November 1 Swimming in North Texas

Don't forget to set your clocks back an hour tonight. I hate hearing that reminder over and over again. And what tragedy would occur if, God forbid, you forgot?

Today is the 1st of November, a couple days til the election, a few more weeks til Thanksgiving, then a few more weeks til Christmas, then one week til the New Year.

Unless it is freezing I intend to go swimming New Year's Day morning. I've pretty much figured out if the average temperature for any given day is in the 50 to 60 degree range, the water is okay to get in. As in this morning. at midnight it was 65, by morning it was 60. This made the pool the most pleasant temperature it's been in a week.

So, I stayed in it a long time. And my videographer documented my first day of November swim. (The video was uploaded to YouTube the morning of November 1. The upload seemed to be successful but YouTube is saying the video is no longer available. Why I don't know. More Google incompetence maybe?) I'll try again with the video...Okay, finally got the thing to work. What a waste of time.

Giant Caterpillar Roller Blading At Village Creek Natural Historic Area

I decided to go roller blading at Village Creek Natural Historic Area today. Roller blading there is a bit more adventurous than Quanah Parker Park. At Village Creek there are 4 hills you get to go down and back up. The hills curve and cause you to cross 2 dams at high speed.

I had my all time worst roller blade wreck at Village Creek. I never thought I'd go back there again on roller blades.

But today I did. It was fun. Just like at Quanah Parker Park, I found I didn't go down the Village Creek hills as fast as I used to, due to my need to put on some weight.

People with a lot of weight are so lucky. They get to go down hills fast and they can go in real cold water and not even feel it and don't even need to swim, they just bob up and down effortlessly due to their built-in auto inner tubes. I wish I could put on weight like that.

Back to today's blading. So, I'm rolling along and I looked down to see this big fuzzy thing, like a caterpillar on steroids, which is what I figured it was, eventually it would become one of those gigantic bat-like Texas moths that like to chase me when I'm wearing my wool cap.

In the photo above I'm stopped right above the giant caterpillar. In the photo on the right you see the giant caterpillar walking across the paved trail.

I think it was chasing me.

A Fort Worth Chesapeake Energy Bus & A Leak

After seeing them on the streets for months, today I was finally able to get a photo of one of the Fort Worth city buses covered with a Chesapeake Energy ad.

The ad says "Thanks Barnett Shale for 83,000 new jobs." The logo of Chesapeake Energy is all over the bus. As well as the AskChesapeake.com web address.

I did not know the Barnett Shale had produced 83,000 new jobs. Now that the drillers are scaling back how many of those jobs have been un-produced?

A non-Chesapeake Barnett Shale natural gas drilling waste water disposal operation out near Aledo, that's in Parker County, west of Fort Worth, was shut down by the Texas Railroad Commission after drilling waste was found on the ground with evidence of an underground leak.

For some mysterious reason the Texas Railroad Commission oversees gas drilling operations.

Waste water from the drilling operations is stored in underground wells. The waste water contains salt, drilling chemicals, drilling mud and crude oil.

CES Saltwater Disposal was given a permit in May of 2007 to drill to a depth of 11,500 feet to pump waste water underground at the now shut down location near Aledo.

The shutdown disposal operation is near a housing development which gets its water from underground wells.

Why these people here in Texas, who rely so much on underground aquifers, would allow contaminated water to be pumped into wells, seems bizarre to me. Up in Washington state there is a serious problem with nuclear wastes at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation slowly migrating towards the Columbia River.

Why do these people here think that contaminated water underground is going to stay put? I see bad things in the future that are only being hinted at in the present. As in MAJOR ECOLOGICAL DISASTER.

Earthquake Shakes North Texas! Is Gas Drilling The Cause?

I thought Texas did not have earthquakes. I've been told that more than once. Where I used to live, in Washington, earthquakes were quite regular. That and mountains blowing up.

Where I lived, in Mount Vernon, we went through a series of localized earthquakes centered about 3 miles east of my house. It was day after day of quakes. I remember laying on my waterbed when one happened and the waves about tossed me out of bed. Another one I was sitting in my living room and I thought the windows were going to pop out. Another one I heard loud cracking and went into the kitchen to find a fault line had formed across my tile floor.

So, I thought my earthquake days were behind me. But then last night, coming up on midnight, we got hit with a series of quakes here in North Texas. The first struck about a half hour before midnight, centered 4 miles north of Grand Prairie. Grand Prairie is the town next to Arlington. I live in East Fort Worth, about 10 miles west of Grand Prairie. I think I felt the quake but thought it was a noisy truck.

The largest quake occurred just after midnight. A 3.0 centered 4 miles southwest of Irving. Irving is the town due west of Dallas where the Cowboys currently play football.

Several smaller quakes in the 2.0 range were felt, with the last shaker occurring around 3 in the morning.

Police were flooded with 100s of calls. Most people thought it was an explosion or a plane crash.

I remember when all this Barnett Shale drilling and fraccing started happening I thought to myself, good thing they don't have quakes here, as doing that much damage to the earth's upper crust would likely have a bad result up in Washington.

The same thought occurred to Fort Worth's wise sage, Don Young. Way back in August of 2007 Don Young wrote the following....

While vacationing recently in Marfa, Texas, I stumbled into a bookstore seeking shade and ran across an interesting book titled, Texas Earthquakes.

I thought to myself, We don't have earthquakes in Texas! The concept seemed counterintuitive. The authors of the book know better. Opening the book at random to page 70, I read the following:

"Three human activities that commonly induce earthquake activity are:

1) Injecting high pressure fluids into rock formations beneath the earth's surface.
2) Withdrawing large amounts of fluid or gas.
3) Construction of reservoirs and lakes."

Until very recently, the first 2 items have occurred only in remote parts of the state, away from densely populated areas. The Barnett-Shale play and subsequent fracing technology have changed all that.

According to the Texas Railroad Commission, in the year 2000, there were less than 10 gas wells in Tarrant County. Today, there are more than 1,000 with many more planned and thousands more in the immediate vicinity.

I'm not suggesting there is a serious risk from earthquakes in Tarrant County, there are far more serious risks from drilling, but, expanded gas drilling and injection wells in the north Texas region have moved us into uncharted territory.

To paraphrase Paul Harvey, "One fine day we may know, the rest of the story."

I fear we are doomed here in North Texas, doomed I tell you.

AT & T U-Verse Email Sending Solution

I keep seeing that people are coming to my blog looking for answers regarding how to send email using an existing email account with their new AT & T connection.

It wasn't easy, but I figured it out. No help from AT &T. I'd intended to post the solution, but I forgot.

There are several steps. I use Outlook Express. You may use a different email program that may require a different solution.

First off, log into your AT & T account. Find your way to your email account.

Click on 'options'. You'll see it on the upper right.

Now click on 'Mail Addresses' under the 'Management' heading.

Now click on 'Add'. Then enter the email address you want to be able to use as a sending email address. You will be sent an email to verify this address.

Now, back at Outlook Express. Click on 'tools', then 'accounts', then the email address you want to use and click 'Properties'.

Under the 'Servers' tab you'll need to make your Outgoing mail (SMTP) "smtp.att.yahoo.com".

At the bottom of the 'Servers' section check off "My server requires authentication".

Then click 'Settings'. Under Settings select 'Log on using'. Then enter your AT & T email address as the 'Account Name'. Enter your AT & T password in the 'Password' field. Click 'OK' and get outta there.

Now, click on the 'Advanced' tab. For 'Outgoing mail (SMTP) enter '465'. Put a check mark underneath that where it says 'This server requires a secure connection (SSL).

Hit 'OK' and you're done. You should now be able to send email using a non AT & T email address.

I know it sounds like an awful lot of bother. And it is a bother that AT & T should not make us go through. But it doesn't really take all that long. And after you get it done it works just fine.

Happy Texas Halloween

My Halloween started with a scary early morning swim. At midnight the temperature was 65. By this morning it'd gotten down to 59. The pool was warmer than yesterday so I lasted longer in it before frostbite began to work its magic on my extremities.

I don't get any trick or treaters here. Benefit of being behind a security gate. When I lived in Washington I'd get a lot of the little beggars. I don't miss them.

I think I may spend Halloween evening over on the balcony of Miss Puerto Rico where I'll have a bird's eye view of Halloween.

Do you like my Halloween costume? I am Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. I haven't found a chainsaw yet. I think Miss Puerto Rico has one.

Obama the Socialist Communist Dictator Wannabe

The right wing wackos are starting to get scary in their desperate fear that they are about to lose the Presidential election. After the Fort Worth Star-Telegram endorsed Obama the paper been printing a lot of really scary letters to the editor from those convinced Obama is a Socialist, Communist, Muslim Terrorist.

I tell you, this is what our inept education system produces. A lot of erroneous thinking. I'd willingly wager the vast majority of the wackos could not coherently tell you what socialism is. Or communism.

I printed some of the scary Star-Telegram letters yesterday. There were quite a few more today. Plus a few reasonable sounding ones. One of the letter writers blamed this oddball opinion flood, that borders on hate speak, on the propaganda job being spewed on talk radio and Fox News. I can see why one might think that, because I thought the same thing, in that many of the letters seem to reflect the type overwrought nonsense I've been hearing on Rush Limbaugh.

It's riling up the nutcases, as witnessed by the letters and by an incident like the pair of Neo-Nazis being arrested due to their plot to kill dozens of blacks and assassinate Obama. The right wing media is engaging in the most shamefully irresponsible disservice to our country I've yet witnessed by those who should know and behave better.

Just take a look at today's Rush In A Hurray email newsletter that came in minutes ago....

On Today’s Show...

Obama's infomercial painted the image of an America so horrible, large people have to cut back on...snacks for their children. People actually get arthritis, too! This is not the real America. It's just people with tough times.

The Obama crowds seek a redeemer in a time of turmoil. It's not what he says, it's how he says it.

Pearl of Wisdom: "This Obama infomercial was a parade of victims. I feel sorry for these people waiting around for him to save them. This wasn't inspiring. There wasn't one example of Obama's leadership. He's a cold, angry, charismatic demagogue. It was like watching 30 minutes of one-minute campaign ads. Would you do that?"

Obama calls America selfish, and thinks "charity" is government taking your money to "be our brother's keeper." Hey, you have a brother subsisting in a hut, and your beloved aunt living in a Boston slum!

Obama's media manipulation tactics exposed in a pro-Hillary blog post? Could be.

Pearl of Wisdom: "Jack Welch was on CNBC with Larry Kudlow and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. He was on fire about the truth of economics and the Barack plan."

Rush's Gut, Daily Tracking: It's hard to know what to call, when the press is so bias.

Pearl of Wisdom: "When you have an Obama advisor saying that Obama is not a black guy -- he's half white, and that's why Americans will vote for him -- and you have Obama making a joke about it on TV, it's all strategic. It's not just a joke, at all."

A Democrat caller for McCain. He's one of many.

Focus, you people. Step #1: Drag McCain over the finish line. Step #2: Rebuild the conservative movement. If you have to, tell yourself you're voting for Sarah Palin.

Pearl of Wisdom: "We've had over 3-1/2 times the polls this October as in October of 2004. It's information overload! We're being swamped with this tainted stuff."

Chesapeake Energy's Tandy Hills Obscene Gesture

In the above satelite view of the Tandy Hills Natural Area you can see some of the trails on the Tandy Hills, plus the location of the Chesapeake Energy drilling site and the location of the Mother Nature piece of guerrilla artwork I've made mention of before.

As my longtime reader may have noticed I go to the Tandy Hills and go hiking a couple times a week, weather permitting and it usually is.

But, before I talk about that I must digress and inform you that after two days of way too chilly I got back in the pool this morning. It was bracing, but I swam for at least 10 minutes. It was 55 this morning when I went swimming.

By the time I got to the Tandy Hills it was hot enough to overheat and require the removal of some clothing. I was not long into today's hiking when I saw that an unwelcome visitor had been erected since Monday, as in the Chesapeake Energy drill site's drilling tower was now in place and though I don't think they've begun drilling something was making an awful racket.

You can see and hear the Chesapeake operation all over the Tandy Hills. In the photos it looked to me as if Chesapeake Energy was engaging in an obscene gesture, directed at the skyline of beautiful downtown Fort Worth. That would seem to be a perfect visual metaphor for Chesapeake Energy and its CEO, Aubrey McClendon and how they and he run roughshod over people, towns and basketball teams.

Un Well In This Week's FW Weekly

I've not seen this week's FW Weekly yet, but always on the ball, Don Young has. He sent me a link to a very good article in the current issue in the Metropolis section written by Peter Gorman.

One of the victims in this story, Jim Ashford, lives in my neighborhood, in Riverbend Estates. I've heard the noise that's made him ill.

I don't think FW Weekly archives the articles in their Metroplis section, so in the interest of the public good I'll archive it here, as in below....

Un-Well

Concerns are mounting over health effects of gas drilling.

By PETER GORMAN

Charles Morgan can’t sleep at night. The low-frequency noise from the 11 gas compressors at an Anadarko facility about a mile from his home in the little Freestone County community of Lanely gives him such bad headaches that he frequently has to take a motel room to get away from it. Sometimes he just gets into his pickup or Volkswagen and drives to a country lane elsewhere in the county to get free of it. On other occasions he’s found himself in the hospital emergency room.

“The noise has ruptured one of my eardrums,” said the 65-year-old former Air Force major, who recently retired from his engineer’s job with the Texas prison system. “The pain in my head gets so bad I think I’ll die. My legs start jumping. My blood pressure goes sky high.”

What Morgan suffers from is vibroacoustic disease (VAD), described in Noise and Health, a respected international journal, as a “whole-body, systemic pathology,” marked by “[d]epressions, increased irritability and aggressiveness, a tendency for isolation, and decreased cognitive skills,” among other symptoms.

It’s brought on by excessive exposure to low-frequency noise, the kind you hear in airplanes, near wind turbines, and from natural gas compressor stations. It’s not well known in this country, and the leading researchers on it work in Europe. But it’s real.

Jim Ashford, who lives in the upscale gated community of Riverbend Estates in East Fort Worth, suffers from it as well. “I can’t sleep. I just lie in bed awake listening to that noise,” he said. The noise comes from three Chesapeake compressors about 2,700 feet from his house. “And because I can’t sleep, I’m irritable. I just hurt in general, and I find myself getting angry and snapping over things that I shouldn’t.”

Gwen Lachelt, director of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, which works with urban and rural communities and tribal groups “to protect their homes and the environment from the devastating impacts of oil and gas development,” says noise abatement is a very important issue and is getting more important “as drilling gets closer to — and in Fort Worth’s case, comes into — urban areas.” The group has already convinced regulators in Colorado to take the noise issue seriously.

But VAD isn’t the only health problem that those in the vicinity of oil and gas operations need to watch out for. Two recent studies by the University of Colorado School of Public Health suggest that gas drilling and its accompanying activities, including compressor stations, may cause serious health problems for those nearby — that is, pretty much everyone in Fort Worth.

The researchers found that “neighborhoods, schools, and workers in close proximity to oil and gas activities may be at increased risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and other disorders,” due to industry pollutants. It’s critical, they said, for more study to be done on those dangers.

“There are so many areas of gas drilling that have long-term potential to affect the public health,” Lachelt said. “What chemicals are actually being used in the drilling and fraccing of wells? What emissions are coming off compressors and being released into the air? What is being evaporated from drill site pits, and how much harm will it do to people and animals in the long run? How much contaminated waste-pit water will wind up in our surface water and earth? There are just a host of issues that are not being studied and need to be studied if we’re going to get our arms around the danger these wells and everything connected with them might pose to people.”

Fears in North Texas seem to be increasing as more and more people report health problems that seem to be related to drilling — and find little in the way of regulation or real answers as to what the dangers are. At Fort Worth Weekly, the questions and worries arrive by e-mail and letter frequently. Some report noise-related health problems and worry about compressor-station emissions. Many have found their well water ruined and wonder what toxins they ingested before the levels got so high as to make the problem noticeable by sight and smell.

Renee Salzman lives in Arlington, about 700 feet from a new well at Davis and Division streets, and she’s sick. “I’ve had these severe headaches, and I’ve had to clear phlegm from my throat constantly for the last couple of weeks,” she said. “I work in a garage studio, and after a couple of hours, I’ve just got a horrible headache.” She’s convinced that her illness is connected to the well because her symptoms appeared when the drilling company “started filling up the retention pool with that toxic waste.” Her daughters, too, are suffering from headaches.

Susan De Los Santos, a member of the Fort Worth Gas Drilling Task Force, said her group “didn’t get to tackle environmental issues because we were told to wrap things up sooner than we wanted.” She’s convinced that the citizen representatives on the industry-heavy task force would support regulations requiring more recapture of emitted gases and toxins. The task force did meet with the city council to discuss environmental issues in a workshop, she said, so that the council would have some basis for addressing those issues when it comes time to redraw the city’s drilling ordinance.

Both studies by the Denver researchers relied heavily on reviews of literature — that is, gathering various pieces of research already done on health aspects of gas and oil drilling.

The first, published in August, reviewed literature on the health effects of exposure to chemicals used or produced in drilling. The list is long and frightening, with toxins ranging from arsenic and barium to radiation from radon, radium, and uranium.

Exposure to one group of the drilling-related chemicals, known as volatile organic compounds that include benzene and toluene, can put people at risk of developing leukemia, kidney and neurological diseases, as well as increasing the risk of renal and other cancers. (Toluene was one of the chemicals found in a North Texas aquifer a few months ago, downstream from a gas drilling site, water that killed and sickened livestock and made some farmland basically unusable.)

The study also looked at heavy exposure to diesel exhaust, a lung cancer hazard that can also increase risk of cardiovascular diseases, asthma, and respiratory infections. And researchers wrote that nitrogen and sulfuric oxide, the gases released from oil and gas production during flaring and from gas compressor stations, have been shown to increase the chance of deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases as well as increasing the rate of premature births and low birth weights.

Other chemicals on the list: toxic metals, exposure to which can cause cancers, auto-immune diseases, and reproductive impairment; hydrogen sulfide, which can cause depression, weakness, and memory loss and can be fatal at high exposure levels; and fraccing fluid contaminants, the exact composition of which oil and gas companies refuse to reveal as proprietary information.

A follow-up paper released in September looked at the health impacts in Garfield County, Colorado, which has been heavily drilled for gas in the past several years. Medical researchers said the scant literature available, combined with preliminary studies of health status and air and water quality, indicated that Garfield County residents could be facing physical, psychological, and social problems because of the drilling.

Dr. Roxana Witter, lead writer on the studies, said in an interview that the findings are worrisome but preliminary. “My gut reaction is that I wouldn’t have my kids or mother or grandmother living near gas drilling because of the potential health risks,” she said. “The more thoughtful answer is that without data informing us what the exposures are, we cannot be specific about the hazards.”

The preliminary data from Garfield County, she said, suggests that known exposures to dangerous chemicals are a real concern. “But when someone says ‘I’m throwing up’, or ‘I’m constipated’, I want a physician to be able to answer the question of whether those things are related to gas drilling. So I want studies done. Without them there will always be doubts. We’re trying to bring science to this issue so that the agencies that are charged with protecting our health can have the data to do that.”

She urged that more studies, targeted specifically at the gas-drilling industry, be done. “I believe it’s vital that someone begins to do legitimate scientific monitoring of air, water, noise, and light in connection with oil and gas development — drilling and production — near urban areas,” she said. “There is a potential for serious effects, but the science is not yet there to explain it.”

Lachelt would also like to see more studies done but thinks the gas companies could do a lot even now to mitigate human and environmental contact with toxins if they chose to. “We want the companies to publicly disclose the chemicals they’re using in drilling and fraccing. And we want them to use technology to capture the emissions that come off compressors and wells during flaring,” she said. “British Petroleum has been working with green completion technologies” — systems to recapture gases that otherwise escape into the atmosphere — “on 40 percent of their new wells, and they’ve found they can break even on the deal financially by selling what they capture and then also eliminate an enormous amount of methane from being freed into the air.”

A technology called the closed-loop system can also eliminate most of the wastewater pits — where toxic water sits and evaporates into the air until it’s hauled away to injection wells — by recycling the chemical-infused water in a given well.

“At a bare minimum,” said Lachelt, “wastewater pits need to be lined, fluids have to be removed quickly, there shouldn’t be any onsite burial of pit waste, and closed-loop drilling should be standard operating technology. And we immediately need to insist that only nontoxic substances be used in drilling and fracturing a well.”

The real fear, she said, is that “the accumulation of toxins in the air and water might do major health damage as time goes by. Are we going to see more people getting cancers? The only way we’ll know is by having ongoing monitoring and health studies to see what’s really going into the air, onto the ground, and into our water systems.”

In the meantime, Jim Ashford and Charles Morgan don’t see an end to their sleepless nights.

Lisa Sumi, a noise specialist with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, said that while the gas companies might claim that complaints like those from Morgan and Ashford are not connected to the compressors near their homes, in Colorado OGAP convinced the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission — equivalent to the Texas Railroad Commission — to recognize low-frequency noise as a very real issue.

“Now when someone complains, the owners of the compressor units have to take readings, and if there is low-frequency noise being emitted, they have to eliminate it. Period,” she said. “And it’s as simple as putting up a building around the compressor to contain the sound. It costs a little for the gas companies but makes them much better neighbors.”

IQ Test Confirms I Am Not An Idiot

I don't want to go into the details of how it came about, but last week I found myself in a situation where I found myself taking an IQ Test for the first time in my life.

The idea of taking such a test made me nervous. What if it confirmed one of my worst fears and I learned I was an idiot?

I'd taken a similar test, years ago, the Federal Government's GSA Test. I did well on that one, got a GSA 14 Rating. Whatever that means. Likely I qualified to be a mailman.

The IQ Test has a lot of very abstract type questions, more like puzzles. Some of them I had to ponder for a bit to figure out the answer. One of the questions totally baffled me and no amount of pondering led to anything but a wild guess.

When it was all over I learned my IQ is 133. Since I had no idea what that meant I feared it might mean I was an idiot. I was pleasantly surprised to learn it was quite the opposite. As in I'm at the far right end of that bell curve you see above, with idiots being on the far left. Unfortunately for me, I suspect most of the people I know are in the middle of that bell curve. Or lean to the left.

A few weeks ago I was talking to an Iraq War vet. He said an amusing thing. He said he is not prejudiced against anyone due to race, ethnicity, sex preferences, nothing of that sort. The one thing he was prejudiced against was stupid people.

I've always tended to not overtly let anyone know, for the most part, that I think what they are saying or doing or the way they are acting is stupid. I felt, who am I to judge. But now that I've got these new IQ 133 credentials I'm thinking I might start allowing myself the privilege of thinking, geez, are you stupid or what? I likely won't be saying it out loud.

I've known some people who I've characterized as having degraded thinking. That sounds nicer than saying I think they are stupid. I have only directly told one person that she had degraded thinking. The situation called for it. I still think I prefer the degraded thinking terminology to bluntly telling someone they are not worth listening to because they are stupid.

I'm thinking stupid is different than ignorant. It is possible to be an ignorant person, but not stupid. Most ignorant people are stupid in that they are stupidly being lazy about losing their ignorance, as in not trying to learn more about the world they live in. Or question their ignorant beliefs. An ignorant person can get rid of their ignorance. A stupid person is stuck being stupid. This doesn't mean you can't be President of the United States one day. Obviously.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've not offended anyone with my stupid talk. I highly doubt any of those on the downside of the IQ Bell Curve would read far enough to get to the stupid part of this particular blogging and you who have aren't on that part of the Bell Curve, so all is good.

I must go do something smart now.