Critter alert

A large opossum has moved into the east side of Centerpointe Section 9 (Arlington and Harvard cul-de-sacs area).  It started tripping various components of my security system a couple of nights ago.

Cameras tell no lies:  the guilty party next to some 3 cubic foot mulch bags. 

I will attempt to live trap her and relocate her unharmed to a more suitable area (it certainly wouldn't be my first time, although I haven't previously caught a critter this mature here).  Meanwhile, I suggest the following:

• Do not leave your garage doors up for any amount of time unless you are physically present.  An opossum will seize any opportunity to move into your house and (trust me) you don't want that.  Once they gain entry, they are surprisingly loathe to leave.  
• Never, ever, ever leave dog food unattended outdoors.  Feed your dogs and then remove any excess food immediately.  This 'possum may be finding a good food source in our immediate vicinity because something is inspiring her to hang around.  
• Similarly, never, ever, ever leave cat food unattended.  Some Centerpointe residents leave their garage doors cracked open at night so that their outdoor cats can find refuge.  You're doing your cats a favor this way, but you're also optimizing lifestyle conditions for opossums, which typically dominate cats (opossums are not aggressive, but cats are generally frightened of them and will stay away if an opossum comes to claim a particular cracked-open garage).  
• If you have backyard gardens containing vegetables or fruits, be on the look-out for this one.  Vegetables are not very sought after by opossums (why bother to eat nutritionally-incomplete squash or onions when you could instead eat pet food with its well-balanced macronutrient profile of protein, fats, and carbs?!) and I haven't noticed any damage to my stock, but a bigger animal is going to have an appetite to match, so there's no telling what might occur.

'Twas with a great gut-wrenching anguish that I feared for the safety of my first ever Japanese eggplant this morning after seeing on security footage how this opossum was foraging in our yard overnight.  It would be tragic, indeed, to lose such a fine specimen so close to harvest.  Fortunately for me, it was not touched.  

The rest of my vegetables were also unscathed, including these two nearly-done peppers which are earmarked for a batch of jambalaya.  I had no room in my back yard for this plant so I installed it in the raised bed next to my garage.  As such, it has no protection from any source of damage.  

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.  

Colony collapse disorder: A bees vs. no bees analogy

I'm unleashing a meme upon the world with the hopes that it will help to educate people about what happens when bees are not thriving.  I have pinned the meme to this blog post so that interested searchers can come here for the full story behind it.

This is not the meme - this is one of my favorite honeybee pics from this 2012 post.   Every spring, I let a few of my back yard winter garden vegetable plants bolt (go to flower) just so I can watch the bees.  This is a broccoli.  

You've no doubt seen headlines regarding colony collapse disorder on the internet and maybe you've even read a little about it.  But if you're like the rest of us, you've had to fight your way through endless streams of propaganda and political rhetoric (on the subject of bees, duh) and you've probably found it difficult to arrive at a perspective about what it all means in the grand scheme of things.

Mounds of dead bees, skulls and crossbones, predictions of the End Times, impenetrable statistics... it's all out there on the internet, just waiting to foul up your perspective.  

That image above is what results when you Google 'colony collapse disorder'.  Despite all the hype, there's nothing whatsoever in that material to give the average non-technical person a simple clear sense of what happens when there are no bees.  And without a grasp of the physical realities that result, how is a reader supposed to proceed into a contemplation of what it all means or how important it might be?

So my meme (given at the end of this post) addresses this by visually incorporating imagery depicting two very practical end-member results:  Bees vs. no bees.

In my case, it wasn't colony collapse disorder that gave me an opportunity to photograph these extremes - it was the 2014 polar vortex, which wreaked havoc on our normal seasonal progression into spring here in greater Houston Texas.  Basically what happened is that, by sun angle and calendar date, many plants concluded that it was time to flower.  But by prevailing severely cold weather, the wild bees decided that there was no way they were setting foot (or wing) outside their hives.

And this was the initial result for my blueberry plants.  What you see here is one bedraggled blueberry on the end of a stalk that contains mostly withered brown flowers, which are the ones that did not get pollinated.  Only one flower of many got lucky because this little portion of the plant happened to flower while it was still too cold for the bees to come out.

Blueberries are particularly sensitive to pollination.  They don't self-pollinate, they need different varieties available within about 100 feet of each other so that they can exchange genetic information, and bees need to do the work.  Commercial growers achieve good pollination by bringing bee hives to their fields while their plants are flowering.  They typically don't rely on natural bee populations like we hobby gardeners do in the suburbs.  

I sat on my patio and watched that initial early flowering, waiting for any sign of six-legged life, and there was none - it was an insect wasteland out there in my own back yard.  At times I would mutter to myself, "Houston, send me just one honeybee, Africanized or not - just one might be enough to turn this situation around."   It was very frustrating because blueberry plants also need cold weather in order to produce berries, and cold weather is something that we are not guaranteed to receive on the subtropical upper Texas coast.  So here I was in a unique situation of having had ideal polar vortex weather conditions which stimulated a profusion of blueberry flowers, followed by no pollinators to service those flowers.

Fortunately, blueberry bushes flower over the course of several weeks, and the weather warmed up enough in the intervening time for the bees to finally come out, which they did in abundance.  And this was the typical result for portions of the bushes that flowered later:

Blueberry bonanza!!  Quite a contrast, isn't it??  These two pictures in this post and in my meme were taken of parts of my two bushes which are separated by about five feet.  It's going to be a happy, happy day at my house when these things ripen and we can eat them.
:-)

Yes it is quite a contrast, and that's the point of my meme.  I wanted to show that bees vs. no bees does not mean better crop vs. worse crop.  It actually means something a lot closer to crop vs. no crop, and that holds true for many plant species besides blueberries.  And that's the message that you don't necessarily grasp right away by looking at the propaganda on the internet.

Again, I want to stress the fact that no actual colony collapse led to the differences you see in the photos above.  Our local wild bees initially stayed away because of the unusual cold weather.  But a lack of bees due to widespread colony collapse would be expected to produce a similar effect.

Memes away:

What's wrong with this CNN picture?

With the recent death of a famous American actor from an assumed heroin overdose, commercial news media, including local outlets, are replete with a reinvigorated focus on drug addiction, its consequences, and the enforcement efforts that we as a society are making to curb it.

Look familiar??  That's League City's half-built Public Safety Building in the background, a half a mile from us.  This is a screengrab from a recent Channel 13 piece that showcases the ongoing training of League City's newest drug-fighting K9.  That black blur you see in the mid-ground is another pooch practicing his pounce.  LCPD reportedly now has three drug doggies.

Screengrab courtesy of KTRK-TV.  

The problem with many of these news media offerings, in my opinion, is that they are formulaic and misleading, thereby doing a profound disservice to the public in helping to perpetuate a variety of addiction-related myths.

The most egregious case I've encountered thus far comes from CNN, in this story titled "One snapshot in a tragic national picture:  Long Island sees exploding heroin use".  This piece framed the issue in the same old tired sensationalist terms:  There are narcotic-peddling wolves in our midst, and they are zooming down a freeway near us, targeting our innocent and unsuspecting children.  Where they strike next, nobody knows, but you can bet that the results will be randomly tragic and wildly undeserved.  

No.  Someone needs to call bullsh*t on this nonsense, because that is not the typical mechanism by which kids get sucked into drug use.  And if people don't discard that kind of mass-consumption mythology and instead start coming to terms with the truth, they won't have a prayer of interceding effectively when (not if) drugs come knocking on their own family door.

I have to insert the usual disclaimers before I continue with my editorial.  I am not a psychological services professional.  I do not have any specialized education or training in the area of substance abuse.  But what I do possess is almost five decades of experience in actively opposing addiction-based lifestyles within certain branches of my own extended family, and in certain social and professional circles.

I'm also a mother who has recently had to deal with predators actively promoting drug and alcohol use to my own kid.  The same is true of every parent of an American teenager - if you have a teenager but you don't believe that your kid has been offered drugs and alcohol, then you are simply delusional.  And if your kid hasn't described either to you or to some other trusted and responsible adult when, where, what, and by whom those illegal substances were offered to them, then I strongly advise you to do whatever is necessary to build up enough security in your primary family relationships and friendships for that kind of intergenerational communication to happen.

In disclaimer sum, my history has left me with strong perceptions and opinions on the subject of substance abuse, which I will now proceed to express.  The opinions of others may differ.

I parsed the offending CNN article in the most practical and useful terms I could think of:  I analyzed it through the lens of my own child's prevailing perceptions of what might be wrong with it.

My child has a particularly vivid, visceral, and almost irrational need to see justice prevail (a characteristic that she might have inherited from her mother).  In shedding the innocence of childhood during her transition to adolescence, she began reacting negatively to a wide variety of social imperfections, including drug and alcohol abuse.  So I gave her a printed copy of that CNN article, I numbered each paragraph for ease of reference (there are 25), and provided the following instructions:

1. Mark the warning signs that the parents in this story missed.  
2. Flag the erroneous beliefs, assumptions, and harmful paradigms that most probably allowed [drug] addiction to flourish in some of these cases.  Physically mark and describe on these [printed] pages.  

If you have a teenager who is old enough to handle this kind of exercise, I invite you to do the same, because there could scarcely be a better learning experience.  Print out the article, and have them annotate it as best they currently can.  They could also read it online but I prefer tangibility - if they print it out and write on it, that process will be more deeply symbolic of them taking ownership of the content and ideas (which is an example of the process of taking personal responsibility for something).  Writing over the top of someone else's statements is an act of physical domination, which also underscores the counter-message that your children do not, in fact, have to perceive of themselves as helpless and submissive potential targets of an impending tidal wave of Mexican heroin, as I believe this article insinuates.

Then, after they have done their best based on their current teenaged understanding of substance abuse, sit down and discuss their findings with them.  Teenagers, even the best-developed ones, won't be capable of spotting every red flag in this article, which is exactly what makes it such a valuable learning experience.  Some of the atrocities in the piece are easy to perceive, but some of them are much more subtle and derivative in nature, and thus will not be recognized except by people who have developed extensive addiction-related empirical wisdom.

I'm going to provide you with my own propaganda punch list to help you with the headwork.  I will tell you what I believe, which is not necessarily the same as what the majority of Americans believe (which, I contend, is exactly why addiction continues to play such a prominent and inconceivably expensive role in our society).  You might not agree with everything I describe here.  Some of it might take you aback or make you offended.  You can decide which of these viewpoints below you wish to consider and/or offer to your own teen.

Scope of the issue as stated by the article:  "Heroin use has exploded in what is being described as an epidemic...".  

A layperson's grasp of the word "epidemic" is along the lines of the typhoid outbreak that killed one third of the population of Athens Greece, or, closer to home, one of those miserable intervals in which fully one quarter of the kids in a public school classroom are simultaneously out sick with the flu (as happened when my daughter was in Grade 4).  We went to a wedding a few years back where 50% of the guests came down with norovirus - now that was an epidemic, let me tell you (and yes - every member of my family ended up on the unlucky side of that statistic).

In profound contrast to those examples of epidemics, only about 1.6% of Americans have ever tried heroin in their entire lives.  In their entire lives!!!  Sure, there are isolated enclaves where usage is higher than that, but to describe the present situation as an "epidemic" is irresponsible at best, and unconscionable at worst.  Perception is the most pernicious part of peer pressure, and what statements like that do is leave young people under the impression that a whole bunch of people are doing heroin.  CNN implied this, so it must be true, right?  And when naive young people think that "everybody" is doing something, they will be more inclined to try it themselves.

And don't believe everything you read on the friggin' internet either, even if it comes from a source that's supposed to be reputable.  

Overall tone of the article:  "Several factors have contributed to this "perfect storm" of addiction according to experts -- among them, proximity to major airports and transportation centers..."  with an expound provided by Paragraph 17:  "Many [who begin using heroin] are cheerleaders, athletes and straight-A students from loving homes."  

In a one-two perceptual punch, as well as being unconscionably misleading as to basic American heroin use statistics, I find this article to be sensationalistic, superficial, and fear-mongering because it insinuates that the primary drug addiction threat is primarily attributable to an exquisitely-efficient trafficking infrastructure which preys upon otherwise functional individuals.

In actual fact, a large percentage of the young people who adopt a drug-using lifestyle do not do so because they are pretty and popular blonde kids randomly seduced by a "perfect storm" of circumstances.  They do so because they are taught those behaviors within their own families.

It's very difficult for young people to "just say no" when their own families are saying "yes".  Many of those families try to impose the "do as I say - not as I do" directive.  But a parental message of hypocrisy is almost always worse than no parental message at all.  

 Sure, there are some kids who, because of conspiracy of circumstances and immaturity, start associating with the proverbial "wrong crowd" and get introduced to an addiction lifestyle through that route instead.  But I believe that they are a distinct minority.  There are no hard statistics on this that I know of because it is so difficult to measure, but my estimate from personal experience is that at least two thirds of young people who embrace addiction do so because, as a lifestyle, it is methodically handed down from generation to generation within their own families.  Usually the addictive substance of choice is not something flashy like heroin - it's usually alcohol, given that about 15% of American have a problem with the drink.  But in other cases, the culprit behavior can instead be another drug or non-drug addictions such as workaholism, sex addiction, spendaholism, or religion addiction.  The end lifestyle result is the same regardless of the addictive substance.  Only the details differ.

This is an important point because, until the true source of any given difficulty is identified and acknowledged, there is zero chance that it can be overcome.  People who point accusing fingers at Mexican and Colombian drug lords as the ultimate source of their problems are bullsh*tting themselves and everyone else, and won't be capable of helping themselves until they adopt a framework of personal responsibility through which they can come to terms with the truth.

In expanding upon this primary family-related (as opposed to drug-lord-related) focus, I'll show you red flags in the sections below and you'll see a consistent theme emerge.  I don't claim to have any intimate knowledge about the specific individuals showcased in the CNN article.  I'm using them here as stand-in representatives for what I have most commonly seen in a variety of addicted (usually alcoholic) families.  In other words, I'm "profiling" here because the practice is useful as a starting point in comprehending larger trends, not because I intend to be accusatory toward any given individual. The resulting interpretations may not apply in those individual cases, but they are instructive of larger overall addiction realities regardless.

Paragraph # 2:   "I was stealing money from my parents, I was doing illegal actions with my friends..." 

Most people, including teens, will be able to spot this one because it is the obvious freebie, the low-hanging bullsh*t detection fruit in the article.  Most commonly, parents who don't register significant amounts of money missing from their own wallets and the general existential impacts of five bags of heroin per day on their kid are:

1. Not in possession of basic information about drugs (most adult Americans cannot legitimately claim this as information about drug addiction is readily available in our society and is taught in most public schools)
2. Mentally, emotionally, and/or physically absent from their child's life
3. In denial, a dangerously maladaptive, personal responsibility-abdicating state of mind which may include full-blown enabling of their child's addiction
4. Engrossed in an addiction lifestyle themselves, which prompts them to interpret their child's similar behavior as normal, or
5. Some combination of the above

In a minority of specific situations, there could be other more innocent explanations, such as, perhaps a parent was battling cancer and simply couldn't be there when their child needed them.  Conversely, some addicted children have genuine un-diagnosed mental illnesses that render them beyond the reach of even the best parenting.  But extenuating circumstances such as those are the exceptions, not the rules.  Most of the time, a child's addiction is a reflection of what's going on within his own family.  Specifically, it's a reflection of the family's prevailing world view, which we'll talk about next.

Paragraph 5:  "There's a primary focus on youths taking responsibility for their own behavior."

If your teenager doesn't pick up on this red flag, try using this question as a prompt:  Can you think of a reason why it might it be necessary to isolate a young person in rehab and spend a solid year teaching him to take responsibility?

Answer:  Assuming that child has no neurological impairment, the most likely reason why that's necessary is that he was not taught to take responsibility at home.

And therein lies the number one hallmark characteristic of addicted individuals and families: A general refusal to take personal responsibility.  If you look closely, you can see this idea manifest again and again in the CNN article and in my analysis of it.

Paragraph 19:  "Heroin?  My son?  Never.  How did I not see that?"

Most likely it was denial.  My teenager picked up on this red flag with ease.

Paragraph 20:  "[The named parent] says stigma is keeping families from seeking help.  "Our children are just like every other mother or father's child and they're not junkies.  And that term needs to change.""

That one skinny paragraph is so fat with addiction world view that I almost don't know where to start.  I fully believe that I could literally write a second Master's thesis on just those three sentences even though my formal education is within the natural sciences rather than the psychological sciences.  For brevity, let me just hit a few of the highlights:

1. 'Stigma' does not keep addicted families from seeking help.  False pride, otherwise known as vanity, is sometimes what keeps addicted families from seeking help and was perhaps the phenomenon that this speaker was referring to.  Vanity is that condition which compels us to put a higher priority on maintaining a good-looking lie than on being honest about a relatively common truth of experience (addiction).  Furthermore, normal healthy people in general society do not brand others with any kind of 'stigma' simply because those people sought mental health services (although shrewd people may do so if folks are obviously in need of such services but choose not to seek them).  
2. "Our children are just like every other mother or father's child..."  No they are most certainly not, and to profess otherwise is to intensify the same denial that exacerbated the family's problem with addiction in the first place.
3. Did you pick up on the pervasive "shoot the messenger" theme in that skinny paragraph?  Did it take you aback a little bit??  It should have, especially the attack in the last line, the attack that was directed at you and every other CNN reader.  When you saw that, did you think to yourself, "Whoa, whoa, whoa - who said anything about applying a derogatory term to drug-addicted youths?  Where did THAT come from?!"  Again, this is a manifestation of the fact that people in possession of an addiction world view are strongly disposed not to take personal responsibility for a wide variety of what goes on in their own lives.  One of the hallmark behaviors by which personal responsibility is abdicated is the practice of shooting the messenger: every time someone tries to tell them that their situation calls for personal responsibility, they reflexively reply with some variant of "It's not ME who has the problem - it's YOU" in order to deflect focus away from their functional issue.  In this example, the de facto messenger got shot before any message was even delivered - that's how prominent this practice is in the lives of those caught up in addiction.  Many addicted families will go to stunning lengths to avoid taking responsibility for addiction, enabling, and the various role-related behavioral problems that accompany that lifestyle.  God Himself in His infinite wisdom could come down from Heaven and in His most compassionate and loving voice, He could inform many an alcoholic family that they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven if only they would turn their efforts to resolving their addictions, and in response to this, many of those families would reply, "Who the hell are you to judge?!  Everyone knows that you are an imperfect God not worthy of trust.  We'd be fools to listen to anything you have to say."  A complete reflection of focus away from the situation on the table and toward a general effort to discredit the messenger is often the method by which personal responsibility is side-stepped (simple avoidance is another common choice).  

Paragraph 23:  "Being able to say that I have different ways that I can manage my emotions besides getting high, it makes me very happy and excited to go through my future."

My teenager initially missed this red flag, but immediately snapped to it when I issued a prompt analogous to that for Paragraph 5:  Can you think of a reason why this young man needed to learn to manage his emotions in rehab?"

Answer:  Most likely, it's because he didn't learn to do that within his own family home.

And why didn't he learn to do that while he was in his own family?

Because emotions are incredibly powerful, and making conscious and effective decisions about the ways in which you will manage your own emotions is pretty much the ultimate achievement in the realm of personal responsibility.  You have to focus on yourself (not messengers) to pull that off, and you have to take ownership of every external issue that affects you.  And for families characterized by addiction, that is their Achilles heel - they cannot and will not take that kind of responsibility.
   
I could go on, and on, and on with this analysis, but this post is long enough.  Again, my purpose here is not to criticize any specific individuals - my purpose is to call bullsh*t on the types of bad paradigms and misinformation that needlessly contribute to the loss of so many American lives to addiction.  The referenced CNN article describes numerous individuals who died of heroin overdoses.  In my view, we can best honor those souls not by engaging in mindless mass media mournography, but if we instead unblinkingly use the rich learning experiences provided by their examples to help other people avoid the same fate.  Especially teenagers, who are just entering the full flower of that stage of life in which they first learn to take responsibility for themselves.

Addiction is a lifestyle characterized by a maladaptive world view that revolves around blaming others and avoiding personal responsibility on a variety of existential levels.  The consumption of heroin, alcohol, and other substances is usually the very last step in the process of succumbing to that lifestyle - the use of substances is not the first step, and it's rarely the most consequential step.  Substance abuse is the tip of an existential iceberg - a symptom of something much more pervasive.  If we can be honest (brutally so if necessary) about what that triggering world view consists of, then there's hope for the people affected by it.

Have fun with your teenager.  Me, I'll sit here and wait for the messenger-shooting to begin.  But I don't mind being shot as the messenger, because I've had decades of time to get used to it.
:-)

Update February 17, 2014:
The morning after I posted this piece, the New York Times published "Addicted on Staten Island".  This is a paragraph screengrabbed from that article.  The NYT piece speculates, "the problems that have arisen on Staten Island would also seem to suggest a story about the stagnancy and the ailing fortunes of the working and middle classes."  Would you guess that this person described in the paragraph above became addicted in response to grief, depression or frustration arising out of a sense of economic stagnation?  Or could the fact that she spent ten years as a young child doing drug runs with her mother have had anything to do with it?

In so many of these cases, it comes from the families, not from the streets.    

Please consider blogging or tweeting

We've got a snow day in greater Houston and no snow to show for it.  As soon as the public school districts began announcing closures yesterday, the domino effect began in earnest.  Commercial cancellation announcements began pouring into my email box and visual voice mail account.

If you're wondering what to do with a bit of unanticipated free time today (or any other day), please consider starting your own blog or Twitter feed, especially if you might be able to see yourself participating in some kind of a community connective role.

There are 300,000 people in Galveston County, and very little community-oriented citizen journalism that I can find.

There are 200,000 people in "greater Clear Lake", which overlaps with north Galveston County, and the same observation applies.

We have a couple of notable exceptions, the most prominent of them being Island Drumz, which is the Clear Lake Shores blog.

Clear Lake Shores is about the size of a postage stamp.  Seriously, about 1,000 people live there, which is probably less than the population of Centerpointe subdivision with its 438 single family homes, most of which contain multiple-person families.  And yet Island Drumz has 68 subscribers and usually receives over 1,000 hits per week.  Do the math.  

If you do the math on that one, what you find is that Island Drumz is an effective mechanism of local social connection and information-sharing.  It represents a phenomenon that is rare in our area.

Bay Area Houston Today is another local example, but many of its posts promote ideological positions to a degree in which neither Island Drumz nor Centerpointe Communicator engage.  I do my share of editorializing - that's one of the perks of being a blogger - but it's not my primary focus.  And if I want political information, I tend to cut to the chase and go straight to The Texas Tribune rather than any given blog.

Our area's original blog was The League City Blog, which once again had a political focus, but at least it contained some hard information about what was going on around here.  Real Scary League City Politics was a similarly-themed progeny, but as of this writing, both have been dormant since 2012.

In sooth, the local blogging field is wide open.  Ditto with Twitter, from what I've seen so far.  Seven days ago when I announced that I was going to supplement blogging with tweeting, I made the statement "I was reluctant to begin this initiative" (Google Chrome has a sense of humor with cut and paste formatting, apparently).  Three days ago, a New York Times blogger neatly explained the reason for my reluctance in a piece titled "Valley of the Blahs:  How Justin Bieber's Troubles Exposed Twitter's Achilles Heel".  Simply put, Twitter is degenerating into a forum where people are trying to be noticed more than they are trying to be useful, which was Twitter's original purpose.   And in fact, much of what I've found in perusing Twitter fits into that category.  Nevertheless, it's still one of the best connective options we've got right now.

There is a HUGE latent demand for local information and connection with the other people who surround us.  We know this with absolute certainty.  Humans of New York recently proved it to us in spades.  HONY is essentially a forum through which local people communicate their individual stories.  They do it anonymously but viscerally, and they do it in a way which is less self-promotional and navel-staring and more in the style of sharing their wisdom and life lessons learned.  And people can't get enough of it, because that is exactly what is so missing from our social universe.   The blog has two million followers and the book that followed the blog was an instant #1 best seller.

When I conceived of this blog in 2011, I added a tab called "Neighbors" and I foresaw including content that was very similar to what HONY has since invented (this post from November 2011 best reflected my original intent for that post category).  But I didn't develop it because the idea was such a different paradigm that I was afraid it would creep people out.  I saw an acute social need for that kind of content, but as a small-scale contributor to the communicative universe, I wasn't sure that I would be a suitable person to try to re-set that precedent.  HONY has now smashed the old paradigm on behalf of us all.

Particularly if you are an older person, what are you planning to do - die with all your empirical wisdom still trapped inside your own head??  What would be the sense in that?  What if you were to share some of in an accessible format such as a blog, within the context of your life here in our local area?  I'm not talking about the navel-staring and self-promotion that characterizes so many individual private blogs.  I'm talking about sharing useful information.

Useful sharing benefits everyone, including the sharer.  A few months ago, a senior member of my scientific profession lamented in a public editorial that he had lost his enthusiasm for his career.  After about thirty years of doing essentially the same things, it had become stale to him, and he wondered what in the hell he could possibly do to keep himself engaged in the gap that he now dreaded, the ten-year gap between the onset of staleness and the final relief of retirement.  He hit upon an increased focus on mentoring junior members of our field, and suddenly he found himself filled with joy and renewed drive.

His story of typical of how life works.  Connection is good.  Sharing is good.  Mentoring is good.  Transmitting accumulated wisdom is good.  So, yeah, there are a lot of people out there who absolutely do not want to know about toilets that don't function properly.  Fine - they can enthusiastically skip that particular blog post.  But rest(room) assured, there's someone else out there who is looking for some guidance on that and literally a million of life's other small challenges.

Think about it.

@CenterBlog: Tweet don't fail me now

I am now tweeting as @CenterBlog.  

Screengrabbed from Twitter. 

Furthermore, I am going to reserve that account for only the most important and interesting local logistical information, with this blog remaining the repository for every other topic.  I will also endeavor to follow other local Tweeters whose information proves to be functionally useful (once I get them identified).

I was reluctant to begin this initiative but I see a clear need for it.  It's a platform through which information can be shared much more dynamically than a blog. 

Yesterday I lamented about the fact that I drove my daughter and her best friend to Baybrook Mall, only to get stuck in a grotesque traffic jam because all of the electricity in the area, including that which powers the traffic lights, was off.  We wasted over an hour dealing with that. 

Back in September, I howled about a localized but extremely-impactful Verizon Wireless outage that had hundreds if not thousands of people running in circles trying to restore their connectivity.  The outage was not reported to Verizon Customer Service, and so many of us were told by Verizon that we had malfunctions with our individual phones.  I wasted valuable chunks of two consecutive days dealing with that one. 

There was no way to find out about either of those messes in advance such that they could be avoided.  And that's just dumb.

In Centerpointe subdivision, we used to have one POA member who would send email alerts when need-to-know situations arose.  But after many years of above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty activity, that member has since discontinued the neighborhood newsletter and largely discontinued the email alerts as well.  I don't have access to that original emailing list, so I can't engage in any equivalent connectivity using email.  Twitter is the next best thing and might even prove to be more useful because of its ability to link to additional sources of information. 

As I was driving my daughter to school this morning, I encountered something rather undesirable that you'll probably want to avoid.  But you'll have to refer to @CenterBlog to find out about that if you're using a mobile device (the Tweet list should be viewable in the right column if you're viewing on a full-sized device). 

How to trim live oaks

Each and every one of us southern suburbanites has 'em standing tall if not proud in our front yards:

Oh, look!!!  A shapeless blob that looks exactly like everyone else's shapeless blob!!
:-)

Live oaks can be beautiful, but not when they are allowed to remain in an uncontrolled, scruffy state.  We gave our two front yard specimens some time to grow and fill in before we commenced with the training I'll describe below. 

If you live in greater Houston, now (December-January) is the time to trim your live oaks if you're going to do it this year.  The trees are at maximum dormancy in the dead of winter, and they haven't begun to shed their leaves, as they do in the spring (which confuses the hell of out people who are not familiar with live oaks, sometimes leading them to do terrible things to the trees, such as "topping" them). 

Tree trimming is partly a matter of taste.  I lived in west Austin for three years and became influenced by the dramatic sculptural way in which residents tend to groom their oaks there:

Those are either live oaks or red oaks.  This is a real estate sales pic which was discussed in this post.   

Compare that beautiful Austin house above to this house chosen at random in Centerpointe (screengrabbed from Google).  These trees are not the least bit pretty, and you'd never even know that there's a beautiful house behind all that hot mess of un-pruned riotous live oak.  These residents have actually put good care into edging their landscape with stone and trimming their bushes, but the impact is completely overwhelmed by the trees.

These trees do a profound disservice to this property.  I don't mean to pick on these specific residents.  About 80% of Centerpointe front yards are currently in an equivalent state. 

I have multiple motivations for wanting to make my front yard look more like the Austin example than that Centerpointe example shown immediately below it. 

First, I prefer the open style - I find it looks more groomed and it also makes the front yard look and feel much more spacious. 

Second, I don't want my live oaks to shade the front yard to the point of damaging our lawn or raised bed growth.

There's our front bed of winter onions in progress.  The morning shadows need to remain light and dappling, not overwhelming and crushing.  (And yes, I do need to weed this bed, but so far these onions are coming along well.) 

Some folks are not going to be comfortable trimming their own trees, in which case a professional services company can be used.  I don't know of a good one for trees, so I can't recommend one here.  In fact, if your live oaks are already very large, you might have no choice but to hire someone, but ours are still fairly small.  If you are brave enough to tackle this as a DIY project, here are some basic steps worth considering:

First, review Randy Lemmon's general tips on tree trimming.  He is Houston's local landscaping expert.

Second, assemble your tools (you'll see pics of the tools in the sections below):

1. Step ladder (careful).
2. Long-handled loppers.
3. Hand-held pruning shears.
4. Hand saw and/or chain saw (if your live oaks are larger)
5. Safety glasses (tree debris will be raining down on you from above).

Third, start by removing larger branches that are either pointing downward, crossed over other branches, or crowding out other branches.  If you spend a few minutes eyeballing your tree, the ones that need to be removed will start to jump out at you. 

Loppers rising to the challenge.  Our trees were planted 4 years ago, and so most of the branches are still small enough for loppers rather than saw. 

Use the process of elimination and logical deduction as to which branches to keep and which to remove.  That little branch cut off at lower left... that one in particular was clearly not going to amount to anything if allowed to remain on the tree.  All it would do would be to interfere with the healthy, well-formed larger branch extending outward to the left.  It would also drain energy from the parts of the tree that I'd prefer to see growing more vigorously. 

Fourth, once you've got your undesirable major branches thinned out and removed, use hand pruners to remove smaller suckers.  The word "sucker" sometimes means basal shoots, which emanate from the roots.  But I'm using the word here to refer to any minor branch which is "clearly not going to amount to anything good if allowed to remain on the tree".  That's the question I ask myself when deciding what to cut and not cut.  "Is this one going to do any good in adding to the tree?"  If the answer is no, I cut it off.

Or my husband does, because he's quite good at this kind of thing. 

The closer you are to the trunk, the more suckers should be removed. 

Fifth, make sure to remove any damaged branches.  Even if they are in a good location on the tree, if they are damaged, nothing good is going to come from them, either.

Here's an example - this branch was growing from the tree in a good location from an aesthetic standpoint, but it had fissured.  It had to come off. 

Sixth, don't be alarmed at the diversity of life you'll find in your live oak.

This is called Spanish Moss and it's like nature's Christmas decoration. 

Seventh, step back and admire your own handiwork routinely in the process.  Don't try to do too much at one time.  If you're unsure as to whether or not to cut certain branches off, leave them on and re-evaluate at a later time after the tree has had more opportunity to grow and fill in.

There's the before and after on this particular tree, although it's not shown from the same viewing angle here.  I could probably do more even more shaping, but given that this was our first major trim, I want to allow the tree more time to grow before I decide what to do next. 

Are ya feelin' it!?!?!

That's the Austin exemplar on the left, and a silhouette view of my newly-hacked oak on the right.  My tree is decades younger and still pretty gangly, but you get the feeling that it's starting to move in the desired direction. 

Eighth, bundle up all your junk for the trash man.  Our collection service won't take cut limbs unless they are cut short (three feet, I think) and tied with twine.

Into every life, a little trash-bagging must fall.

We find that this is a two-person job:  One person to trim, and the other person to bundle and bag. 

Happy trimming.
:-)

Voting vexations

Heading to your polling place today?  Ponder this Chron blog post if the notion of a straight-ticket solution ever crosses your mind in any future election where public servants rather than bonds and Constitutional amendments are on the ballot:  Yet another local Judge is alleged to be engaging in flagrant abuse of the public trust.  Excerpt from Chron:

"Family Court Judge Denise Pratt of the 311th District has come under fire for altering court records to mask tardy rulings, as well as a host of other doings that many lawyers have described in interviews as not criminal but highly unusual, unprofessional or unethical, including rampant absenteeism and communicating with lawyers on one side of a case without the other side knowing.  Pratt, a Republican judge first elected in 2010, did not immediately respond to requests for comment."

ADD SHAME FACE DU JOUR:  You could choose Judge Denise Pratt (Houston), former Judge Christopher Dupuy (Galveston), or if you change the costume, this could be former District Clerk Jason Murray (Galveston). 

Microsoft clip art (a weird one). 

This is the third such recent case just in our local area.  Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.  Something is wrong here because the system doesn't seem to be self-regulating.  We would expect our elected representatives to exhibit a diversity of competence, but multiple cases of allegedly-intentional lawbreaking?? 

My heart goes out to the families impacted by this latest situation.  Family law cases are horribly disruptive and emotionally wrenching even in the best of circumstances.  I can't imagine those transactions being complicated by unethical and/or illegal behaviors from the presiding authority - talk about adding unspeakable insult to injury.  Here's hoping that both the voters and the Republican Party can do a better job of cleaning our elected house in the future.

From KTRK:

NNOtice

Tomorrow is the annual National Night Out (NNO) get-together which is really quite a big deal in Centerpointe.

This is a tap-able reproduction of the POA announcement.  Screengrabbed from this site. 

That NNOtice doesn't say what time it starts, although it mentions a prize drawing at 8 p.m. (LCPD says it's 6 pm - 9 pm). 

Unfortunately, as is the general way of life in suburbia, there are also some "mission critical" meetings happening at Clear Creek High School tomorrow evening, and so I may not make it.  But I highly recommend it for the people-chatting even if you're not much into a carnival atmosphere.  A lot of interesting folks live in Centerpointe, and I've never failed to meet new ones at previous NNO events. 

Cycling conundrum continues

Almost a year ago, I published a post called "The untold story of Dickinson Road". 

Here's a screengrab so that you don't have to load the URL. 

It's very dangerous because it's impossibly narrow, as you can see above.  And yet at the same time, it represents one the of the really good "straight shots" we have in League City, and thus has an irresistible allure for cyclists. 

Thursday evening around 5:45 p.m., I came upon these cyclists on Dickinson Road.  Pelotoning on one of the narrowest roads in League City and during rush hour to boot. 

 I snapped that fuzzy foto with my phone because I wanted to post it and say, "Aw, jeez, guys - don't do this.  Not on Dickinson Road.  Not during rush hour.  There are already two highway crosses just on this one stretch.  How many more would you like to see added?!"

And then less than two hours after I took that pic, a cyclist was hit by a truck in west League City (paywalled URL).   The newspaper reported that he was taken to the hospital with a head injury, which doesn't sound good. 

We are in late September, when the weather gets cooler and cyclists amp up their activity.  There are numerous bike fests coming up, including Bike Around the Bay in about two weeks, an event which is soaring in popularity. 

And people need to practice for these things.  The trouble is, there are no good places to practice around here.  In "The untold story of Dickinson Road", I talked about an allegation from local cyclists that the only relatively safe cycling spot in the League City area had been the interstate highway service road (feeder) between Dickinson and LaMarque.  But that was a couple of years ago, and in the intervening time, the Tanger Outlets were built, which substantially increased traffic on that segment.  Now they're left with basically nothing. 

Maybe someday we'll improve our development to incorporate something akin to complete streets.  Until that time, watch out for cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians.  Especially when the weather turns cooler and more people are outside. 

In May of this year, Houston became the largest city in Texas to adopt a safe passing ordinance.  They did so by unanimous vote and as an  emergency measure, meaning it went into effect immediately. 

These types of laws are a nice start, but the obvious problem still remains:  most of our streets are simply not designed for multiple users.  They're designed for cars alone.

Graphic screengrabbed from this Houston Tomorrow post. 

League City could write analogous ordinances until it was blue in the face, but it wouldn't change the fact that Dickinson Road is not much wider than my outstretched arms.  Or that the IH-45 feeder is curbed with no shoulders that cyclists could hug while in traffic.  If someone in a motor vehicle tried to give a peloton a 3-foot berth on the Dickinson Road stretch shown above, I think they'd end up in the ditch. 

Image from Google Maps ground view.   

Screengrabbed from here.

Public outreach graphic from the state of Connecticut, which also has a 3-foot regulation. 

Ten people killed just within spittin' distance of Centerpointe and just between the years 2001 and 2009.  Ten vulnerable road users (cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians). 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Friend of a friend killed while in a peloton in 2003, not far from Centerpointe.