Mitigating the madness

This post is dedicated to my wonderful husband, because as soon as Korean Air 214 went down a few days ago, I said to him, "Gladwell is sitting in some Manhattan apartment with his furry head bobbing at his TV set as he's thinking to himself, 'Uh-huh. Yup.'"  And then I forced my husband to sit and listen to me read aloud part of Gladwell's corresponding essay in the same manner as I had inflicted on our daughter just two months ago. 

"Mitigating the munchies" was a post in which I scrounged up a link to a copyright-questionable PDF of Gladwell's "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes". 

My purpose with that post was to draw stark analogy between the crash-and-burn mentality that had previously characterized certain air carriers based in strongly-mitigated cultures, and our own all-American crash-and-burn mentality that characterizes our en masse over-consumption of food. 

Screengrab from "Mitigating the munchies".  We, too, could realize substantial gains if we dispensed with the distorted table manners that have strangely come to see as normal. 

Now with the crash of Asiana 214, there is renewed interest in Gladwell's original essay on the deleterious impacts of speech mitigation.  Dollars to donuts (don't eat too many), the fact that this recent crash involved a Korean airline is not an accident, and the investigators are going to find a speech mitigation component to that tragedy. 

But who'da thunk in the midst of all of this that I might have ever risen to such stratospheric search engine heights as to come in #3 on anyone's Gladwell Google??  I'm a microscopic blog star in my own unmitigated eyes.
:-)

Austin ramble: Two great eateries

It's been a rough couple of years for food around Clear Lake.  Three of my favorite restaurants reportedly closed because of owner decisions (Korean BBQ, Dimassis, and Hans Mongolian Wok) and two others were destroyed by Hurricane Ike (Portofino in Clear Lake Shores and Pappadeaux in Seabrook). 

I'm getting tired of seeing captions like this...

...and this.

Internet chat suggests this Pappadeaux was closed due to issues with location, location, location more so than hurricane, hurricane, hurricane.  In being very difficult to get to on the opposite side of the channel as the Kemah attractions, it reportedly wasn't drawing the profits that its owners expected.

I typically don't like restaurants that I believe promote obese-a-thon style eating (and that pretty much includes 90% of the restaurants out there, in my opinion), but this one made a very good grilled seafood shish kabob which I could get them to serve with grilled asparagus rather than a bunch of starchy rice.  That was literally the only thing I ever ate there, but it was worth paying for. 

That's five restaurants down the toilet, which leaves me with almost no local recourse.  Which is why, when I did a quick trip to Austin last week, I jumped at the chance to get some decent food at a few of my favorite places.

Here's the ultimate in Bad Blogging Form: showing a restaurant dish partially eaten!!  Gross!!  But my daughter and I were so happy to finally get decent restaurant food that taking photos took a distant back seat to enjoyment. 

That's the artichoke dip at Marye's Gourmet Pizza in Westlake Hills.  It is literally the best I've had in my entire life. 

I have yet to find a single decent gourmet pizza source anywhere in greater Houston, even though Houston is the eating capital of America. 

Most Houstonians, especially suburbanites, probably don't even know what a gourmet pizza is.

This should clarify the matter.  Artisanal ingredients (to the extent possible) are worth paying for because the taste is so much better. 

Screengrabbed from the Marye's Gourmet Pizza website. 

Even when I go to a "better" restaurant in the Clear Lake area, mostly what I'm eating is some combination of the following:

• Feedlot beef (recognizable by its taste)
• Factory-farmed vegetables, and/or
• Farm-raised fish that tastes like little more than antibiotic-ridden alfalfa, no matter what atrocious oil-ridden paste it's "smothered" in. 

Irrespective of the moral implications, how could anything raised in these conditions taste even remotely good?!

This is a screengrab of a "we don't do this" cattle feedlot example pic shown by Live Oak Natural Beef as a counterpoint to their own operations.   These types of smaller artisanal farms and ranches are becoming increasingly popular for obvious reasons - because they supply an alternative healthier grass-fed, non-mass-produced product that simply tastes a whole lot better.  People will gladly pay for stuff that tastes better. 

My other Austin favorite is the old standby, Kerbey Lane Café.

The original location, on Kerbey Lane. 

The situation is absurd.  One can now go to the League City HEB grocery store and buy Kerbey Lane's famous pancake mixes.  But find a decent pancake at a restaurant in League City or Clear Lake??  Forget that. 

Hell, for that matter, you can buy the stuff on Amazon. 

It's just a pancake, but it's a good one.  I'm not looking for gourmet 5-star exotic restaurants.  Just simple restaurants that offer better-tasting dishes based on higher-quality ingredients. 

Oh and by the way, the ingredients in the box are allegedly not exactly the same as the ingredients in the restaurant pancakes, because obviously they need to keep luring people back to the restaurants, so they can't give away every secret.  You have to go to Kerbey Lane Café itself to get the true original pancakes. 

In sum, I don't know why the suburbs of Houston can't support better restaurants.  With a small number of notable exceptions (e.g., Chuyos), all I've found is the usual chains and franchises and unimaginative mass-produced slop.  But if you're ever in Austin, check out those two mentioned above, especially Marye's.  You won't be sorry. 

Intermodular interfaith

Apparently the good folks at Pyrex figured that my personal collection of over one hundred of their multi-purpose kitchenware was still less than what I ought to have, and so they took it upon themselves to send me a bit more, free of charge.

A six pack, but this is a non-profit blog, and I don't accept freebies from anyone.  So I took it over to Interfaith Caring Ministries for donation.  More about them in a near-future post. 

My husband saw this package arrive unsolicited and asked me, "Can you please blog about Toyota next?!"
:-)

This nice gesture puzzled me because I couldn't figure out what prompted it.  Sure, I wrote a blog post extolling the virtues of how a healthy eating strategy could be maximized with the help of Pyrex.  But there's nothing special about a blog post like that - lots of people do that kind of thing for sport, plug products hoping that the manufacturers will bestow upon them some kind of windfall in exchange for the free advertising.  But I'm not a monetized blog, and my traffic is very low by internet standards.  Nothing about that post warranted a de facto pay-back. 

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if perhaps I actually had nailed them on their marketing intent, such that their gift was more a cerebral kudos than a commercial acknowledgment.   

In that same blog post, I compared the Pyrex system to the way freight is handled all over the world using intermodal containers. 

I have always wondered why on earth Pyrex chose the colors that they did for their lids.  Ten years ago when I started collecting, it was mostly navy blue stuff on the market.  But the neon reddish orange came out a few years ago, along with lighter orange, green, and a lighter blue shortly thereafter.

Seriously??  Whose kitchen would this stuff color-coordinate with??  Answer: nobody's!!

There isn't a single kitchen in America that stuff would color-coordinate with in the literal sense.  There's no shopper out there to whom they could possibly appeal on esthetic grounds with this product line.  But stacked up like that, it does look a hell of lot like container boxes reinterpreted for the kitchen, does it not??

Any food, any freezer, any quantity. 

Image from DNJ Intermodal Services. 

And when people see intermodal containers, they usually see a lot of intermodal containers.  So that remains my front-running theory:  Either intentionally or unwittingly, Pyrex chose its bizarre lid colors so that people would form an unconscious association between their products and intermodal containers, of which a lot are required to get any given product management job done.  Hence a lot of Pyrex needs to be purchased to get a kitchen job done. 

It's an utterly brilliant conceptual association, when you think about it. 

And *I* clearly fell for it hook, line, and sinker, didn't I??

Screengrabbed from this Pyrex page. 

Regardless of intention or accident, it's the best product I've found for my particular job.  Hopefully the staff at Interfaith Caring Ministries will find a good use for their new pieces, and I will have a post about them shortly. 

Never leave pet food outside!

If you leave uneaten pet food outside, the rat population will explode.  It's that simple. 

Learn to recognize the signs:  This is a steaming fresh rat turd on our front stoop next to the "Welcome" mat.  Welcome, indeed. 

This problem is two-fold. 

• First, people leave pet food and/or bird seed outdoors unattended, never imagining that more than birds or pets might be eating it. 
• Second, then when a plague of rodents does predictably mushroom in direct response to this overabundance of food, people fail to recognize the signs, the most obvious of which is droppings such as the one shown above.  Not recognizing the signs, they don't modify their pet food management practices. 

Learn to recognize the signs:  Here are two more turds at the same front entrance, only now you're looking at aged turds which typically become lighter in color and more dried out. 

Lately, I've actually had to sweep turds off our front and back porches, there are so many of them.  The rats are running wild during the night and their turds are visible the next morning. 

Pet food mismanagement has become a problem at one point or another in every Texas suburban neighborhood I've lived in during the past twenty-odd years.  It was not a problem in the recently-built Centerpointe Section 9 until a couple of months ago.  When this subdivision was first built, we had mice.  But mice and rats tend not to occupy the same ecological niche, and it seems that rats have now come in and displaced the original mice. 

Learn to recognize the signs:  UNESCO produced this handy comparison diagram.  Rat turds have blunt ends. 

There are many natural food sources for rats, especially during the growing season, but I'm focusing on pet food because it's so superior for them.  Rats are like any other mammalian species - they require the same three macronutrients (fats, proteins, and carbohydrates) in order to thrive.  Pet food optimizes that balance.  It frankly amazes me that I now see as much rat activity as I do, and yet I haven't seen a single bit of damage done to any of my back-yard vegetables.  But vegetables alone will disproportionately supply carbohydrates, and no self-respecting rodent would dine on tomatoes or squash or cauliflower or blueberries or anything else grown in soil when a more complete meal is readily available for them.

I've currently got about ten million of these things in our back yard, and they remain untouched. 

The rat situation is so bad here right now that we've decided to try a new approach to controlling it.

Bait stations ordered over the internet.  Lots of them. 

Historically, I've dealt with suburban pet-food-driven rat infestations by physically trapping them rather than by poisoning.  However, they are best trapped inside houses, and we are now in the wrong season (summer) for that.  And I don't want to leave snap traps or glue traps outdoors at this time of year because both children and other small animals (including Centerpointe's outdoor cats) can be seriously injured by them. 

But baits are not ideal either.  They raise the possibility of some rats dying in locations where they can then be eaten by other wild animals or pets, which then ingest the same poison and perhaps proceed to die themselves.  Or curious children might contact a carcass, which is potentially dangerous from a disease perspective. 

Despite these reservations, we deployed the bait stations anyway.  With as much rat sign as we are now seeing, if we don't somehow reduce the population quickly, they will begin moving into our neighborhood houses when the weather gets colder this autumn, as rats will do.  And at that point, we would all have a much larger problem if they remained unchecked. 

I will be going door to door in my section of Centerpointe, asking people about their pet feeding practices and showing them the turd pics above.  I encourage folks in other sections of Centerpointe to do similarly.

Number one rule of rodent control:  Deny them their food. 

Vulture culture

This black vulture I reported on earlier may have been unusually socialized, but this other one I saw today was as skittish as I would expect a suburban vulture to be.

Centerpointe Drive at West Walker Street.  The smaller birds to the right were dive-bombing him.  Songbirds routinely dive-bomb predatory raptors, but I'm not sure why they'd hassle a carrion-eating vulture.  Perhaps they can't tell the difference. 

He seemed to want to focus on something in the immediate area, which suggested that something dead might have been nearby.  But between the songbirds and my intrusive presence, he didn't hang around for very long.

I managed to get just one or two pics before he (or she) was outta there. 

It might not have been carrion that (s)he was after, though, because vultures will eat everything and anything.  I strongly suspect that someone is leaving dog food outside, somewhere on the northeast side of Centerpointe, and (s)he may have been after that instead.  I'll comment more on that in one of my next posts. 

Might they be finding dog food around here?  The internet says that they can be intentionally attracted by placing meat scraps outside, but I don't know if they would seek out anything that is meat-containing, like pet food. 

Quote screengrabbed from this site. 

Low water pressure in League City?

Is this my imagination, or has anyone else also noticed it lately?  I spent much of my July 4 holiday working on my slowly-emerging tract home masterpiece, but my masterpiece isn't the only thing that's slow to emerge these days.

The water seems a bit lethargic as well.  A hose with good pressure ought to be able to launch water a couple of feet, not a couple of inches as seen here.  This is one of my Sears rubber garden hoses, standard size, going full blast around 6:30 a.m. on July 4, 2013.  I checked the hose for kinks, checked the tap for problems, and found none. 

You'd have a hard time convincing me that there was excessive demand (resulting in lower pressure) on the municipal system at that hour of the morning on a national holiday, when everyone in their right mind was seizing the opportunity to sleep in.  Sure, automatic sprinklers tend to be active overnight and in the early morning, but few people were up showering and doing dishes and laundry at that time.  This pic's a bit dark because the sun wasn't even fully riz yet. 

I've also noticed lower-than-ideal conditions inside my house at times lately.  It's subtle but it does seem like there's less pressure than there rightfully ought to be.  I don't know why this is, and I don't know whether it's a localized versus a more widespread issue.

Could it have something to do with the new capacity under construction on Highway 3?  I haven't heard much about this project in the news, but it looks like they might be getting close to finishing the improvements.   

That's the same water distribution plant that made headlines in 2009 for being the asset that League City purchased and then apparently forgot they owned.  Excerpt from that Chron article in case the URL goes dead in the future:

Although water rationing has dramatically cut water usage in League City — over the weekend water usage was down 53 percent to 72 percent at various times — city officials say low water pressure is likely to remain a problem until the pump station is fixed or the hot, dry weather lets up.

Well, presumably they did fix it in an interim sense prior to commencing the capacity expansion you see above. 

On July 2, League City did enact Stage 1 (voluntary usage reductions) of their Drought Contingency Plan.  And yes indeed, if you look at city-wide usage, you can see it climbing as we continue to proceed through summer without appreciable rain:

The middle column is gallons pumped.  The far right column is percent of total capacity. 

Screengrabbed from this page. 

Unfortunately there's a few days lag time on the usage posting, so I can't see July 4 numbers yet.  Maybe I'll turn this into a mini science project and jot down the dates and times when my kitchen sink or garden hose annoys me (because the lower pressure makes me stand outside in blistering heat for longer than I would otherwise) so that I can later compare to the municipal throughput. 

Best place to see fireworks in Clear Lake

City of Webster, without question (July 4th festivities description here). 

Try getting that kind of remarkably close view anywhere else around here.  From the 2007 show. 



It's a small city without a lotta people and with a lotta tax money to spend on really cool fireworks (speaking of tax money, did you see that new fire station they are about to finish on SH 3 south of NASA 1?? Wow!!  It looks like Frank Lloyd Wright himself had a hand in it!)

And Webster is conveniently right up the road from those of us who live in Centerpointe.  However, it's also a fairly accessible location if you live in any of the surrounding areas (the Clear Lake annexed areas within City of Houston, all of League City, east Friendswood, maybe even Seabrook and Kemah if you can successfully navigate up NASA Road 1). 

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.

A Clear Lake Lifer once described Webster's annual fireworks display to me as being the proverbial best-kept secret in Clear Lake.  In past years, we have viewed it from two locations: 

(1) From the Bed Bath and Beyond parking lot, which is west of the municipal park that they commandeer for the event.  This location has a particular advantage in being easy-in, easy-out from the freeway.  The police will block Blossom Street (now on some maps as Plumley Drive) to prevent people from getting too close to the pyrotechnics.  This view from a few years ago is looking roughly north on Blossom from the barricades. 

(2) From the sidewalk along Texas Avenue northwest of the Clear Lake Regional medical center complex.  This is even closer, although Texas Avenue isn't that wide and so you have to deal with cars going back and forth and people rubbernecking through the whole show as you're sitting or laying on the grass (bring a blanket).  The traffic is still not that bad getting in and out of that area, though. 

Happy Fourth!!