Latest suburban oddity

This irritating thing:

My guess is that it's a specific error code, some kind of a subroutine built into this fixture to signal a short circuit, although I haven't tried to research it yet.  There's nothing like four inches of rain to really p*ss off the fire ants, and immediately after this started happening, I discovered that they had invaded the exterior wall right below this light.  Furthermore, we noticed that have been unable to reset a GFCI that ties into this wall (different circuit, same location).  I've never seen fire ants trash a motion light before, but with ants, there's a first time for everything. 

In case you need some background on this undesirable phenomenon, TAMU has a publication called "It's shocking what fire ants can do to electrical equipment".   Looks like my husband has his honey-do all laid out for his Sunday afternoon.  Bzzzzt. 

Five hundred toward ten thousand

Nothing rational can be done with this, my five-hundredth blog post, except explain why in the hell I wrote five hundred blog posts, many of them lengthy and complex.

I got this meme from The Summa blog, but I don't know where that blog's author got it.  That's the nature of internet memes. 

I get this question a lot, usually from another Centerpointer with an uneasy look on his or her face:  Why am I spending so much time on this?  Why am I doing all this work?  We live in a profit-driven society - my effort makes no sense in any deducible context.  I'm not getting paid.  I'm not getting promoted.  I'm not getting applauded.  I'm sure as hell not getting famous.  And half the stuff I write isn't all that interesting or compelling, unless you happen to be the frustrated newbie who is trying to figure out how to pry the attic hatch back open after the cord has snapped off, the kind of newbie I hear from daily. 

Part of this I've explained previously - I really do like helping people.  We live and die by the almighty dollar, careening madly from one consumeristic transaction to the next.  Something has to be done with a primary eye toward one's fellow man, or else one's entire life perspective ends up simply going clickety-clack in a stultifying roundabout fashion. 

But there's another reason as well.  I really, really wanted to be an investigative journalist when I grew up, but I grew up poor.  Even back in the early 1980's when I graduated from high school, it was obvious to me that choosing a "soft" career such as journalism was a risky chance that I personally could not afford to take.  For reasons I don't consciously understand, I strongly sensed the impending precipitous decline of journalism even before its technological causes were invented.  So no journalism - having nothing whatsoever to fall back on in life, I had to do the safe thing and choose the "hard" career field of science instead, the choice that was all but guaranteed to yield financial security and the greatest diversity of professional options. 

My science career has achieved exactly that, and in ways I never could have predicted.  But still there is the unfinished business of the journalism thing.  I had a university professor who beseeched and begged me to abandon science in order to become a writer instead, and when I explained my poverty rationale to him, he promptly began to cry.  "Don't worry," I comforted him.  "I can do both.  I'll find another way to get there as a writer.  I promise you." 

Blogging is part of that way.  The folks who become uneasy when they can't identify my motives aren't seeing that this is part of my proverbial ten thousand hours of development time.  That's precisely what's in it for me - pure practice.  I'm still not completely sure what "get there" will prove to be, but not knowing is part of the fun of it.  And if, along the way, I get to help the attic cord people and occasionally instigate a deer-in-the-headlights moment over at City Hall, then that's the icing on my long-awaited cake.

:-)

Yup. And stay tuned for more.

 

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:

Beacon beckons

An interesting case of community action is unfolding as a special interest group called Families for the Responsible Development of Beacon Island (FRDBI) wrangles with a developer's plans to install high-density residential assets on League City's long-undeveloped "lighthouse" island. 

How it is, and how it might be: 
Googlemaps screengrab compared with the developer's concept.  You might be able to access the plans here if the paywall doesn't kick in. 

This is the kind of thing that doesn't impact Centerpointers directly, but I like watching these cases evolve because it basically "shows us how it's done".  I don't know that we'll ever need to petition regarding any development that may be proposed for our subdivision's vacant adjacent tracts, but it's nice to have a template, and it's instructive to follow the logic of what works or doesn't work in terms of dealing with the City.

FRDBI's chief concern is with the relatively high density of proposed development.  As I commented on a report in this morning's Galveston Daily News (paywalled), my immediate concern was the potential future impacts of Biggert-Waters, aka the Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012.  Here we are moaning and wailing about how Biggert-Waters will catastrophically destroy real estate values in vulnerable areas, and yet at the same time, League City is entertaining a development proposal that, at first glance, puts a lot of real assets on or near grade in what appears to be a vulnerable area.  One of the most comprehensive local news reports (paywalled?) concerned the financial impacts of Biggert-Waters on the City of Nassau Bay.  Well, you could practically hit Nassau Bay with a rock from Beacon Island.  Would a lot of Beacon Island's improvements as proposed still be insurable four years from now after we get done with the delays and political obscurations surrounding Biggert-Waters?  The answer to that remains to be seen, but it's an important consideration for the viability of the development. 

Sooner or later, waterfront homeowners are going to have to pay the federal piper, and they're going to be paying a lot. 

Cute graphic screengrabbed from this site. 

More wings over Centerpointe

It wasn't Shuttle Endeavour this time, but it was one heck of an impressive sight nonetheless. 

What is that??  A cracked windshield, maybe?

Not a photo of busted glass.  It was a classic energy-conserving V-shaped flock of migrating birds flying at an impossibly-high altitude.  An impossibly-large number of birds.  That's just one arm of the V-formation shown in the photo above. 

Even with a long lens, I couldn't do this one justice.  They were probably between one and two thousand feet high. 

They were so far up that, if it were not for the sharp eyes of my 5-year-old neighbor, I never would have seen them.  But he knows I enjoy wildlife, and so as we were in the middle of washing my car this past Saturday evening, he pointed to the sky and shrieked, "Get your camera!"
:-)

They are probably either white-fronted geese or snow geese.  I increased the contrast in the photos above to improve visibility, so they don't look very white.  But those are two of the more common species that traverse our area in large numbers each autumn. 

"Snowbirds" in the most literal sense of it:  Both species migrate from the high Arctic to the Texas Gulf Coast.  And some snowbird people make that long journey as well. 

Map screengrabbed from this page. 

Snow goose photo from Wikipedia. 

Goose on the loose will soon be geese on the lease, as they don't have much farther to go from here before they touch down for the winter months.  I've seen amazing flocks of them foraging in the wetlands down around the Matagorda area.  Here's hoping they find good eatin' given that freshwater inflows along the coast are not optimal right now. 

Rain barrels: What's hype, and what's helpful, Part 2

Wa-ay back in August 2011, I published this post which fact-checked the issue of rain barrels for use at single family properties. 

These things.

My conclusion was obvious: that rain barrels are likely to pay for themselves if used consistently over the long term, but "save you money on your water bill", as the popular PR song and dance proclaims??  Not really. 

Screengrab from the first hype post. 

Well, it turns out that the situation is even less cost-effective than I initially forecast, at least with respect to the barrel that I bought, which was a Systern model. 

This is what happened to mine within the first year of its use. 

Let's see a close-up of that.

No bueno.  The shell cracked under the weight of the water contained within it.   

I was willing to overlook this as a one-off failure, especially given that the manufacturer replaced my barrel under warranty at no charge (I now use the original cracked one for dry mulch storage and the crack conveniently lets accumulated rainwater drain out of it).  But a year later, my replacement has also started to leak.  It didn't suffer a photogenic stress failure as the original one did.  Rather, it seems to be a maddening pin-hole this time, which I haven't been able to locate and fix. 

However, what I can locate is a perpetually soggy spot adjacent to my slab as the stupid thing slowly bleeds out after every rain.  Not only is that not useful, it's actually worse than useless because you don't want to have any areas of differential moisture around your slab.  That could lead to uneven soil settling, which could eventually lead to slab damage.

So now my warranty replacement follows its older sibling straight out the window, and not only have I not achieved anything "eco-friendly" with this effort, I've actually generated a lot of wasted plastic, wasted money, and wasted time. 

I've looked at other consumer-grade rain barrels on the market, and I don't have sufficient confidence in what I'm seeing to purchase any of them.  I bought the Systern because I did the research and concluded that it was one of the more robust models on the market.  You have to remember that a full rain barrel will weigh 8.34 lbs/gal * 55 gal = 460 lbs!!  Four hundred and sixty pounds!!  I look at some of the thin plastic brand names being sold in big box stores and other places and I don't believe they would stand up to that kind of a weight loading for very long.  If the Systern can't take the heat, I doubt that any of the others could either. 

I do believe there are non-consumer options out there that could work very well in a residential setting, but I will save that discussion for a subsequent post.  In the mean time, I suggest that you take the continuing flow of local news stories like this one with a grain of salt. 

Halloween downpour

My two rain gauges registered right around four inches, which was enough to turn Centerpointe's dry-bottom storm water retention ponds into very wet ponds.

And where there's water, there will be Great Egrets. 

And ducks.  This always amazes me... where do they come from, and on just a few hours' notice??  364 days a year, there's no standing water here, but as soon as it appears, so do they. 

The 747 jumbo jet of the local bird world.  Very photogenic but also very camera-shy. 

The same conditions that produced that remarkable deluge also gave us one of the best sunsets of the year.

Water Street (name coincidental to the day's events) in Webster.  Picasa had no processing suggestions for me on this one - it was optimized as-is. 

NASA Road 1 looking toward The Hop nightclub in Webster. 

My photographic attention was pulled in three directions simultaneously, as we celebrated candy-time with the kids.  Hope everyone had a good one.

My favorite costume of the evening.  Notice the intentional head lean to amplify the overall effect.  Given the overwhelming popularity of The Walking Dead, I expected to see more zombie-like costumes last night, but they were few and far between.  I guess that zombies are a bit intense for the Superman set.