Front yard onions, Part 2: Installation

When people who are not familiar with our cul-de-sac walk by and see this...

...they often produce facial expressions that look a lot like these...

I sit in my front office and see their looks of surprise and delight as they stroll by and I always have a camera at the ready, but it wouldn't be polite for me to publish their actual faces, so I hope you don't mind these substitutes above.  You get the general idea from them. 

Anyway, people continue to enjoy the stacked stone, even though we're not nearly finished building the whole front yard out.  Hopefully folks will get an opportunity to enjoy the next part of the grow ops, because we installed our winter onions this past weekend.

And we're trying a new thing with these - using a hose-end drip line to irrigate them.  Either we'll screw it up and they'll get root rot, or they'll grow really nicely, I don't know which.  I didn't want to consider any kind of permanent irrigation until I had a chance to learn whether the temporary knock-off would work for this kind of application. 

I think they'll look very fine once they start filling out the bed.  It ought to be very Zen, a bunch of stick straight bright green plants on a grid in the middle of winter when everything is usually brown and decrepit. 

The lines have tiny holes that let water drip out according to a battery-operated timer's schedule.  Very efficient. 

Of course, I can't close this post without mentioning Hermine and Tom, a husband and wife team who sued the village of Miami Shores two days ago after being forced by same to tear out their front yard vegetable garden.

"Oh look, honey!!  Two older Americans on TV who are not dying of obesity-related comorbidities!!  My God, could that have something to do with the fact that they keep physically active in their yard and eat the healthy stuff that they grow??"

Screengrab courtesy Miami Herald. 

Apparently Miami Shores didn't get the memo about how strong-arming homesteaders to stop homesteading is the Kiss of Death in the court of public opinion, and maybe even in the court of law.  This is yet another in a long line of local skirmishes that have led to national news coverage and widespread backlash.  The most any code-enforcer is ever going to accomplish in these cases is to compel some kind of minimum aesthetic standard.  That'll certainly stop short of pricey Oklahoma chopped sandstone, but it might exceed bare black weed cloth. 

Anyway, my thanks to the two neighborhood children who helped me harvest the sweet potatoes and the six children who helped me install these one hundred onions in their place.  Hopefully our hose-end experiment will succeed and we'll be able to grow enough for all. 

Thiess versus the people of Galveston County

For the benefit of the many of you who are not paying subscribers of Galveston County Daily News, I'm linking a YouTube of League City Councilwoman Thiess's recording of the recent fist fight between Councilmen Becker and Okeeffe at the end of this post. 

Screengrab from KTRK's original reporting on the incident. 

Let me first summarize the facts of this incident as they have evolved since the original story broke.  Thiess's audio recording of the fight was initially not released to the public because it was considered evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation.  After the charges against both Councilmen were dropped last week, that restriction expired and the recording was obtained and published by GCDN (paywalled). 

What has happened since then is interesting in a number of respects.  Having been thusly liberated from the court of law, the issue is now firmly within the court of public opinion, and public opinion seems to have shifted away from the two duke-it-out Councilmen and re-focused on the motivations of Thiess in having made the audio recording in the first place. 

The reason for this is easy to understand.  On the recording, you can hear a pretty simple altercation between two grown men.  While everyone acknowledges that their behavior was childish, their exchange sounds very authentic and very mutual.  Neither of them appears to have disproportionately violated the other.  You get the feeling that there was nothing going on between Becker and Okeeffe that wasn't immediately apparent - all cards were on the table. 

My own confidence in both men actually rose following their fist fight because I know from my fifty-odd years of general life experience and empirical wisdom that sneaky people don't generally act like either of those gentlemen did, and therefore they are probably not sneaky at heart.  Sneaky people are much more controlled, more conniving, more capable of manipulating adverse circumstances to make themselves look good even as they are doing bad.  Given that politics is a magnet for sneaky, self-serving people, if we as Leaguers can look at a couple of our City Councilmen and conclude that the worst we're dealing with is two pathologically candid if occasionally childish elected individuals, then maybe we ought to consider that a gift from God, because we could have done much worse.

Thiess, on the other hand, has drawn attention for what some folks are concluding was a fundamentally sneaky act:  conspiring to record both elected and administrative officials without their knowledge or permission.  While that may have been legal (this paywalled GCDN editorial concludes that it probably was), by any objective evaluation, Thiess wasn't being honest in what she was doing.  At least what Becker and Okeeffe did was honest. 

I was actually surprised by the tenacity of some of the comment responses to this on GCDN.  My own feelings toward Thiess's actions are rather neutral at this point.  Certainly there are significant unanswered questions as to her reasons for making the recording, but I don't see any a priori reason to believe that she had a specific dastardly motive. 

Of course, that opinion is coming from a blogger with a track record of not only taping the actions of others without their knowledge, but actually publishing the resulting content online (e.g., my "dash cam" series in which I filmed the good people of League City engaging in motor vehicle violations).  I tend to assume that, in this day and age, each of us better expect that we are constantly being recorded and/or monitored in some fashion.  And with technology being what it is, this is only going to get worse.  I generally don't feel like I have anything to hide, so if someone wants to record me, whatever.  This is not high on my list of personal priorities regarding what to get upset about.   

But in the city that vehemently voted out red light cameras for the unreasonable intrusion that they were perceived to represent, my view on privacy is not a majority view (I represented the one out of every four voters who preferred to keep the danged red light cameras).  People around here have very strong ideas about what they should reasonably expect in terms of privacy, and being secretly recorded is not something that they're prepared to accept, either formally or informally. 

It'll be interesting to see whether Thiess proceeds to offer any public statement in her own defense.  Meanwhile, here's her recording of the now-famous fight (NSFW - explicit language, which is also very candid, and I have to give you a URL rather than an embed because this video is so new that YouTube doesn't have it indexed yet):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrfQz1HeKE

Front yard onions, Part 1: The prep

One of the neighborhood children came up to me yesterday and announced that I needed to plant more stuff.  He and the other kids were running out of things to work on in my existing inventory, and given that none of them had fruit trees or vegetable gardens in their own yards, his view was that I really ought to expand mine. 

He got part of his wish today as we prepared our front stacked stone bed for the winter crop of onions.  This is what it looked like prior to our harvest of sweet potatoes, which are roughly clustered in the center of the bed, flanked by ornamentals. 

Remember the things I said in the May 2013 post titled "Front yard vegetable garden".  If you are going to raise food in your front yard, you need to follow some rules of aesthetics.  You can get away with most anything in your own back yard, but a front yard garden needs to look presentable at all times.  Ornamental flowers really help with that.  It's mid-November and I still have flowers blooming. 

Little hands make light work (and blurry photos).  Nothing sounds as heartwarming as the surprised shriek of a child who hauls his first big honkin' sweet potato out of the earth. 

This is what we pulled out of the front yard so far (I'll probably find more when I compost and till the soil in preparation for the onions).  It'll be enough to share with my young harvesters and their friends and families in time for Thanksgiving.   

Having cleared the sweet potatoes and their vines, I then neem'd the bed to put the run on any ants prior to our pending onion installation.

Here's what the baby onion transplants look like as I purchased them from Faith's Garden Shed - Texas 1015 and red creole respectively.  Little onions grow into big onions.  I don't think the kids quite get that yet. 

Stay tuned for the installation part.  We're planning to incorporate a new experiment with that this year. 


UPS yours

Our security cameras revealed the reason why our dog flipped out at 10:10 p.m. last night, scaring the bejesus out of us after we had all gone to bed:

Yes, that is actually the UPS man, at that hour.  And our dog would like to disembowel the UPS man.  She does not take kindly to unfamiliar people who stride aggressively to our door.  Such people break all the rules of canine decorum. 

You might see a delivery truck such as this after 10 p.m. and assume that it's a fake, some kind of a cover for a criminal operation.  They're really not supposed to be delivering past about 8:00 p.m., but for whatever reason, the local distribution node has been having issues that cause them to run way, way behind schedule on some days.  A month or so ago, I encountered this while waiting for a signature package.  The website said it was "out for delivery" on the truck, but the truck never came.  Around 8:40 p.m., I called and asked what the deal was.  They told me that it might get there by 10:30 p.m.  I guess they expect us to clamber out of bed in our pajamas to sign for packages.

Anyway, keep this in mind as the holiday season approaches, because the problem might very well get worse.  If your bell rings in the dead of night, it's not necessarily a prelude to a home invasion, so please don't shoot the bell-ringer on general principle.  My dog would be so disappointed.  She is really hoping for first dibs. 

:-)

Substitute "UPS man" for "mailman".  My favorite barking meme.  I would credit the maker if I knew who it was.

How to keep rats out of your garage

Answer:  I haven't found a solution to this problem, but read on so that you can understand this issue fully. 

My husband has been hard at work with the bait battles, obviously.  This was the juvenile who greeted me when I stepped into our garage this morning.  She could not have been dead for very long, but our battle won't end with her.  She probably has 29 brothers and sisters waiting in the wings. 

If you read up on the subject of rats and garages, probably what you'll find is a lot of useless information that tells you to ensure that the rubber seal on the bottom of the door is intact and tight against the ground.  But the problem is rarely with the bottom of the garage door.  The problem is with the corners.

The unfortunate light of day:
The door seal is just fine - but by design, it stops about an inch short of the side of the frame.  That creates this gap below the guide wheel that holds the door in the track. 

This opening is HUGE to any rodent.  You might as well send them gold-embossed invitations to come live with you. 

Several months back, I scoured the internet searching for some kind of product or retrofit that would seal these very obvious points of entry.  I came up empty-handed, so it seems that I'm going to have to invent something to do the job.  It's a tricky proposition because obviously the door is a moving part that can't be interfered with, and there's no fixed infrastructure in a convenient location for attaching any kind of a guard, because the wheel and its bracket are obstructing the area of concern.  We have two garage doors so this means four corners, and I have a feeling that I'm going to have to custom-cut and bolt four individual barriers. 

Sounds like a fabulous way to spend a Saturday, doesn't it?  I'll post on the outcome of that job when I get it done.  Given the strong cold front we just had here in Houston, the one that motivated rodents to seek even more indoor shelter than they usually would, my date with door destiny might come sooner than later. 

Challenging chelonian

There's a story behind this one and I really wish I had the time to track it down (oh, to be a real journalist), because it has a high probability of being absolutely hilarious.

Can you imagine cruising down Centerpointe Drive and seeing the likes of this hoofing through the grass beside you? 

Image courtesy Centerpointe POA, which probably got it from somebody else. 

Did anybody not look at the POA's email blast and yell, "HOLY SH*T"?  This thing is bigger than Dallas! You could saddle it up and ride it home!  "Take me to your leader - yah, giddy-up!!!"
:-)

Anyway, it's just another day in paradise, obviously.  Here's hoping that the traveling terrapin is reunited with its humans. 

Centerpointe's Sunday solicitors

Who are these people, and why did they see fit to enter my private property uninvited before noon on a Sunday morning??

Smile - you're on Candid Camera of sorts.  There is no expectation of privacy for anyone standing in my front yard. 

Perhaps I have a dystopian bent, but every time I hear unexpected adult voices outside my door, my first instinct is always to reach for my camera and stalk the windows behind the blinds.   If I end up dead one day from a home invasion, there'll be a photo of it somewhere. 

It turns out that these folks weren't the usual suspects selling soap or magazine subscriptions - their pamphlet trail indicated that they are Jehovah's Witnesses.  We have a "no soliciting" rule here in the subdivision, but is it enforceable, and if so, by whom and under what circumstances?  I've also never understood why these folks keep soliciting in the first place.  There are 314 million people in America and according to these folks, entry into Heaven will be limited to just 144,000 of the most worthy, which equates to about 0.05% of our total population (ignoring the balance of the rest of the planet).  Do they not think that they've recruited enough by this time?  Who does their math, anyway? 

It seems that I will go through the rest of my Sunday no further enlightened regarding these perplexing questions than I was on Saturday night, because I sure wasn't interested in answering my door this morning.