The Public Safety Building sidewalk issue

Remember in this post I had published a screengrab similar to this one:

Screengrabbed from this PDF as published by League City and dated September 17, 2012.

Yesterday I sent that grab to a collection of LC elected and administrative personnel along with this picture-tells-a-thousand-words:

West Walker just past the Interurban easement.

That sidewalk you see in the photo above is ours, meaning, it belongs to the public but we Centerpointe residents were the people who collectively paid for it because its price tag was rolled into the costs of buying a home in this neighborhood. 

I confirmed this via emails with our developer yesterday.  That approx. one mile of sidewalk stretching from this terminus all the way to State Highway 96 was a required component of the subdivision development plan approved by League City ("PUD plan" or "PID plan" or whichever the heck acronym applies).  Some of it doesn't even run in front of our subdivision but let me not even go there. 

So if I'm understanding our developer's description of this situation, what falls out of it is the following observation:

The continuation of this sidewalk to points east as these additional properties are developed... this is not just a matter of principle or aesthetics or me personally advocating healthier lifestyles that include places for people to safely walk, jog, or bike-ride, or my desire to see fewer local children run over by cars and killed in part because sidewalks are not available to them and they were forced to either wait for the bus or ride their scooter on the open road instead of on an available sidewalk. 

This is actually a larger issue - there's a property value ramification for us.  If League City does not extend that sidewalk across this new development, it devalues this substantial investment that we Centerpointers were forced to make through our installation of what I'd nicknamed the "Bridge to Nowhere":  a wonderfully broad, very expensive one-mile sidewalk that presently is of limited value because it doesn't connect to anything else.  And would remain of limited value if left perpetually in that condition. 

We paid for it.
We better make sure that we advocate for it.

From a value perspective, that connectivity may not be critically important at this very instant in time, but I strongly suspect that we as a society will continue to move in a direction where pedestrian accessibility becomes increasingly valued (but I won't get off on a tangent explaining why I think that).  Shortsightedness on issues of mobility today will be penalized in the form of lower property values tomorrow. 

For these reasons, this sidewalk connectivity issue is not something that I'm simply griping about.  It's an issue that I'm prepared to pursue with additional actions if necessary, but hopefully I won't have to, because I received an email from League City Communications Coordinator Kristi Wyatt which stated the following:

"City code requires sidewalks in front of the public safety building. Although this is not listed on the project webpage at this time, sidewalks will be included as a part of this project. This project is contracted as a construction manager at risk project, due to this delivery method elements of the project are bid at different times, sidewalks have not yet been through the bid process but will be included in the project."

Hopefully this will prove to be the case and the issue is thereby resolved.  I suppose at this point I could question what on earth prompted the site design engineer to be so detailed as to specify individual trees planted exactly thirty feet zero inches apart along West Walker in his September 2012 drawing, but simultaneously declined to include a major design element such as a sidewalk.  Let me not even go there right now, because the important thing is to see the issue resolved productively, not to find fault with any interim representations. 

So for the moment we will take LC's statement on faith.  But at the same time, I'll be keeping a sharp eye on the progression of that new development.

Careful with Sample Ballots

So, early voting began yesterday...

From the www.Vote411.org website.

...but when I Googled for our sample ballot, I got this site...

http://www.galvestonvotes.org/NOV_3_2009/ballot_view.htm

Note the date embedded in this URL but not stated explicitly on the page itself: 2009.  They should have hauled down that old page because it's confusing to people (I just got a message from one such person who began reading the old ballot without realizing it was from 2009, which is why I know about this).  Should have hauled down this old page but, you know, the Galveston County Clerk's office has had a number of issues on their collective minds lately, so perhaps they just didn't get around to it. 

Don't use Google to go after this info.  Instead, to get to the new sample ballot pages, you have to go to the Galveston County Clerk's current homepage and drill down through the menu until you get to a page that looks like this (or just click this link given here):

http://www.galvestonvotes.org/2012NOV_GenElection/index.html

And then follow the links for your Precinct (which in the case of Centerpointe, I suspect that the entire subdivision is Precinct 454, which will take you to this sample ballot).

I'll have more on the guts of that ballot later, if time permits.

So you think you can't garden...

...but I'm here to convince you otherwise.
:-)

Over the past year or two, I have presented some really cool pics of vegetables and herbs growing in some unconventional and/or high-dollar apparatus, such as from this post:

Has anyone, in the history of humanity, ever used the terms "okra" and "iconic" in the same sentence?  If ever there was an iconic picture of okra, this is it.
:-)

However, there's really no great magic to a lot of this.  Yes, if you want to raise good eats, for the most part you have to fulfill some prerequisites, particularly some basic soil conditions (with or without it being in stock tanks) and consistent watering.  But sometimes, these things decide to raise themselves:

Do you ever gaze with curiosity upon your non-English-speaking lawn crew and wonder about the full repository of useful information that actually resides within their heads, and ponder how it got there??  The immigrants who have enough gumption to make it to America... a great number of them are shrewd and educated to a level way, way beyond their current (temporary) life stations as day laborers (with or without documentation). 

As evidence in support of this assertion, I present Exhibit A above: the only weed in my entire yard that the crew silently refused to whack down without me having to ask them to spare it.  And why the refusal?  Because the crew recognized that this weed is special:  it's a "volunteer" in the gardening definition of the word - an herb that grew from an accidentally-scattered seed.  In fact, it's one of the finest sweet basil plants I've ever grown (look at that perfect form and vibrant color!), except that I had nothing directly to do with its growth.  In this case, it did that all on its own with no planting, watering, or fertilization being done by me.

The lawn crew got it right.  This particular foundation weed was not fit for whacking.  But basil is not really used in Mexican cooking, so how did they know that??  This might forever remain a mystery.

My point with all of this is the following: 

Some great-tasting gourmet stuff is really, really easy to grow - in this example, it literally raised itself.  Basil is actually one of those easy things, but you'd never know it from looking at what's for sale in the grocery store:

This is what you're going to see if you go into any of our "better" grocery stores: hydroponically-raised or greenhouse-raised fresh basil, at three to four dollars per each little package.  Ouch - that's expensive. 

But here's the real kicker: All that cash, and yet this stuff won't taste anywhere near as good as a wild-grown foundation weed.  Mass production never yields artisan-quality food products. 

My family practically LIVES on fresh basil.  I have it growing in many nooks and crannies in the yard, which explains why the seeds escape from me like this and take root on their own. 

And here's what became of that particular lawn-crew-spared basil volunteer a few minutes after I snapped that pic above:

MMMMMM!
:-)

This is a slightly-modified Whole Foods recipe which we find to be utterly divine:

Here is the URL for this recipe.
Photo screengrabbed from the Whole Foods website. 
Regarding the sausage, I recommend one of the brands that Whole Foods sells (jalapeno variety), or, if you can't get all the way to Whole Foods and have to shop locally, look for Poffenberger's sausages, which are sold in our local HEB (but they are not always available because customers often buy out the store's entire stock).

You'll notice that I have a lot more basil in my photo than Whole Foods has in theirs.  That's 'cause we LUV it so much.  If I had to pay grocery store prices for the quantity of basil that I used in the dish, it would have been twelve to sixteen bucks, just for the basil.  THAT is just bat-sh*t crazy.  Why not grow it as foundation weeds instead??
:-)

There's only one caveat regarding basil:  It's a warm-weather plant that ceases to grow once night-time temperatures fall below 50 degrees F.  Every year, we go into withdrawal as our basil supply dries up for a few months.  Every year, I tell myself that I'm going to try to convince the police to sell me just one light from any given marijuana bust:

Remember this Chron screengrab from this post?  Do you think they'd sell me one of those things stacked on this front lawn??  Could I convince them that I need (need!!) to grow sweet basil rather than maryjane??

Alas, I do not yet have a good indoor growing alternative yet.  But I will get there.  Meanwhile, we're happy eating our weed of another species. 
:-)

Lost and found

If the partial number 2287 means anything to you, it might be in your interest to contact me via centerpointe.blog on gmail and explain why. 

I found an item the other day while walking the dog, and I contacted the POA to see if anyone had reported a loss of any kind, but the only lead to come out of that had to do with a lost piece of jewelry, which this ain't. 

It got me to thinking that there must be a better way of linking up losers (for lack of better term) and finders.  We typically do this in Centerpointe via the neighborhood newsletter coordinator, who might be kind enough to send out an email blast making an inquiry if someone requests it. 

But that's really not the best way to do it.  Some people experience an uncontrollable conspiracy of circumstances that result in their losing an item, and that's understandable, but others are just plain sloppy or lazy. The sloppy folks don't necessarily need to be enabled via an email that intrudes upon four hundred families.  Especially when their "lost" items are dogs (which are the most common trigger of such e-mail blasts), dogs that they didn't bother to put collars and tags on in the first place. 

Anyway, I went looking on the internet for alternatives, and found this site as the top Google search result:

URL here.

It looks like a good idea, but upon searching in it, I don't see much evidence that folks in our zip code are really using it much.  There aren't that many listed items across Houston as a whole, and most of those that are listed are, well, dogs. 

So I don't know what the answer is here, but there's the question, FWIW.

The Sky is Blue, Part 2: Painting the kitchen skylight

(Last updated August 11, 2013)  Back in May of this year, I published this post describing the process I went through to zero in on the best color for our outdoor patio ceiling. 

At that time, I hinted that there would be a "Part 2" to this ceiling-painting endeavor (and that's an endeavor without a "u", instead of with a "u").  Part 2, "where the men get separated from the boys".

I will admit straight up that this skylight painting project was not my creative idea.  I've also mentioned in the past that I'm an absolute HGTV junkie...

This is an actual photograph of our TV itself, obviously from the HGTV show Kitchen Cousins, which is a kitchen make-over series.  How wonderful for us that DirecTV can be paused like this, because that's how I scrapbook many of the design ideas that interest me: I sit there with a camera and take pictures of the television set.  My teenager says that I'm far too eccentric.  I'm old enough not to care.

I was immediately drawn to the impact of the skylight in the photo above.  It just glows.  This is the effect that I wanted to duplicate in our home.  Our issue came down to the following:  we chose an unusual but popular Meritage plan that has the kitchen in the absolute center of the house, instead of on one of the exterior walls, which is the case with most house designs (including the one shown above, which is unusual in having a kitchen sink window AND a skylight).  Because our kitchen has no windows, we ordered a big wide skylight option much like this one.  And our skylight turned out OK, but it didn't have much visual impact in its original "builder-basic" form.

It's fairly unremarkable, isn't it??  Gives some feeling of weightiness being lifted off the head, but really no WOW-factor here.

So this was my challenge:  duplicate the impact of the HGTV example above in our space, which was quite, quite different in terms of color scheme and geometry. 

Men from the boys.  There was not a single fifty-dollar home improvement project I've ever done that was anywhere near to being as challenging as this one proved to be.  Converging on exactly the right shade of blue came down to an almost scientific process that went something like this series of steps below.

Have you ever noticed that just the right shade of aqua/turquoise can have tremendous WOW-factor?  Such as this art glass piece in a fancy hotel as photographed by Lloyd Edwards (image screengrabbed from this site).

That visual impact occurs most impressively when the shade of aqua is on the opposite side of the color wheel from the orangey wood tones that are together with it in the same room.

Here's an image of a color wheel screengrabbed from this HGTV site.  Do you see how the blues are opposite the oranges?  That is extremely important for the analysis below.

In order to go via process of elimination to constrain the right shade of blue for our kitchen skylight, we first had to find the formula for the color that was essentially the opposite of our kitchen cabinets, which are a spice-colored maple, and which supply a lot of the kitchen's color due to their sheer number.

This is how our cabinetry appears when photographed without using the camera flash.  This is fairly true-to-life.

According to a color-wheel calculation software that my husband located on the internet, this is the color-wheel-opposite to the cabinet photo above.

Just to bracket the range of possibilities, this is what the same cabinet looks like when photographed with the camera flash on. This is much more yellowish than how it appears in real life.

And this is the blue shade that was calculated as being opposite the camera flash option.

So those two shades gave me a rough idea of what the final product was supposed to look like. 

August 11, 2013:  There's now a cool app that can help with that sort of determination. 

Go to this site and play around with it if you're trying to constrain colors. 

Screengrabbed from Color Scheme Designer.

The rest, unfortunately, became a difficult task of largely trial and error.  Remember, there are multiple independent variables involved with a color choice - hue, saturation, lightness, intensity, value... this stuff is tough if you're not an expert at it, which I certainly am not...

...and of course, daylight conditions varied substantially as seen down the skylight, even as I was trying to choose the paint.  Meritage painted it a flat off-white color, and so it was also fairly dark to start with because of the low reflectivity of the light-absorbing paint.  Here you can see some of my initial paint tester shades added at photo left, but it's really too dark to tell much of anything here.

Here is a clearer view so you can see some of the tester trials.  I could immediately see that all of these were too dark (saturated), although the samples to the left were starting to get toward the proper hue.  And the greener tones were just not right.

Aaaaand even more samples.  Finding the right color literally took me the better part of a week's worth of free time.  I went through between ten and twenty different tester shades and had to make multiple trips to Lowe's hardware store because each time I thought I had finally zero'd in on it, I'd get the paint home and find out it was wrong for the space. 

You can also see in this pic that I'm switching to a satin paint from Meritage's original flat paint.  This was to increase the reflectivity and the resulting brightness of the skylight. 

All this fussing around did finally pay off as we hit the proverbial jackpot in a Valspar shade called "Sweetleaf".

I almost did not buy an 8-ounce tester of "Sweetleaf" because it looked far too green to me in the store and on the chip card... isn't a "leaf" supposed to be green rather than blue??  And I thought I was looking for a blue.  Here it is above as screengrabbed from this site. 

And here it is as screengrabbed from the Lowe's site.  But paint shades as seen on a fan deck don't necessarily bear any resemblance to what they look like once they are up on the wall.

And here is what that very same shade looks like up in our skylight.  Hard to comprehend, eh??  Nobody was more surprised than WE were!!


You are probably sitting there thinking,
"She is just plain wrong.  She mixed up her colors."

But I have the half-empty paint can sitting beside me as I type this post.
:-)

The best I can tell you is this: 

Painting a skylight is not like painting any other surface of your home - especially if your skylight is a massive shaft ten feet in length up through the very center of the house, as ours is.  If you remember your high school science, what this means is that the light coming down that shaft is largely polarized, which can drastically affect how colors manifest.  We noticed right away that the paint as applied seemed to immediately resonate and self-amplify, particularly because it was a semi-shiny satin - it reflected light back upon itself to intensify its own blue tones.  I've never seen this happen to this degree in any painting project before (but I've never painted the inside of a shaft before).

Just in case your mind is not totally blown at this point, THAT is the very same paint in the roller tray immediately prior to me applying it to the sides of the skylight.  To our naked eyes, the paint itself appeared almost pure white.  The tiniest hint of green can be seen in this open paint can beside the tray.  A hint of minty green similar to the Valspar paint samples shown in the screengrabs above.

But hey, despite this counterintuitive solution to our color predicament, the results have been simply awesome.

The shade of blue created is constantly changing depending on the angle of the sun, the amount of cloud cover in the sky, and the time of year!

We never get tired of being surprised by whichever color is going to appear next.  It's more fun than watching TV!  It literally ranges from aqua to baby blue to navy blue to various shades of off-white and gray.

In the evening as the sun lowers in the sky, there is a mysterious subtle glow that reminds me of Cherenkov radiation.

Look again at the initial pre-painting view of this same skylight:

Blah.

There's simply no comparison.  I've never done any other home improvement project that resulted in  this magnitude of visual impact.  Our whole kitchen now comes alive in a vibrant new way. 

Anyway, in summary, should you be one of those intrepid souls who is intent on finding just the right color for your skylight, my advice is this:  just keep trying and trying until you find the shade that suits your particular room configuration and lighting conditions.  Done correctly, the final result is more than worth all the effort and energy that it might take to get there. 
:-)


Why the facelift?

By "facelift", I mean the replacement of Centerpointe Communicator's original frontispiece with this one:

Centerpointe's iconic pine tree with a hint of tract home treasury in silhouette.

When I started this thing, I made a mental note to myself that I would mark the occasion of each additional block of ten thousand new blog hits with a bit of e-renovation.  The twenty-thousandth hit actually happened a couple of weeks ago but I just got around to the update yesterday. 

Now, of course, by internet standards, 20,000 viewers is not very much.  But I've intentionally tried to keep the number suppressed because it's my intention to remain noncommercial and because I would hope not to attract the attention of Blogger, which might try to layer in a commercial element if my numbers suggested that traffic is high enough to support their advertising.

I don't intend to sell ads, but because I'm using a free platform, I don't necessarily have control over what end users see on their screens.  Cartoon from this site.

You may wonder how on earth a blog originating in a neighborhood of just 405 single family homes could possibly generate even that much traffic...?! 

The answer is that blogs are inherently non-local phenomena.  I publish information that is intended to be of use to people here in our area, but the same information is also being sought by other Americans in other subdivisions all across the country.  Rodents, fence stain, paint colors, snakes, landscaping challenges - these are issues that all homeowners face, and they are smart enough to glean the answers to their questions from their peers - not from commercial entities whose primary goal is to sell them some products and whose perspectives are warped accordingly.  People want ideas and evaluations, not sales pitches. 

And from the statistical code that is invisibly embedded in this blog, I can see that those people are, indeed, doing just that.  Knock wood, I've got no bot traffic at this point - I'm seeing just the surfings of ordinary Americans looking for answers to common predicaments.  And that's good, because those are the people I intended to serve when I started this thing.  Serve, as in, provide useful information without expectation of any form of reciprocation.  Not make money at their expense.

So here's to the next ten thousand ordinary Americans, whoever they may prove to be.  Bottoms up, under-the-commercial-radar style.
:-)

Barrier street marker down

I uttered a few expletives yesterday upon seeing this:

Centerpointe Drive at West Walker.

It's supposed to look like this: the large red and white striped barrier marker to remind drivers that Centerpointe Drive terminates here.

It could be that this came down on accident, but it's curious that it fell toward the street.  If a car had bumped it, one would think that it would have tipped over backwards.  It's also possible that Earthworks (the Centerpointe landscape maintenance contractor) knocked it over as they were mowing the retention ponds the other day. 

Or it could be that it was intentionally knocked down in preparation for more development because contractors will need to access the adjacent tract of land through this dead-end street segment.  I haven't seen any "sold" signs on this West Walker tract, but that tract is not listed in HAR's Commgate to start with, so who knows?  All I know is that development is starting to happen so fast around here that I can't keep up with it.