structure, but apparently it's common for cities our size to have no paid firefighting employees.

Here's the part where I recap a story that I submitted to the October 2010 neighborhood newsletter.  During a business meeting, I encountered a League City resident who claimed that his house had burned down, and that it had been a needless event.  He alleged that between the time he dialed 911 and the time LCFD showed up, a full 30 minutes elapsed, such that a small kitchen stove fire had time to engulf most of his house and cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

The man described LCFD as being "absolutely unapologetic" about the fact that it took them so long to arrive, and he recommended that people keep an abundance of fire extinguishers distributed throughout their homes so that they will be able to respond to their own incipient fires, rather than relying on LCFD.

Of course, this man's account above represents only one side of that fire-fighting story, and I have no idea if his experience is typical or simply reflected a conspiracy of negative circumstances for LCPD on that particular day.  I will say that he was a medical doctor and his character seemed authentic.

And either way, there's merit to his advice:  there's no harm in having a good supply of fire extinguishers.  My husband and I bought several more and placed them strategically around the interior of our house, including mounting them on the walls inside our garage so they won't get buried in clutter.

www.wikipedia.org

Around the same time that this doctor's house burned, a search for a "half-salary" LCPD Fire Chief was announced.  I'm not sure how that kind of employment works logistically, because most people need full salaries to meet their personal financial obligations, but whatever - at least it's a start in further developing the department as League City continues to expand.

Today it was announced that the search has been narrowed to ten finalists.  So, despite the fact that League City has been hemorrhaging administrative talent, it seems that this hiring effort is proceeding.  Hopefully they will install a strong candidate and we'll all be better off for it.

In the mean time, be sure to check that your own fire extinguishers are present and in good working order.

While we're at it...

My last two posts have dealt with internet hacking and brick-and-mortar consumer fraud.  It's a propos to bookend these topics with a discussion of some general steps consumers can take to protect themselves.

The usual disclaimers apply: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.  I'm sharing personal observations only.  Consult an attorney for your specific circumstances.  Also, this information is not complete, from a consumer protection standpoint.  I'm only hitting a few highlights here.

(1) Credit reports.  Every American consumer is entitled to one free credit report per year.  You should avail yourself of this service at a routine minimum, even if you don't think that any aspect of your identity may have been recently compromised.

The easiest way to do this is, assuming you are comfortable doing it over the internet, is via a clearinghouse site recommended by the federal government.  You could instead approach the three credit bureaus individually if you prefer, but I find that they'll distract a person by trying to sell everything under the sun, and for an exorbitant price.  Here is a screengrab of the relevant FTC site:

This is what this site looked like on the morning of this post.  You need to be careful as you're going through this process because there are scam sites on the internet advertising credit report services and they would welcome the input of your personal information.

That link highlighted above, www.annualcreditreport.com, looked like this on the morning of this post:

Remember, whenever you're dealing with any of these sites and personal information is involved, you need to always see the secure HTML symbol in the site address:

It is a fairly efficient and user-friendly process to walk through the AnnualCreditReport site.  It directs you to each of the three credit bureaus sequentially and then there's a "back"-style button so that you can proceed to the next after you've dealt with the others.  The only lack-of-smoothness might potentially arise when you go to save your credit reports.  Experian printed easily to PDF for me yesterday, but I found I had to copy-n-paste the other two into a word processing program and save them as editable files.  There may have been another way to do it, depending on the browser used, but I took the path of least resistance.

Of course if you see activity on your reports for which you were not responsible, you need to start the process of resolution, which is a topic too intricate for me to go into here.

(2) Junk mail.  Junk mail can pose a risk to your identity simply by overwhelming your ability to monitor what's actually going on with your name and address.  I can't tell you how many times I have tossed out unopened mail that appeared to be junk and which had near-miss variants of my name on it.  At the time, I assumed that some minimum-wage person whose native language was not English simply transcribed my name incorrectly on yet another of an infinite number of mass-mailing lists.  It never occurred to me until yesterday that someone with a similar name or pseudonym might actually be up to something fraudulent and the results of their activities were starting to roll down-hill and into my mailbox.

I'm not sure what to suggest here.  Once several years ago, I took considerable effort to go through the recommended official channels to get off mailing lists and cut down the junk mail, and what happened?  Seriously, the amount of junk mail I received practically doubled as an apparent result of my efforts to stop it.  By this time, because my husband and I moved to Centerpointe from separate houses (and thus we were severally receiving huge amounts such that we are now receiving 2x a huge amount), I literally need to bring a carrying container with me when I go to our mailbox.  It's sometimes five pounds a week of junk that we're receiving!

Once again, there is a federal government site that deals with some of this issue:

The two sites it recommends are Opt Out Prescreen for cessation of credit offers (highlighted in the screengrab above), and DMA's Mail Preference Service for other unsolicited mail (if that link doesn't work, search "DMA choice" and go to the direct marketer's site).  There are also commercial services offering to stop your junk mail and personally I'd be willing to pay for them if someone could convince me they'd actually work.  I'm going to try both of these FTC-recommended options now as a first measure, and I'll report in a subsequent post whether I've noticed any positive results.

Anyway, there's a few ideas as openers for you.  Good luck with it.

A new kind of fraud?

Hot on the heels of our PayPal account being hacked two days ago, we discovered this morning that someone has been writing hot checks using our Centerpointe address, but it's still unclear whether they've also used any other facet of our identities.

I'm posting about this because it *might* be related to the fact that our house is brand new and therefore this info might be useful to other Section 9 buyers.  

The story goes like this.  My name for this blog posting purpose is "Johnelle Smith".  When I received mail addressed to "John Smith" at my address, I naturally assumed the firstname was a typo, and so I opened those envelopes.  

It turns out that one was a hot check collection notice from Kroger, and the other was an Affidavit of Fraud pursuant to a hot check that had been written by "John Smith" at Lowes hardware store.  

I called the Kroger and they revealed that the check was written on a Wells Fargo account at a Kroger in Fort Worth, and they gave me the associated checking account number.  We have no financial accounts with Wells Fargo, so obviously this wasn't an account related to us, at least not directly.  

Between the time they issued the collection notice and the time I called, Kroger had already figured out that this was a fraudulent account and so the CSR noted that they were not going to attempt to take further action at me or anyone else at my address, but the obvious questions for me still remained:  What is this all about, how did it happen in the first place, and how deep does the fraud go?

Telephone calls to Wells Fargo revealed that I needed to go to a local branch in person and present my ID in order to make inquiries, so I did.  The Wells Fargo CSR was only able to tell me the following:

1. The person whose name was associated with the hot checks was not in the Wells Fargo computer system.
2. There IS an active Wells Fargo account by that number, but because I'm not a signatory to that account, they can't disclose to me any information about whether there's been any fraud on it or what actions (if any) were taken with respect to it.

But here's the interesting part:  As the local CSR was talking on the phone with a Wells Fargo fraud expert, she turned to me and asked, "Is your house brand new?"  Her tone of voice had an "ah-hah" quality to it, like perhaps she was really saying, "Your house is brand new."  This is what made me wonder if this isn't a particular kind of fraud specific to new home construction.  What would have prompted her to ask that question?  There are 80,000 people in League City and only a few hundred of them live in homes that could be described as "brand new", so this does not seem like a statistically-obvious first question to ask.  

Based on the desperately-limited information that has been divulged to me so far, this is what I suspect happened:  

1. "John Smith" went trolling through the public records to find a person whose name closely resembled his own and whose address is still virgin by computer databasing standards.  Partly because our house is so "brand new", about the only public place where my full name and address have been published together is the Galveston County Appraisal District.  
2. "John Smith" then had fake checks printed up using his name, my address, and a third party's actual checking account number (possibly that he got because he is a dumpster diver, or maybe he worked as a cashier somewhere and lifted a number at random off a check he processed??). 
3. "John Smith" then personally passed his fake checks at local businesses.  Of course he would have had to show his ID in order to do that, and if he used his TDL, it's address would not have matched my Centerpointe address that he had printed on his checks.  But at that point, "John Smith" could have pleaded that it was a "brand new house" and therefore TxDPS had not issued his updated TDL yet (and in fact TxDPS does take a long time to process those requests).  Even if one of the receiving merchants had parsed my address, they would have seen "Johnelle Smith" and maybe not thought twice about the apparent typo.  And because "John Smith" was using a valid third party's checking account number, his fake checks would have cleared.  

I don't know if there's any validity to those suspicions above - I'm still very much looking into this.  I'm also trying to figure out whether "John Smith" might have fraudulently switched his TDL address to mine, but so far all I get from TxDPS is the usual "We are unable to assist you due to high call volume.  Please try your call again later."  

If and when I am able to discover more about this type of fraud, I'll follow up with additional posts or by making comments below.  

Meanwhile, if you are a new home buyer in particular, watch carefully for suspicious items appearing in your mailbox, and please contact me if something similar to this has happened to you.  Two heads would be better than one in figuring out how something like this could happen, and how extensive the associated damage actually is.  

Check your PayPal ASAP

This is a strange topic for a neighborhood / suburban lifestyle blog post, but I'm absolutely dumbfounded that it hasn't been covered by the mainstream American news media, so here goes - SOMEONE should be spreading this word.

Yesterday morning, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported that a hacker group publicly released a cleartext file containing 62,000 usernames and passwords to accounts including those on PayPal and Facebook.  Within a few hours, thousands of people had downloaded that file of personal information.  Most of the compromised accounts belonged to Americans but, again, no major American news media outlets carried the story.

Within a few hours, a collection of bloggers including Dwight Silverman at Houston Chronicle released links to sites (including one by Gizmodo) that published queries allowing users to check whether their passwords had been compromised.

Here's what happened to us:  we checked all our email addresses against the Gizmodo query, and the response we got each time was, "Your information has not been released to the public".  Friday morning, I went in and changed PayPal passwords on both my business and personal accounts anyway (better safe than sorry).  Unfortunately, my husband did not, and his PayPal account was hacked this afternoon.  Only because I happen to follow the CBC, we were aware of the risk and managed to freeze his account shortly after it was compromised, but we do have a collection of fraudulent charges that we are now dealing with.

I suppose this timing could have been a grand coincidence, but my suspicion is that the hackers released 62,000 passwords to the public and then silently reserved another XX,000 passwords for their own use and/or to sell to the highest bidders.  So in other words, don't get an automatic warm-fuzzy when you enter your info into any given widget and it tells you you're safe.  We certainly were not.

This is not a small-potatoes issue - PayPal is a BANK!  It's a major financial institution doing massive numbers of financial transactions on 232 million accounts and which has direct access to users' credit cards and brick-and-mortar checking accounts!  I simply can't imagine how or why the American news media would not be following this story!  

Go check your PayPal account, if you still can.  And good luck.

Mo'e water woe

League City declared a Stage 3 water emergency yesterday, although you might have difficulty confirming this from their homepage this morning, which is still running an eye-catching Stage 1 graphic:

Screengrabbed from www.leaguecity.com around 9:30 a.m.

One recent news commenter wondered if the city manager and assistant manager had perhaps both resigned because of the perceived mis-handling of repairs to the regional water main that broke almost two weeks ago now, and which is largely to blame for our current water shortages and the resulting low water pressures experienced in some areas of the city.


I'll tell you what: if the city doesn't get this thing fixed and real quick, all that animated debate and speculation about the resignations and possible mayoral micromanagement is going to be moot, because citizens will be calling for all of their heads to roll, elected and hired alike.  I went to the LA Fitness on League City Parkway yesterday evening, and the water pressure was so low that no commodes could be flushed, and you can imagine what a delightful sight that was in such a heavily-attended facility.  In other words, at this point, the water issue of highest concern is not whether we should get fined $500 for trying to keep our landscape investments minimally alive - basic public sanitation is being impacted.  After witnessing LA Fitness last night, I'm now starting to refer to "League City" and "Demijohn" in the same breath (and if you don't know the Demijohn story, hit that link because it's an interesting case study in how mismanagement of infrastructure can yield third-world consequences right here in America, right now in the 21st century, and right down the road from us).

Anyway, as we watch to see what happens next, this news article provides information on the Stage 3 water use restrictions that now affect us all.