And that I expected that litter to be gone when next I rolled my wheels by that location, because de-littering litter seems to be the Wichita Falls norm, unlike my previous Texas location.
Today that prediction proved accurate. The littered location you see if you click the above link is now cleaned up, with a white swan, or swan-like bird, floating by, whilst another white bird rests on the nest of leaves washed up against the concrete wall.
And no litter visible to my eye.
And then a short distance later I saw this Sikes Lake scene.
A few days ago I came upon a flock of five goslings floating on Sikes Lake with parental supervision.
Today I came upon a flock of nine or ten goslings being land lubbers grubbing for food, whilst being gosling-sitted by a full size goose, who I assumed to be a parental unit, likely the mother.
To the right, out of the photo, what appeared to be a male goose honked aggressively non-stop whilst I took pictures. I am fairly certain that goose would have goosed me if I got too close for his comfort.
Prior to rolling my wheels to my favorite Wichita Falls goose habitat I rolled my mechanized wheels to Sikes Senter to early vote YES on all seven of the bond proposals the May 5 ballot.
After voting I rolled my mechanized wheels a few miles further north to the Wichita Falls Public Library to stock up on reading material to take with me to Arizona when I fly out of Texas tomorrow.
Oh, I must explain to those who might wonder what Sikes Senter is. It is a mall, which for non-clever reasons not fathomable to me someone thought it alliteratively clever to name the town's mall with an "S" instead of a "C".
Sikes Center would be so much better, name-wise. The mall itself is a bit outdated. Built back, I think, in the 1970s. The interior, where one early votes, looks as if it has been upgraded. The outside, not so much.
Way back in the 1970s the town I lived in before moving to Texas, Mount Vernon, Washington, built two malls of the Sikes Senter sort. The first one on the north side of College Way. The second on the south side of College Way. One called the Mount Vernon Mall, the other the Skagit Mall.
Those malls lasted a couple decades before both were demolished and replaced with more modern strip mall type business venues, whilst a way more modern mall was built in the next town north, Burlington.
Burlington was the town I grew up in. The new mall in Burlington was named Cascade Mall. Burlington was/is a small town, population around 5,000 back in the 70s, a little bigger now. Mount Vernon population was and is around 30,000.
Due to the big changes in the retail industry, brought about my things like Amazon, the Cascade Mall in Burlington is gradually closing, having lost most of its tenants.
In addition to the Cascade Mall, stores like Costco, Pacific Edge Outlet Center, Fred Meyers, Target, K-Mart and even a Krispy Kreme opened in little Burlington. The town became a sort of shopping mecca, swelling the town's population with shoppers, many of them Canadians.
But, nothing ever remains the same in dynamic fast growing, fast changing parts of America and the planet....
