Lawn legislation low-down

Woot!!  The bill that would prevent local governments from prohibiting low-maintenance lawns has passed the House!! 

Pending signature by Mr. Perry, no one will be able to prevent you from having a bunch of these in your front yard, if you so desire.  Or some other stuff of the non-water-guzzling type. 

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia. 

Most media outlets are not yet reporting on the progress of this thing, but in our current conditions, it's hard for me to imagine the Gov refusing to sign it.  Hopefully we will know soon enough. 

Drought map from last week.  The unprecedented conditions we experienced in 2011 never totally resolved (large PDF alert on that link). 

Where to buy a mattress in Houston

We found the idea of buying a new mattress to be a daunting proposition and so it became a decision that we literally put off for a few years.   But finally we could not tolerate our twenty-three year old (!!) mattress any longer, and so we had to climb that learning curve and get the buying job done. 

There's a wonderful CarMax TV commercial airing these days - an absolutely brilliant marketing campaign - in which a white animated line appears and guides prospective buyers and sellers toward the information they need to make their decision. 

Unfortunately, no such magical line appeared for us when we asked, "Gee, where to start?" when it came to mattress-buying. 

TV commercial thumb screengrabbed from Google. 

Being Houstonians, we started in the only logical place, which is Gallery Furniture.  Even if we don't end up proceeding with a purchase here, the GF reality check feels like an obligatory step in any furniture-buying process. 

I've always been a Gallery Furniture fan and, in fact, several major pieces in our house were purchased there (including this one). 

But here's the thing: Jim McIngvale got his legendary nickname "Mattress Mac" many years ago.  Much has changed since then, and his store no longer has an overriding focus on mattresses. 

Thirty years after it first opened, GF is more about solid wood than sawing wood. 

Houston freeway billboard pic screengrabbed from a Reddit post. 

Oh, they do still have quite a mattress selection - don't get me wrong.  But buying a mattress isn't a matter of stylistic taste so much as function, and in a mega-store which is now dominated by a fantastic selection of highly taste-specific furniture, I found the focus to be a little wonky when we transitioned into the mattress section.  The atmosphere wasn't conducive to concentration, and concentration is what we needed to muster in order to cope with the avalanche of functional choices in modern-day mattresses. 

There's plenty at Gallery Furniture to entertain - or distract, depending on your goals and how you experience the place. 

So we did inspect all of the mattresses at Gallery Furniture, and it was indeed the culturally-enriching experience I've come to enjoy over the past 20 years.  Perceiving that we were serious high-end prospective buyers, the sales staff was all over us in their trademark style, which led to an entertaining exchange, as follows. 

At one point as a salesman was elaborating with great verbosity on a particular mattress model, I caught a glimpse of Mr. McIngvale as he walked briskly behind a showroom partition. 

"Elvis is on the lot," I quipped with a raised eyebrow and an exaggerated expression of sagacity on my face, echoing the title of McIngvale's 1996 book of the same name, which of course I own a copy of. 


Downsampled screengrab from this Amazon site.

"Huh?" the salesman replied, mildly startled by my non sequiturial interruption. 

"He's on the other side of the wall.  I'm referring to the book," I explained with great amusement. 

"Oh yeah - I read it," the salesman hastily interjected. 

"Maybe you ought to read it again," the hyper-vigilant Mr. McIngvale growled from behind the partition.

Hilarity aside, we did not proceed with a purchase from Gallery Furniture that day.  We came away from that initial shopping experience feeling that we needed additional retail data points for reference.

Having not purchased a new mattress in many years, we had no idea going into it what to expect in terms of either mattress technology or pricing.  There are many choices including conventional inner spring mattress, memory foam mattress, and adjustable mattresses.  Did you know that mattresses range in price from about two hundred dollars to ALMOST TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS?!  HOLY CRAP!!  IT'S A MATTRESS - NOT A MOTOR VEHICLE!!

From Gallery Furniture, we proceeded to our local Sleep Number store. 

Here's where personal needs and preferences start entering into the analysis pretty strongly.  I personally prefer a very firm mattress - as firm as possible without causing discomfort.  In principle, a bed with adjustable firmness is a really good idea, especially given that my fantastic husband doesn't want quite as much firmness.

However the problem for me with a Sleep Number bed is that the numbers don't go high enough.  It didn't seem logical to spend all that extra money on an adjustable bed only to leave the firmness setting on 100 all of the time.

The other issue I had is that the memory foam offered by the Sleep Number store was not sufficiently dense, and we knew that we did want a memory foam topper at the very least, if not the whole mattress.  So even though I could make the bed a 100-level firmness, the top layer was still too soft.  If they had offered a range of choices in the top foam density, we probably would have proceeded with a purchase of one of these.  But they told us that they had no foam choices. 

From the Sleep Number store, we proceeded (gulp) to our local Mattress Firm store.

Up until this shopping trip, I had never set foot in one of these places, nor would I even have considered it.  This is just my personal opinion, but these stores look SO JUNKY to me!!  Cheap mattresses screaming sales prices piled outside, as if it were La Pulga or something!!  Is it too much to hope for just a tiny bit of class in a shopping experience??  A retail esthetic that does not totally grate on a person's artistic nerves??

And all that garish neon hype plastered all over the windows... "no credit check, no quality" is what messages like this suggest to me. 

By the way, you can see the iconic NASA Value Center reflected in these windows. 

But if you can actually muster the intestinal fortitude to walk inside the store, it's a different story:

To my surprise, the interior of the store approached the ideal.  Everything was arranged in an orderly manner (and I'm very big on order) - logically and color-coded so that you could actually focus on the functional aspects of the different mattress choices, without distractions, and without unnecessary hype. 

I got the feeling that this captured the complete, all-in-one-place data set that I had been missing from both Gallery Furniture and the Sleep Number store.  I got the feeling that all of the objective information I needed to make the best mattress decision was right there assembled in one convenient streamlined place.

I had always wondered why in the hell Mattress Firm stores and their imitators were popping up like weeds all over the retail landscape.  I can think of at least seven just within Clear Lake alone!!  Seven mattress stores in a single suburban enclave?!  What is up with that?!

These are just the local Mattress Firm stores - this doesn't include the knock-offs. 

Screengrabbed from the Mattress Firm website.

NOW I know the answer to that question: because this really is the best way to sell this particular item, and so the resulting sales volumes are probably supporting all those stores. 

The Mattress Firm sales people were extremely nice - helpful and responsive but not pushy.  We actually focused on a pair of Mattress Firm stores - the clearance center in the NASA value center, and the mainstream retail outlet which is directly across the Gulf Freeway on its east side (in a strip center north of the Webster Cinemark; store numbers 2 and 3 on the map above).  The clearance center sells new mattresses but re-stocks are also offered at a reduced price. 

We ended up choosing a brand new mattress rather than a re-stock, as we were emboldened by the store's "Happiness Guarantee" of full money back if we ultimately decided not to keep it. 

This one, actually.  Neither my husband nor I had slept on a memory foam mattress before, and it's a big financial decision that a person has to live with for years to come.  The idea of full money back gave us the confidence to try this route.

Note that "extra-firm" in Tempur-pedic terms doesn't mean the same thing as "extra-firm" in innerspring mattress terms - it's actually softer (in my opinion).

My recommendation if you become a Tempur-pedic owner: spend the extra money to get the matching pillow because they work together (memory foam goes with memory foam).  We got two Symphony pillows in addition to this mattress. 

Anyway, it has now been a few months since this purchase, and we are completely satisfied.  I've come to realize a couple of things:

1. What I thought I wanted in a mattress wasn't exactly what I needed in a mattress.  As noted above, the Contour Select is not the firmest mattress on the market, but somehow it seems to work. 
2. The best measure of a mattress might not be "how good it feels", which is an instantaneous response to a device that you actually have to use for six to ten continuous hours each day.  It's analogous to taste-testing soda pop: if all you get is one sip, you might prefer the sweeter one.  But by the time you drink your way to the bottom of each glass, you might find yourself gravitating toward the less-overwhelmingly-sweet brand instead.  Similarly, the measure of a good mattress might be the degree to which it doesn't intrude upon your daily life.  If you stumble out of bed in the morning without a single reflective thought (negative or positive) about your mattress, it's probably doing its job. 

 So there you have one middle-aged woman's highly-opinionated commentary on the subject of local mattress vendors.  Good luck with your shopping! 

Dove dilemma

Something has gone strangely wrong with the mourning doves that routinely nest in our back yard.

Chick, you're lookin' good!  Two healthy squabs in a hanging basket in the spring of 2012.  Both of these fledglings went on to launch successfully.

For the past several years, I have enjoyed watching these critters nest and flourish in a few of the planter baskets that hang beneath our covered patio.  There are many birds of prey that hunt within the confines of Centerpointe, so the patio is an excellent refuge for nesting birds. 

One of the chicks perched on a wind chime, on first furlough from the nest.  This pic was taken before I cleaned and painted the patio ceiling. 

Peeking out through window blinds to observe this fledgling sitting on the back of a patio chair as (s)he faces the world for the first time. 

My favorite photo to date: parent with squab peeking out from the leaves. 

I was disappointed to see the first nest of the season fail this year, but I chalked it up to a random act of nature and perhaps the abnormally cold weather we had this spring. 

But then things got curiouser:

The doves laid a second clutch a few weeks after the first one failed, and the second clutch failed, too. 

Do you see that one egg off to the side?  That was a failed egg that the mother bird apparently pushed out of the way as she laid the second clutch. 

Two failures in succession prompted me to examine what might be going wrong now, after multiple previous successes last year and in prior years.  I took down this hanging plant and examined the eggs.  There was no visible damage to any of them.

These things look like blood spots, but I have no real knowledge of these things. 

Using the handy morning sun to candle the eggs, I couldn't really see good differentiation in there, even though the parent dove(s) sat on both clutches for a couple of weeks (according to this site, mourning dove eggs should hatch in 14 to 16 days). 

My tentative conclusion is that these doves are sterile.  I don't know whether the first and second clutches were laid by the same mated pair, or a different pair.  According to this site, dove pairs mate for life and "wild doves are notorious for infertile eggs", so maybe their biological clocks have simply run out this year. 

In researching this, I did find that there is a sterilizing food product used to control the closely-related common pigeon species, but I'm unaware of any local use of this product.  Certainly I've never seen pigeons being a problem anywhere near League City (our hawks would take care of them in a jiffy even if their numbers did increase).  So my guess at this point is just infertility deriving from a normal cause. 

Smog smut

This may sound strange, but I've always hoped to get stuck in traffic at the top of the south Sam fly-overs to southbound IH-45.  What a photo op that would be!!  I actually have a friend who did get stuck at the very top.  They were driving home during the Christmas Eve 2004 snowstorm - yes, a "snowstorm" (a very mild one) in Houston. 

While I was running madly through the streets taking pics of Houston's first ever white Christmas, my buddy and his family were involuntarily pondering the scene from hundreds of feet in the air... 

...because, by the time they got to the top of the fly-over, the icing conditions were so bad (remember the old mantra "bridges freeze before roads") that all of the traffic simply halted and stayed put for like an hour and a half or something!!  None of the drivers wanted to risk tobogganing out of control down the other side of the fly-over, and who could blame them?  I can't find any published accounts of how tall that ramp is, but it's huge. 

This Texas Freeways site uses the term "Full Stack" to describe that array of ramps, and in the passionate language known only to highway enthusiasts, they note, "Sprawling, high flying ramps, symmetric. Could this be the perfect stack?"  Perfect for taking photos, supposing you have a legitimate reason to stop there. 

Anyway, nine years after that event, I finally got a quasi-chance yesterday when traffic slowed to stop-and-go.  I couldn't get out of my car, but at a dead stop, at least I could point my camera out the window and make an attempt to capture the impressive scene.

So close, and yet so far...

 But for the love of Pete, why was everything so blurry and hazy??  Because someone set Veracruz on fire, apparently.  Dang the luck - I finally get up there, and I'm enveloped in smog and smoke. 

Oh well.  Maybe it will snow again soon.  Not.

Better luck next time. 

 

The crazy business of crazy ant differentiation

This is a "placeholder" post that asks a question I cannot yet answer:  How does an ordinary person tell the difference between an invasive "Tawny" or "Rasberry" crazy ant and a "normal" crazy ant of the type that we've all seen for many years? 

I'm an outdoorsy type of person and I'm a gardener to boot, but I'm sorry - this just looks like yet another ant to me.  There's nothing about it that gives me an "Ah-hah!" moment of recognition that it is somehow different from other local ants. 

Screengrabbed from this Agrilife site. 

I'm asking because the mainstream news media is currently awash in re-broadcast Armageddon (antageddon?) stories about how these things are potentially a bigger threat to sanity than invasive fire ants.  You can read about it in Chron, online science journals such as this one, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and many other sources including the Tehran Times, as if anyone in Tehran would actually give a crap about what goes on in our back yards. 

Here's the thing, though: You can also find the same flavor of alarmist local stories about this ant from five years ago (e.g., this Chron article).  Rasberry crazy ants are not a new phenomenon here.  And while they're definitely spreading...

Impacted counties in red. 

Screengrabbed from this Agrilife site. 

...it's not clear to me how much of this is news hype and how much of it is an actual looming problem that rises to a level of seriousness that demands our attention.  Everybody has crazy ants of some kind, so a derivative question then becomes as follows:  when Rasberry / Tawny crazy ants invade a new area, do they always manifest in the billions?  Or does their density sometimes remain within the range of what we'd expect from the species of ants we've always had (because of unfavorable small-scale terrain conditions or whatever other reason)? 

Do they always displace fire ants, or do they sometimes maintain a lower density and co-exist? 

What is the actionable criterion, in other words?  The homeowner dilemma is obvious: a homeowner sees a few crazy ants and wonders whether they're "normal" crazy ants which manifest in relatively low numbers, or this new kind of crazy ant that can be expected to mushroom into back-yard Antageddon.  Does an ordinary unskilled homeowner have to wait until an Antageddon scenario actually appears in order to make the distinction?  Or is there a way to tell in advance so that a pending Rasberry ant infestation can be nipped in the bud before their Antageddon phase develops?

The answers are not clear to me from the information I'm finding today on the internet.  If I gain any additional useful insight, I will update this post accordingly.  Meanwhile, I'll leave you with an embedded clip attributed to local Antageddon discoverer Tom Rasberry:

Not just another blogging statistic

In this recent post, I embedded "This Is Water", the amazing new short film based on David Foster Wallace's commencement ceremony address of the same name.  


The partial text behind the actress reads as follows
(emphasis partly mine):

"But if you really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know that you have other options.   It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars  - love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things."  

Film screengrab from "This Is Water" by TheGlossary (as attributed). 

Life in a cookie-cutter tract home is often parodied as the ultimate "consumer hell-type situation", to use Wallace's turn of phrase.  No, that isn't Centerpointe above - it's a photo of another subdivision, an iconic photo that has come to symbolize everything that's stultifying about such a lifestyle.  But whether or not those homeowners' lives are actually hell has a great deal to do with how they choose to perceive their own realities, and how they decide to work with what they've got.  For instance, they could choose to grow organic vegetables in their microscopic back yards if they wanted to do that.  Or they could choose any one of a number of other potentially meaningful pursuits, such as blogging, for instance. 

Now I'm going to offer you a glass of Wallace's water in order to complete the picture of it on a small, relevant scale.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might wonder from time to time why on earth I write about some of the obscure topics I choose.  For instance, attic stair cords?!  Really?!  Who writes a blog post about attic stair cords?! 

Quoting both Wallace and the Sydney Morning Herald simultaneously, "But the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance."

Who writes a blog post about attic stair pull cords?  People who pay enough attention to know that some other people need that kind of stuff.  This is a zero-money blog.  I don't pay for anything; I don't get paid for anything.  So I can access hit statistics, but only for a few days at a time, because I only have the freebie version of Statcounter, which is a piece of code designed to capture web traffic information.  But even a few days of data at a time is enough to tell me what's going on out there, and what people need.  In just a few days' time, look what happened, as indicated by the green typeface:

Google rankings are often accessible in Statcounter because Google owns Blogger, this platform.   

Replacing an attic stair code is about the dullest task any of us will ever do.  A person has to have a real need for that kind of information before they'll bother taking the time to Google it.  And who might have such a need?  Maybe one of Austin, Fairfax or Cedar Lake is a newly widowed and frightened person who has never had to tackle home maintenance before now and doesn't have a clue where to start.  Maybe one of them is a newlywed who is feeling overwhelmed by the demands of home ownership.  And do you know what?  They would almost certainly figure out their attic stair cord issue without reading my blog post, but the unmitigated fact is, they were never really looking for technical instructions to start with.  What they were really searching for was an affirmation, however small, that they weren't alone - that someone else was with them in the spirit of humanity as they faced their tiny attic cord challenge.  And if I can write a blog post to meet that need for a fellow human being, that is water. 

Sometimes the search strings are even more revealing than that example.  I write a lot of stuff that is mostly fun and indulgent, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of one's honest labor by describing the neat stuff that its rewards can produce, but sometimes those same topics can have a much more serious place in other peoples' lives.  Late last year, I wrote a post about installing ceramic tile throughout an entire house.  Most of the search strings for that one have been fairly neutral:

It's cool to score a #1 topic rank on Google, especially if the searcher is non-geographically-proximal (because Google prioritizes rank based partly on distance from the source), but ranking goals were not the reason why I started this gig.

So those above were neutral, but every once in a while, a search string will stop me in my tracks:

I was Dallas' #1 ranked hit as well, but that's not what's important here. 

What's important is the tone of that search string.  Dallas is clearly apprehensive about something.  Dallas is afraid of looking funny, afraid of making a bad decision, maybe afraid of degrading their property value.  Only Dallas knows the reason for that fear, but from the tone, it doesn't sound like Dallas is an average happy-go-lucky affluent suburbanite who is about to indulge in the purchase of some new floor tile.  It sounds like Dallas might be going into this decision somewhat reluctantly.  Maybe Dallas can only afford one kind of floor tile, the kind that's on clearance, hence the question.  Maybe Dallas has a child with asthma and the medical bills that go with it - asthma is probably the most common reason for installing a hard-surface floor like tile throughout an entire home.  Or maybe Dallas cares for an invalid parent who simply cannot manage to navigate their wheelchair through pile carpeting.   

If I can help one person who finds themselves in a situation such as what Dallas might be facing, that is water.  And so that's why I write about a variety of things that might seem obscure, dull, or maybe just plain bizarre.  I don't get many hits on much of what I write, but that same stuff seems to find its way onto the computer screens of people who really need it.  And the way I see it, that is what this is all about.  My consumer indulgences and artistic pursuits are fun, but the only real meaning comes from the opportunity to help a few people like Dallas along the way. 

Welcome to the 'burbs, where our experiences really can be deeper than the pockets needed to fund them. 

"The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to see it.  This, I submit, is the freedom of real education ....  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.  THAT is real freedom.  THAT is being educated, and understanding how to think.  … This is water.  This is water."

Film screengrab from "This Is Water" by TheGlossary (as attributed).

Chilos Mexican seafood

A random shout-out here to one of my favorite local restaurants, but it's one you might be wisest to hit en route from Point A (some location inside the Loop) to Point B (your home in League City or other points south), given that it is some distance away. 

Such was the case for me this past Friday morning when I had to be outside working in a lot of that weather mess and three inches of rain. (Working outside except during the most intense interval of lightning, during which there were an estimated one hundred fifty thousand lightning strikes in southeast Texas (!!) and a City of Houston employee was tragically struck). 

Anyway, to make a long story short, despite having rain gear, I got soaked. 

This is what the sky looked like after the worst of the rain and lightning had passed.  Pretty raunchy stuff. 

I got soaked, which meant that stopping for a hot bowl of soup on my way home was just the ticket, and my favorite destination for soup is Chilos Seafood Restaurant on the Gulf Freeway at Howard / Bellfort.  

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps. 

It's on the south end of that funny looking strip center which is accessible from the southbound feeder.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps ground view. 

Most Houston suburbanites think that they know what Mexican food is.  And most of them would be wrong.  Here's how to tell the difference. 

If you log onto a Houston restaurant's website (if it even has a website, which most of them don't) and the content is presented in English, it's probably not a real Mexican restaurant. 

Screengrabbed from Chilos Seafood Restaurant homepage. 

If you order seafood in a Mexican restaurant and it comes without the head still attached to the fish, it's probably not a real Mexican restaurant. 

Screengrabbed from Chilos Seafood Restaurant homepage.

Most Houston suburbanites think they know what Mexican food is, but really what they know is Tex-Mex.  And there's nothing wrong with Tex-Mex, but when your butt is soaking wet and you want a good hot hearty soup to remedy that condition, you're probably not going to find it in any Tex-Mex restaurant.

But you will find it at Chilos.  This is the Sopa de Mariscos in the small size.  You add both the lime and the rice to your soup yourself so that all components are maximally fresh and the rice is un-soggy when you eat it. 

Chilos serves its salsa fresh and warm, which I really like.  It's spicier than Tex-Mex but not blow-your-head-off spicy. 

This is an expensive soup, but you get what you pay for, and the high quality is plain to see here.  Rather than being packed with low-quality fillers, it's made of fish chunks, shrimp, crab fingers, oysters, pulpo - my favorite!!, and vegetables such as carrots and peppers.  With all of those good ingredients, they don't need to be adding excessive oils or carbohydrates in order to pump up the flavor.  It has a rich and wonderful home-made taste to it, without an oily broth. 

A word about the indelicate question that will be on the minds of many suburbanites at this point in my discourse:  should a person really stop at any establishment on that part of the Gulf Freeway?  Isn't it one of those proverbial "bad areas" of town? 

My personal opinion is that it's about three orders of magnitude less dangerous than actually driving on the Gulf Freeway.  I've been going to Chilos for at least ten years and I've never seen anything that caused me concern.  I do go at lunchtime rather than in the evening, because the mood gets very festive with Mariachis and crowds, whereas I prefer a quiet meal.  That part of town might be a little more animated at night. 

Anyway, we may have lost a number of high-quality local restaurants such as Hans Mongolian Wok, Korean BBQ, and Dimassis, but I reckon Chilos will be around for a long time to come, because it's extremely popular.  Mostly with people of Mexican heritage, but wet-back (I mean that literally) gringos like myself enjoy it, too.