Friday Morning Texas Thunderstorms Have Put Me On Flood Alert

You can not see via the view from my secondary viewing portal on the outer world that lightning is striking this Friday morning, half way through the month of June.

I did not get many hours of sleep last night. I don't know what time it was I started hearing thunder booming. It was strange. I heard thunder, sort of constantly, but saw no flashes of lightning.

The lightning free thunder went on for quite a long time.

And then all hell broke loose. A downpour arrived simultaneously with a lightning bolt with the thunder boom also simultaneous. It felt like the lightning struck right outside my window. This was then repeated several times.

Sleeping was not possible.

I see, via my computer based weather monitoring device, that the National Weather Service has issued a Flood Alert.

When I went to bed last night I did not know that a thunderstorm was in the forecast. And now I have to be alert about a flood.

This is all very stressful.

I think I will go swimming now and try to alleviate some of my stress.

Tonight I Heartily Biked The Gateway Park Mountain Bike Trail

Gateway Park Trail Above Trinity River Cliff

Tonight I went on my first mountain bike trail ride in a long long time.

Yesterday I saw the Gateway Park mountain bike trail and thought it looked fun.

Easy and fun.

Well, it did turn out to be fun. But, easy? Not so much.

The Gateway Park mountain bike trail is a one-way single track. The trail starts off easy, twisting and turning through a dark woods. At times I felt like I was in a tunnel.

After several minutes of twisting and turning I exited the woods to a paved trail, following an arrow back to the mountain bike trail. Once more I was meandering a twisting and turning trail through a dark woods. I was liking it a lot.

And then, suddenly I found myself pedaling beside the Trinity River, with the river about 50 feet below, with the trail running along the edge of a cliff that drops to the river. This seemed treacherous to me.

My photo of this does not remotely capture what this cliff-side trail actually looked like.

I was still dealing with the surprise of finding myself pedaling at a cliff's edge, above a raging river, when suddenly I came to a steep drop off.

It has been a long time since I biked down a steep drop off.

Biking down the steep drop off went well, but, I was not prepared for the steep climb that followed. I almost made it to the top of the climb when I ran out of steam and had to jump off the bike. This type maneuver can go badly wrong. This time it did not.

That first steep up and down was followed by several more, some with twisting turns mixed in, and some off camber turns.

It was challenging.

Eventually the roller coaster section ended and I was back to more sedate trail, like I enjoyed at the start of tonight's ride.

All in all, I was quite impressed with the Gateway Park mountain bike trail.

Who makes these trails? And how do they make them? It seems to me to be quite the feat of engineering.

It would seem, judging by the fact that I only saw 4 other bikers tonight, that the D/FW mountain bike community has not discovered this trail. It took awhile for the River Legacy mountain bike trail to draw the crowds that now regularly fill the parking lot. In many ways, I thought the Gateway Park trail was funner than the River Legacy Park trail.

I will be back. But, not tomorrow. And probably not the day after tomorrow.

Today I Learned About The Murder Of Fort Worth's Burwell Christmas Evans

I know I've mentioned what I think is Fort Worth's best blog previously, a time or two, that blog being Hometown by Handlebar.

Almost daily I'm impressed and amazed at the stories this Bloggerman, Mike Nichols, tells.

Mike Nichols is making Fort Worth, past and present, seem so interesting methinks the City of Fort Worth and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce should be paying this guy.

Today's Hometown by Handlebar is yet one more instance of yet one more piece of Fort Worth history, unknown to me, til today. A sad tale of a bad crime of the sort that could be in our headlines today, but this happened way back in the same century the Civil War took place in.

Have I mentioned before that one of my majors, in college, was history? History has always been my favorite subject.

The title of today's Hometown by Handlebar blogging is Once Upon a Crime: “Woe, Woe, Woe”

Below is the first paragraph...

Burwell Christmas Evans was born on December 25, 1844, in South Carolina. When the Civil War began he was a student at the Citadel military college. Just sixteen years old, he enlisted. After the war in 1872 he headed west. He settled in Fort Worth and opened a dry goods store downtown. In 1876 he offered customers something new: On the second floor of his store he opened Fort Worth’s first respectable theater. Illuminated by kerosene lamps, such noted entertainers as humorist Josh Billings performed in the theater upstairs. And on its stage Madame Rentz’s Female Minstrels brought the cancan to Cowtown. Ew la la, y’all.

Click here to continued reading to find out all about the woeful crime...

Anonymous Animal Encounters With Giant Purple Flowers On The Tandy Hills

Today I came upon some new color brightening up the Tandy Hills in the form of the giant, purple orchid-like bloom you see in the picture.

It was slightly warm, in the mid 80s, when I hit the hills today to get some much needed endorphin inducing aerobic stimulation.

Coming up a hill I was startled by a large animal running across the path ahead of me. I only saw it for a flash and have no idea what it was.

Giant roadrunner? Scrawny coyote? Cougar? Bobcat? Olive the Prairie Dog?

I don't know. It was fast and long gone by the time I got to the top of the hill.

Currently, back in air-conditioned comfort, the outer world is being heated to 92 degrees, as measured by a thermometer device, with the humidity having the air feeling like it is 102 degrees.

I have a relative issue or two that weighs on my melancholy mind. For some reason watching the re-boot of Dallas heightened my melancholy feeling. Why? I have no idea.

I was up early this morning and in the pool shortly after the sun arrived.

I don't think I'm getting enough exercise, so this evening I think I will check out the mountain bike trail at River Legacy Park that was looking fun when I saw it yesterday.

Dallas Is Back To Looking Good On TV

In the picture you are looking at a TV screen cap from last night's opening credits of TNT's re-boot of Dallas.

Along with millions of people, all over the world, I was a fan of the original Dallas. Though, by the end, I thought it was time for Dallas to die.

I suspect millions of people watched last night's Dallas and found themselves pleasantly surprised to find themselves not thinking it would have been best to leave Dallas to TV history, or as I said it in the title to my post on my TV Blog, Dallas Returns In Surprisingly Good Form On TNT.

I started watching Dallas, in re-runs, the summer after the first season of Dallas ended with much of the world obsessed with finding out the answer to the question of "Who Shot J.R."

The summer of 1980 was the first time I visited Dallas and Fort Worth. I remember watching a Dallas re-run at what was then a Ramada Inn at Beach Street and I-30, in Fort Worth. Ironically just a few miles from where I live now, over 3 decades later, and walking distance from the Tandy Hills, which I will visit later this morning.

I always liked the opening credits of Dallas, with the Dallas theme music. I was pleased that the update Dallas version did not tinker much with the opening credits, except for updating them with the 2012 version of Dallas, which includes a Dallas Cowboy Stadium. In Arlington.

The Dallas credits open with a view of the stunning skyline of beautiful downtown Dallas, zooming over what I now know to be Interstate 30, across the flood plain of the Trinity River.

In the new Dallas opening credits you can see some of what I think is the Dallas Trinity River Vision project.

The opening credits include a shot of one of the Dallas Vision's signature bridges. I think it is called the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.

The Dallas Pioneer Plaza Cattle Drive has been added to the Dallas opening credits. And probably a lot of other things, that I did not catch, that have sprouted up in Dallas since the original went off the air.

The new version of Dallas is filmed in North Texas, unlike the original which was shot mostly in Hollywood. The Hollywood version did not have North Texas looking like North Texas actually looks, which is one of the reasons I have more than once had Washington friends comment on one of my Texas photos, asking if it is really that green here.

Dallas 2012 has the Southfork Ranch land looking green, just like it likely looks at this time of the year.

Methinks Dallas, the town, should be quite pleased to have Dallas, the TV show, back on the air, showing the world, once again, that Dallas is one good-looking town. Filled with money mad, double-crossing cheating schemers.

You Pathological Lying Cheaters Are Easily Busted

I've only known one doctor diagnosed pathological liar.

The doctor diagnosed pathological liar, I used to know, who regularly lied to me, often would tell a lie when the truth would just be simpler. Often there was no point to the lie.

I'll give you one good example of this particular person's pathological lying.

One day she called me and told me that the day before she'd flown from Seattle to Phoenix for lunch, for free. That a friend of hers, who is an Alaska Airlines flight attendant, was able to fly her to Phoenix for free for lunch.

With this particular pathological liar when you ask followup questions she quickly gets defensive, because she suspects, accurately, that she's been caught lying again. I remember asking how she got to Sea-Tac. She said she drove herself there. I asked how much the parking cost. She didn't remember. I asked how they got to the restaurant when they got to Phoenix. Rather than say they got a taxi, she made up a lie about cars being available to flight attendants. I asked where the flight attendant got the key. She didn't remember. I asked what the name of the restaurant was. She did not remember.

A short while after I was told the lie about flying to Phoenix for lunch, I was at an event in Seattle with this particular pathological liar. The Alaska Airlines flight attendant showed up. The pathological liar and the flight attendant started talking about a Golden Corral in Spokane that they thought was fabulous.

I know what you are thinking if you've been to a Golden Corral, that being that these people I know are tasteless morons. Well, let's not be judgmental until we experience that fabled Spokane Golden Corral.

So, the flight attendant tells the pathological liar that he can get them roundtrip tickets to Spokane for 50 bucks, that they should fly to Spokane for lunch at the Golden Corral. The pathological liar was all excited about this plan. I sat there thinking should I or should I not ask why it cost $50 to fly to Spokane for lunch when it was free to fly to Phoenix for lunch?

But, with this particular pathological liar I had long known that one risked a temper tantrum if one blatantly exposed one of her lies. And so I did not say anything. I sort of regret this.

Changing the subject from pathological liars to cheaters.

By cheaters I'm talking about the meaning of the word that is associated with cheating to win a simple game. People who cheat to win a game are sort of like pathological liars, in that they don't realize how transparently obvious the cheating, or the lie, is.

For instance, if a person in normal conversation seems to have a limited vocabulary, with infrequent use of polysyllabic words and frequent use of cliche, and yet somehow, when playing a game like Scrabble online, time and again gets a lot of points with obscure words, the meaning of which I do not know, it is sort of a dead giveaway that the person is cheating.

Now, if you play Scrabble online with 5 or 6 different people it really makes the cheater standout, due to the preponderance of obscure words.

So, I was curious what was available online for Scrabble cheaters. I was not too surprised to find that there is a lot of help for Scrabble cheaters. Like this website called "Scrabble Word Finder."

There are websites where you enter the words that are on your current Scrabble board, then you type in the letters that you have available to play. You are then shown obscure words and where to place them to get a lot of points.

A real dead giveaway of the Scrabble cheater is if over and over again they use up all their tiles making up a word. This gets a lot of points.

What I don't understand is why would this be any fun to play this way? What possible ego gratification does one get from cheating to win a simple game like Scrabble? This just seems really sad to me.

Rosie The Rat Dog & Family Are Now Heading North On The World Famous Alaska Highway

Rosie the Rat Dog with Bear

My Big Sister and her Big Entourage have made it past Dawson Creek and are now heading north on the World Famous Alaska Highway.

I did not know the Alaska Highway was World Famous til I read it on a sign in a picture on the Rosie the Rat Dog Alaska! Blog.

"YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE WORLD FAMOUS ALASKA HIGHWAY DAWSON CREEK, B.C."

That is Rosie the Rat Dog in a confrontation with a bear, in the picture, above, that I swiped from Rosie's Blog.

Rosie the Rat Dog is sort of a famous dog, likely not as famous as the Alaska Highway, though. Years ago Rosie the Rat Dog won some sort of Dog Award from some Japanese entity. This happened back in the previous century, so my memory of details is a tad foggy.

I am fairly certain, though, that Rosie did not fly to Tokyo to accept her prestigious award.

I Walked By An Area Close To The Public Today In Fort Worth's Gateway Park

I'd not visited the Gateway Park trail in a long time, til today.

That trail was damaged quite some time ago from the Trinity River flooding after the remains of Hurricane Hermine dropped too much rain for the river to easily handle.

For a long time after Hermine left town the Gateway Park trail was blocked, with a sign on the blockage informing trail walkers that the trail was closed.

Eventually the trail was reopened, though the damage has not been repaired, but interesting signs have been installed on the cyclone fencing, that blocks access to the damaged area, informing people that the "AREA CLOSE TO THE PUBLIC."

I did not need a sign to tell me that the area where I was standing was close to the public. I'm part of the public and I knew, quite clearly, that I was close to the area.

Another sign informed me that "TRAIL IS CLOSED TEMPORARILY FOR MAINTENANCE DO NOT ENTER"

Closed for maintenance? I did not see much maintenance going on.

Closed temporarily? It's been years, that does not seem very temporary to me.

As I walked along the sections of the trail that weren't closed, I saw a dirt path heading towards the river.

I followed that path and was surprised to see the remains of a very old trail that the river had washed out a long time ago, likely long before Hermine visited Fort Worth.

No cyclone fence or warning sign stopped me from walking on this old paved trail. You can't tell it very clearly from the picture, but, that is the paved trail, broken off, at the bottom of the picture. If I walked off the end of that trail I would have had myself a fun, long fall to the river below.

Chunks of fallen paved trail lay on the river bed, along with old tires and other flotsam.

A couple years ago a mountain bike trail was blazed in Gateway Park. I've never biked this mountain bike trail. My previous times seeing this trail it did not look as if very many people biked it. Today I saw the Gateway Park mountain bike trail and it now looks well ridden.

I shall return at some point in time in the near future to pedal the Gateway Park mountain bike trail.

A Tale Of Two Town's Flood Control Projects: Fort Worth & Mount Vernon

Currently, here in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex zone, we are in the midst of a thunderstorm. Usually a thunderstorm is accompanied by rain. Often in copious, flood causing amounts.

However.

No matter how much rain falls, or how high the Trinity River rises, it is highly unlikely a flood would breech the enormous levees that contain the river as it flows past downtown Fort Worth.

These levees, on the Trinity River, were built over 50 years ago, paid for by the kind taxpayers of America, after the downtown Fort Worth zone was damaged by a really bad flood at some point in time in the early 1950s, if I remember correctly.

I read some news in my old hometown newspaper, the Skagit Valley Herald, this morning, that had me being perplexed. Apparently tomorrow the Mount Vernon City Council is expected to approve a plan to borrow $1 million of the town's future federal funds, to close a funding gap on the $12.9 million cost of Phase II of Mount Vernon's Downtown Flood Protection and Revitalization Project.

Let me explain downtown Mount Vernon and its flooding issue to you.

When the Skagit River goes into big flood mode, downtown Mount Vernon becomes like New Orleans. It is below the level of the flooding river. So, a temporary sandbag dike has to be quickly built, on top of the existing dike, to keep the river from destroying downtown Mount Vernon.

In November of 1995 record rains brought record flooding to all the rivers of the Puget Sound zone. I remember watching the flooding, on TV, at 1 in the morning, when  KING  5, out of Seattle, went live to downtown Mount Vernon where the  KING 5 reporter made it sound as if a fevered effort was underway to save the downtown Mount Vernon library. The TV screen showed a beehive of activity by the library.

I remember being shocked. I woke up some help and headed to downtown Mount Vernon. At the library I found out what was actually going on was a sand bagging operation, with the filled sandbags being brought to the revetment to build a secondary dike. That was where the help was needed, so that is where we went.

Sandbag Wall in Mt. Vernon While the Skagit River Rises

There may have been well over 1,000 people in downtown Mount Vernon working to build a sandbag wall.

Hundreds of National Guard troops were helping.

Sometime around 3 in the morning we were told we'd done all we could do, the sandbags could go no higher.

The Skagit River was expected to crest around 11 that morning. It was expected to crest well over a foot above the sandbag wall. All the businesses in downtown Mount Vernon were sandbagged to help stop the expected flood.

By the time of the crest, I, along with a lot of other people, watched from high ground as the river crept to the top of the sandbag wall. Just as it was starting to go over the top, the river suddenly dropped a foot or more. Everyone was mystified. It was like there had been a divine intervention.

But, we soon were to learn what had actually happened, as emergency sirens sounded and helicopters began to appear. A dike, downriver a couple miles, had popped a couple hundred foot breech, flooding what is known as Fir Island.

Needless to say, Mount Vernon and the Skagit Valley were in a State of Emergency.

And then, 2 weeks later, after the Fir Island dike had been repaired, it happened again.

From that point Mount Vernon decided something needed to be done, after coming to the point of disaster, twice within 2 weeks. In 2007 Mount Vernon bought a mobile flood wall from a Norwegian company, the first such thing to be installed in America. Now, just a few people can put up a wall in a couple hours, where previously it took half a day and 100s of workers.

But, this was a temporary solution. Phase II of the Downtown Flood Protection and Revitalization Project replaces the mobile flood wall with a permanent solution that will take downtown Mount Vernon off FEMA's list of vulnerable flood zones.

That is a list that downtown Fort Worth is not on.

Now, how is it that Fort Worth and its bizarro Trinity River Vision Boondoggle has gotten millions of federal dollars for an un-needed flood control project that will build a likely ridiculous looking, un-needed flood diversion channel, so that the levees that have stopped flooding for decades can be removed?

Meanwhile, Mount Vernon, which has an actual, real, flood problem, that has caused problems for decades, scrambles to find the money to build a permanent fix.

Is this a function of the fact that the congressperson who represents the district in which Mount Vernon is located is not a corrupt politician willing to finagle shady deals to channel federal money Mount Vernon's way, whilst Fort Worth is represented by a corrupt congresswoman who stands to make financial gains from the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle which she has helped to fund, which, in addition to providing her financial gain, also provided her son, J.D. Granger, the job of running the project, a job for which J.D. Granger has absolutely zero qualifications?

The installing her son to run the TRV Boondoggle is sufficient cause to attach the "corrupt" label to this corrupt politician, let alone all the other reasons.

Why do not more people find the TRV Boondoggle's wastefulness and lack of need to be perplexing, particularly when there are locations in America where money could be spent to fix an actual flooding problem?

Places like Haltom City and Mount Vernon.

If you'd asked me if the 1995 flood I'm talking about above was the infamous Thanksgiving Day Flood, I would have said, yes it was. If you'd asked me if this was the flood that sank one of the Lake Washington floating bridges, I would have said yes it was.

Well, just a little Googling let me know I was wrong about the Thanksgiving Day Flood. That flood was in 1990 and was the one that sank the floating bridge.

The fact that I get confused about Western Washington's floods and the fact that some of them have names, should be a good indication of how bad the flooding in that rainy zone can be.

I remember watching the floating bridge sink, on TV, at my sister's cabin at Lake Cushman. That fact confuses me for a variety of reasons. One of which is I also remember being at Seattle's Gasworks Park watching my aunt finish a marathon in the rainstorm that sank the floating bridge. But, I'm further confused, because I remember being up in Lynden, at the Dutch Mother's Restaurant, because my grandma wanted to have all her kids and grandkids together for a turkey dinner for the first time in decades. I remember that night as the night the rain started that became the flood known as the Thanksgiving Flood. Apparently I was all over Western Washington during that flooding period, all the way to the Canadian border, to Seattle, to Hood Canal.

That or my memory is really mixed up.

Below is a YouTube video of part of the KING 5 report about the sinking. There is footage of the actual sinking, which happened live on TV, if I'm remembering right, which I've fairly clearly established may not be the case...

The Shadow Of The Tandy Hills Thin Man Grows Thicker As Summer Nears

As you can see looking at the Shadow of the Tandy Hills Thin Man, the Thin Man has gotten way thicker since the last time a photo was taken of his shadow.

Indicating, it would seem, that the Thin Man has gotten thicker.

That, or the sun is directly overhead due to it being in the noon time frame, thus creating the illusion of a thicker Thin Man.

Prior to leaving the air-conditioned comfort of my abode I heard a voice on the radio say there was a chance of thunderstorms to the south of Interstate 20, and maybe later tonight, incoming from Oklahoma.

Then, about 2 seconds later, another voice came on the radio saying the National Weather Service had just issued a Severe Thunderstorm Watch for the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, with the need to watch for a thunderstorm continuing til 5 this afternoon.

We have about 4 hours to go before we can quit watching for thunderstorms. So, far, I'm seeing nothing that looks stormy. Below is the current weather condition at my locale...