Buc-ee's bonanza

Given that commercial news outlets such as Houston Chronicle and GCDN (paywalled) have already covered the general story of the unprecedentedly-massive Texas City Buc-ee's opening a few days ago, I thought I'd provide you with sides of the story less reported.

And that would include an expound on the curb-your-dog signs, which are unprecedented in their own right.  Perhaps League City can take a few pointers from this photo series for their proposed dog park, assuming it moves forward into development.  

Poochy peer pressure is positively punishing in this regard.

BTW, note that long line of cars to the left.  The next thing that has to happen here is that TxDOT needs to get on the ball (the small ball) and revise the IH-45 interchange, which is now frightfully under-capacitied for serving both Buc-ees and Tanger Outlet Mall.  

Fear not in the face of fierce peer pressure - the infrastructure is in place for dealing with the demands.  

Even more different types of signs, humorous but pointed.    

Obviously they're very serious about this directive.  With 701 parking spots and in view of the fact that about half of all American households include at least one dog, can you imagine what conditions would be like if they were not serious about it?!  Do the math!!

I took pics of folks taking pics of their kids with the now-famous bronze beaver.  

As for the store itself, it's a Buc-ee's monolithic classic.  Every time I walk into one of these, I can't help but think, "How the hell did you people manage to build this thing with such a long unsupported span?!" 

The store is marvelous, thematically similar to the other mega-stores such as the one in Gonzales and the one in Waller, but this one does have "more stuff" (referencing a quote from several years ago by co-owner Beaver Aplin when Chron asked him, "What are you going to put in such a large store?!").

There is need for EVEN MORE stuff, however:  I was disappointed to find that the wall-sized collection of spices and sauces did not include any Mexican blends.  There's Texan, BBQ, and Cajun in abundance, but no Mexican (other than fajita spices which, to me, fall into the BBQ category).  Beaver please take note - we have a lot of TexMex and MexMex going on around here.  We could really use a good Mexican spices vendor, especially since The Spice Lady of Kemah decided to discontinue her artisanal efforts in order to pursue a different career focus (reportedly).  

Another mild disappointment:  I was hoping that they had produced a T-shirt to commemorate the Texas City grand opening.  Perhaps they did, but sold out.  I bought my Dad a non-commemorative T-shirt because I figure he'll wear it as a conversation piece.  My Dad lives thousands of miles away in another country, but that won't matter.  Seeing the shirt, someone will, indeed, walk up to him in the street and ask him where his favorite Buc-ee's is located.

And they'll also ask him, "What's your favorite billboard slogan?"

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia.

Did Arcade Fire's art sample a house on Ramada Drive?

Back in 2010 when I first saw the album cover for Arcade Fire's critically-acclaimed album The Suburbs, my jaw hit the floor.

It took only a fraction of a second for me to realize that I'd seen that house somewhere before, but it took me about two painful weeks to zero in on its location.  It was one of those mysteries that nagged in the back of my mind until I finally figured it out.   

It's on Ramada Drive in Clear Lake, although for the privacy of the owners, I won't give the address.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps. 

It's not necessarily that the house literally looks like the album cover feature for feature, but moreso that it feels the same.  Of course, it's convenient that both are shown as painted the exact same unusual shade of "rancher red", but back when I first saw that house in the mid-1980's, I believe there might have indeed been a boat-sized sedan parked in its side yard (the house is unusual for Clear Lake in having lateral access to an integrated garage).  The art work doesn't show a garage, but it shows a sedan in an otherwise-unlikely position.  

It's a provocative suggestion that the two might be related because Clear Lake City was Houston's first master-planned suburban community, so there's a certain nexus of precedent between Clear Lake and the album.

Boat-sized sedan (or perhaps a station wagon) parked in front of a brand spanking new rancher as shown in a promotional brochure reported to have been produced in 1965.  Every once in a while this eerie thing circulates anew on the internet (e.g., this HAIF reference), but I can't find a live reference for it right now.  I believe photo credit should go to Friendswood Development Company (as it was owned in its original incarnation by Exxon), but I'm not certain.  

More purely-speculative forensics:  The Suburbs was inspired by band members Win and William Butlers' upbringing in The Woodlands, but that palm tree on the album cover does not scream "Woodlands" to me.  I've been to that mysterious, far-off place called The Woodlands and they do indeed prefer a lofty forest canopy feel there, just as the name suggests.  But in coastal Clear Lake, palm trees have historically been de rigueur, especially during the era referenced by the art.  Drive around "old Clear Lake" and you'll see classic examples of palms that seemed like a good suburban planting idea at the time (i.e., several decades ago), but which have since morphed into rather shaggy imposing behemoths quite similar to the one depicted in the art work.

We'll probably never know whether art has intentionally or just accidentally imitated life here, but one thing we do know for sure is that The Suburbs is unmatched in its artistic achievement.  This particular passage neatly sums up why.

Screengrabbed from this review by The Hipster Conservative. 

The Suburbs won Grammy Album of the Year on February 13, 2011.  I started this blog about a month before that.  My tag line references the same realizations that are explored by the album's concept.  We spend the majority of our time and most of our money on our suburban lifestyles.  Shouldn't our experiences here be just as deep as the pockets needed to fund them?  They are - but only if we are smart enough to consciously realize it instead of falling victim to shallow surface messages.   

The suburbs - not as lame and formulaic as often depicted.

Screengrabbed from the 1965 Friendswood Development Company brochure (I think).  

How to grow blueberries in greater Houston

They are not found naturally on the upper Texas coast, but they are soooo worth the small amount of effort that it takes to grow them:

They're heee-eere!!!
This year's crop of blueberries is now arriving.  And you have to remember that they taste 10x as good as store-bought.

Note to husband:  Don't bother bringing Mother's Day flowers.  I've got blueberries!!!!
:-)

And they taste good to every other creature out there also, especially mockingbirds.  Bird netting costs about ten bucks a roll and is highly necessary at the point of ripening.  

A year ago, my two bushes looked like this:

Pretty scrawny, and the pinkish one in the foreground was suffering from bad soil chemistry to the point where I didn't think it would survive.

That's Swiss chard in the center, not blueberries, obviously.  

A few weeks ago before they got tented with bird netting, they looked like this:

Much improved with an enormous amount of growth for one year, and the little guy on the right recovered well once I adjusted the soil.  

As I discussed in a previous post, our local soils are not sufficiently acidic to support blueberries, which is why I grow them in culvert scraps where I can control the chemistry.  But it does not take a lot of skill to do achieve good soil conditions and a good crop, as this next series of photos will show.

Not all cultivars are suitable for subtropical Houston.  I'm having good luck with SpringHigh, which requires very low chill requirements (blueberry plants generally have to experience a cold weather spell to set fruit).  Locally I buy these plants from Faith's Garden Shed which sells at the Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market.

The smaller cultivar in the right side culvert scrap above is a different strain, which is necessary for pollination purposes.  But I forget the name of it.  If you're buying plants, ask the vendor which are the best to put together for home gardening purposes.  Pollination is very important for blueberries, as I discussed in this post about the role of bees.

 This unrelated Houstonian blueberry fanatic lists additional cultivars that he has experimented with.  Houston is very cool.  Our metro area is so large that it contains at least one fanatic for every conceivable hobby, including blueberry growing.  

My plants don't seem to be very fussy about the soil, which I mix as comprising about 25% regular potting soil, 50% peat moss, and 25% compost.  See this web entry for additional detail (scroll down through it).    

Additionally...

I toss in a small amount of this stuff (a few ounces per a large planter), just to be on the safe side in creating acid conditions.  This is soil sulfur, available at most hardware stores in the gardening section.  

Plus I add a big fistful of Microlife fertilizer.  It looks like hamster food.  

That's about the extent of it.  Mix up the soil, plant, and water frequently (not too dry, not too wet) especially if you're using an isolated section of a raised bed or large container, because they dry out quickly in our area.  I don't even bother to test my resulting pH (hassle).  If the plants don't look like they're doing well, I just fiddle with the soil until they respond.  

This was my latest addition this year, also a SpringHigh.  He has survived the past month in a large pot of that soil I mixed in my wheelbarrow.  I plan to eventually add him to the central culvert scrap to complete the assembly.  

I have one other secret ingredient to my blueberry soil:

Spent green tea leaves.  I don't drink coffee, just different teas, and rather than composting the leaves, I dump each day's yield directly into the blueberry planters.  They seem to love it.  

And if you'll excuse me now, it's definitely time to eat.
:-)

What monarch butterflies teach us

Answer:  That each and every species is similarly characterized by a natural and unchangeable range in individual ability to thrive.

I bet you were assuming that I was going to say something along the lines of "that we should love and cherish Mother Earth and conserve her precious resources".  But that would be a shallow analysis, indeed.    

Ten days ago, I did not predict a good outcome for this particular caterpillar, who chose to attach her cocoon rather haphazardly to the side of this large planter.  It fell way short of an ideal location, exposed to both the weather and potential sources of physical damage (e.g., my running dog brushing up against the planter).  The individual in the cocoon surprised me by emerging in the visibly flawless condition shown above, but then failed to display physical vigor.  I could have easily reached out and grabbed her, as she seemed to lack a reasonable startle reaction.

This is what I've noticed most strikingly after a few years of fostering monarchs - an incredible diversity of competency when it comes to executing the basic functions of their life cycle.  They come from the same parents at the same time in the same environmental conditions with the same unlimited food source, and yet their individual outcomes are always wildly different.  Some of them do the most inexplicably boneheaded things (even though they don't have bones).  Sometimes as I am talking to them I ask, "Dude, what were you thinking?!  You can't possibly survive in your own self-selected conditions.  Why would you intentionally throw your own life away like that?!"

Of course, I have asked the same question verbatim of a number of people in my life, as human being show exactly the same diversity in competence when it comes to executing their life cycles.  It's all just a reflection of that most fundamental property of all life:  the DNA naturally produces a riot of possibilities, some of which will ultimately be selected for, and some of which will not, and there's nothing that anybody could (or should) do to change that. I suppose I just expected a narrower range in outcome possibilities in a much-less-complex organism such as a monarch butterfly.  But no.  This is how we all are, bones or no bones.  

He makes my latest butterfly look tame on the issue of self-preservation.  

Fresh Market opens May 7

This blog keeps getting search hits for this information, so here it is:

Fresh Market in Webster (1519 West Bay Area Blvd. in the Baybrook Mall area) advertises that it will open May 7, which is next Wednesday.  Chron concurs.

Cell phone pic of how it looked two days ago.  

Creature from the suburban lagoon, Part 2

Following up on my original post where I didn't yet have the varmint identified, it turns out to be a nutria, more accurately referred to as a coypu.

The white hairs around the schnoz are a dead giveaway.  He lives in the drain pipe under Cypress Pointe at West Walker Street.

Given that I found him, I feel entitled to name him.  I think I'll call him Constantinople.  Constantinople the coypu.  

So we can relax that there will be none of our trees cut down as there would be with a beaver, although there might be some burrowing to contend with, because these guys love to dig all kinds of stuff up.

But surely you didn't think I'd conclude this post without subjecting you to a bunch of other photos of lagoon-related creatures.  Yesterday might very well have been the nicest day of the entire year - well worth a 2-mile ramble around our area.  Here's a short tour of some of the other critters I encountered on the way.

A couple of quackers.  I suspect from the edged blue wing markings and their shyness that they are American black ducks.  

Mourning doves, only because they are so photogenic.  

Firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella).  I bet you always wondered about the name of this distinctive wildflower.  

Scissor-tailed flycatcher, also known as the Texas bird of paradise.  The retention ponds were this particular individual's paradise of insects.  

Checkered white butterfly.  Looks beautiful in this photo but its caterpillars would eat my broccoli.  

Red-shouldered hawk at the top of one of the high towers.  Any time you see one of these near Centerpointe's retention ponds, look around for its mate.  

His mate was easy to spot, standing on the southwest fence of Oaks of Clear Creek subdivision, hoping to pounce on and devour someone's kitty or chihuahua.  Sorry for the blurryness of the photo.  

I would think it's a loggerhead shrike, but I don't know why its belly is as yellow as that of a brown shrike.  They are ruthless hunters, and one of their favorite local meals is the not-so-humble Carolina anole.  

Woodpecker, perhaps a red-bellied (their bellies really aren't that red).  The abundant trees in the dog park property and the adjacent cattle tract support a number of woodpeckers.  

Pulled along by my dog, I missed getting pics of an equal number of additional species.  It's really quite remarkable the diversity of wildlife surrounding just those retention ponds and extending down the Interurban easement.  I've always loved that about Houston - it's a riot of life everywhere you look, in defiance of developmental burdens.

A word of warning, however.  With recent increased publicity regarding the dog park property, more folks seem to be showing up to check it out (I've seen walkers and the other day there were two young people riding a dirt bike around it).  It's a beautiful property but it has not yet been tamed.  As such, it contains hazards including poison ivy (above).  Additionally, the Centerpointe retention ponds are perfect habitat for the water moccasin, which is one of the nastiest poisonous snakes on the planet.  Enjoy our area, but keep your eyes open.  

Today is shaping up to be as beautiful as yesterday was.  You'll want to get out and take a few long walks, because the heat of summer and the mosquitoes will be upon us soon enough.  Who knows - you might even spot a shy coypu in the process.  

Why 'Murder Mansion' obsession is so persistent

Seabrook's former List Mansion property was back in the news last week, with stories about a disgruntled tenant who was allegedly unaware of the property's shocking past prior to renting a tract subdivided from it, stories that made their way all the way to publications in New York the United Kingdom (correction per reader observation).

The Houston Chronicle ran this teaser photo, but it showed photos of the present-day mansion, which is not the mansion with which local people are still firmly if not increasingly obsessed.

Photo screengrabbed from this Houston Chronicle article.  

That would be this mansion, the original as built by murdered owner Bill List.  To make a long story short, List was a wealthy business owner who was shot to death by a few of the young men he had recruited to stay with him and whom he had allegedly molested sexually.

Photo screengrabbed from this Travelers Today article.  

Here's what I find most remarkable about this bit of local history:  Thirty years after the murder that defined it, the interest in the long-demolished mansion is growing rather than fading.  About 10 years ago as I was sitting around with friends doing the typical beer-and-banter thing on a Friday evening, the subject of "the haunted house on Todville Road" came up, and we searched the internet for information regarding it.  At that time, there were a few references to the fact that it had existed, but nothing in the way of substantive content.  We had only our own memories to go on as we compared notes.  Each of us had independently been inside the thing because, back in the mid-1980's, it was a rite of passage that any consummate Clear Laker had to find a trespassive route into the massive abandoned structure for their own personal look-see.

I took this Flickr photo and attempted to photo process it to make it look more like I personally remember the mansion.  There's not enough dynamic range remaining in the faded photo for me to do it justice, but I remember the brick having stronger orange tones and contrast than the Flickr photos and most of the other historical photos show.  

By 2014, however, you can find all kinds of information regarding the place - it's remarkable how that information base has grown.  There's even a closed Facebook group called "Todville Murder Mansion" with almost 2,100 members!  And other online references to the place abound.

There's even this YouTube video which is a snippet from an obscure indie film shot (pun intended) within the mansion.  The movie does have an IMDB listing.

Image screengrabbed from the YouTube snippet.

So what does it all mean??  I'm not entirely sure, but I have a few ideas.  On its face, a wealthy eccentric builds a one-of-a-kind residential structure and gets murdered there.  This in itself is not radical by American standards - that kind of thing has happened before.  But what was radical was the structure itself.  The fact that it has been emphatically denounced as "a grotesque monument" and "a supremely depressing, tacky, hideous place" belies a deeper truth.

Tell me that there are not now a bunch of inner-loop residential lofts selling for $400,000 that bear a certain curious resemblance to this facade.

Screengrabbed from this site. 

That's right.  Bill List, as reviled as he is, was quite possibly the first person to ever attempt that residential design aesthetic which we now refer to using the phrase "industrial chic" or a similar term.  He certainly did not hit that ball out of the park, but if you delete the obvious dated and incongruent elements in his construction, there's a certain resonant familiarity to the residuum that people are just not ready to admit, but which preoccupies them subconsciously nonetheless.   When I stood in the middle of that mansion in 1986 or 1987, that was my dominant realization:  This place is way, way, WAY ahead of its time.  My fateful day of trespass, almost 30 years ago but I remember it like it was yesterday, had an enormous and lasting impact on my own residential design aesthetic.

If you doubt me on that point, here is your head-slapping "HOLY SH****TTT!!!" moment of truth.
:-)
Stacked stone landscaping photo from this post.  

What's happening when people describe the List Mansion as "grotesque" is that they are combining their visceral reaction to the murderous events that happened there with their awareness of its obvious design flaws, and they are projecting the resulting emotional amalgamation onto the mansion as a whole.  They are consciously missing its corresponding strengths in the process, but the subconscious misses nothing, and so this tantalizing fragment of cognitive dissonance twigs at them, contributing to the persistence of the thing in their awareness.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.  Thirty years after he was murdered, Bill List is still way, way, WAY ahead of his time.  But with the internet and social evolution being what they are, that may very well change.  I hope so because, criminal elements notwithstanding, he deserves more visionary credit in death than he ever received in life.