Hiking The Dry Trails Of The Tandy Hills While Being Alert About The Air Quality

Even though up to 4 inches of rain fell in some locations in the D/FW zone on Saturday, I decided, since my computer based temperature monitoring device was telling me that it was only 79 degrees in the outer world at my location at a half hour before noon, that I'd risk running into rampaging creeks and getting stuck in mud by returning for some salubrious endorphin inducing aerobic stimulation via hiking up and down a few of the Tandy Hills.

Well.

The trails were pretty much bone dry, with just some slight hints that a little rain may have hit the prairie in recent days. No water was running in Tandy Creek. Tandy Falls remains bone dry.

As you can see, via the look west at the stunning skyline of beautiful downtown Fort Worth, the air appears to be smog-free, scrubbed by the recent storms.

However, despite appearing to be clear air, the National Weather Service, or whoever it is who determines such things, has determined that we need to have an AIR QUALITY ALERT.

Maybe this AIR QUALITY ALERT has something to do with the toxins being sprayed throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, attempting to kill West Nile Virus bearing mosquitoes before they make more people sick. Or dead.

A Pleasantly Warm Sunday Walk Around Fort Worth's Fosdick Lake

Oakland Lake Park's Fosdick Lake was being a dead calm mirror today. The only motion on the lake, that I saw, was due to turtles diving off logs at the sight of an approaching, possibly dangerous, human.

Yesterday's storming, with a lot of rain, seems to have temporarily cleaned the usually polluted air of North Texas.

Freshly scrubbed clean air caused this morning to be the first morning in awhile that I did not wake up to find myself with blurry, stinging, watery eyes.

It was barely 80 when I walked around Fosdick Lake today. With no wind blowing and high humidity, it felt way hotter than 80.

Currently the outer world, at around 2, this Sunday afternoon, is heated to 84 degrees, with that aforementioned vexing humidity making it feel like 97.

This morning, by the time the sun arrived to begin its daily heating duty, it was only 69 degrees. I had my windows open almost all morning. Tonight the low is supposedly supposed to get to 66. I do not remember such frigid temperatures this time of year in Texas. Let alone opening my windows in August.

With Western Washington sizzling from a heat wave while North Texas is cool, I may need to re-think my plan to escape the former heat of Texas for the cooler clime of Washington.

Changing the subject from Texas being cool, to something else.

Yesterday someone named Dixie Belle emailed me asking for directions to that Oakland Lake Park and beautiful Fosdick Lake that I'm always talking about.

Well, Oakland Lake Park is really easy to find. Driving either west bound or east bound on I-30, in Fort Worth, exit at the Oakland Boulevard exit. From which ever direction you exit, head south down Oakland Boulevard, barely off the freeway, take any of the next couple left turns off Oakland Boulevard and in one short block you will be seeing Fosdick Lake. There are parking lots on both the east and west sides of the lake.

Going On A Litter Free Walk With Blue & Max In Tacoma's Point Defiance Park

I hit the publish button on the previous blogging, then when I checked the blog to make sure it blogged correctly I saw that Blue & Max, Tacoma's most well known blogging poodles, had blogged again.

I swiped one of Blue & Max's pictures.

The picture shows multiple elements of why I'd like to move back to Washington.

First off, in the picture I see two nephews and one niece. That is nephew David in the yellow shirt on the far left, mom Kristin holding niece, Ruby, whilst sitting on a piece of driftwood. Sister Jackie, visiting from Arizona, in the middle, in a blue shirt, with Ruby's twin, my nephew Theo, in the red shirt on the right.

The two closest to you in the picture are Blue & Max.

In addition to nephews and a niece, what else am I seeing that makes me want to move back to Washington?

Do you see any litter in the picture?

I get so disgusted, at times, with what a littered up mess Texas is, with so many Texans mocking their "Don't Mess With Texas" slogan.

How can so many people be such slobs, creating so much litter?

It is so perplexing.

I don't know what time of day this picture was taken. My last time at this location was in the early evening, with 100s of people picnicking, in the water, playing. This is in Tacoma's Point Defiance Park, one of the biggest urban parks in America.

Tacoma charges no fee to enter Point Defiance Park.

Most big cities, which have learned to wear their big city pants, do not charge entry fees to their basic amenities, like city parks.

The only park in Fort Worth that is even remotely as diverse, and big, as Point Defiance, is the Fort Worth Nature Preserve & Refuge.

Very few people visit this Fort Worth park.

An entry fee is charged.

Point Defiance Park has miles of really good hiking trails. Trails in deep woods with really tall trees, with those trees being green all year long, hence calling them evergreens.

With Washington being known as the Evergreen State.

Which it really isn't.

Evergreen.

A drought can make the west side of the Cascades somewhat brown, while the east side of the Cascades is mostly always brown, with a lot of irrigated green oasis.

From the location of this picture, if the sky conditions were cooperating, we would be seeing Mount Rainier.

I miss mountains.

To the left, that water you see is what is known as saltwater. Part of Puget Sound. Even though this water is in a big city, it is crystal clear, as in you can look deep into the water. Anyone looked deep into a Fort Worth lake lately? Or the Trinity River?

To get to the location of this picture Blue & Max would have parked by Anthony's Homeport. A seafood restaurant. I miss good seafood and good seafood restaurants.

Just a short distance from Anthony's Homeport is the Vashon Island Ferry dock. I miss hopping a ferry. Where I lived in Washington I could drive a short distance and hop the Anacortes ferry out to the San Juan Islands, and enjoy the island's Mediterranean climate, protected from rain by the Olympic Mountain's rain shadow.

I miss varied geography and varied climate areas within short distances.

I miss fresh fruit and vegetables. I can't remember the last time I had fresh corn on the cob. Or a strawberry that tasted like a strawberry. In Washington blackberries are free for the picking. Blackberries are my favorite of all the berries that grow in Washington.

I think if I moved back to Washington I might be able to restore my health to its former healthy vigor, with the healthy regimen of fresh seafood, fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and fresh air, with no fracking allowed.

Below is a video I made in July of 2008, from a walk with Blue & Max, at the same location as today's picture. In the video you'll see the aforementioned Mount Rainier, see the Vashon Ferry, hear me talk about Anthony's Homeport, as we try and find a parking spot and you will see a lot of people at the location of the above picture. And, in the video, you will also see no litter....

Mysterious Disappearances At Quanah Parker Park

On my way to Town Talk today I parked in the Quanah Parker Park parking lot, for a short while, to facilitate checking out something I'd wondered about weeks ago, on July 30, to be precise.

In a blogging titled White Energy Pickups & Other Quanah Parker Park Puzzles I took a picture of an area where a thick layer of beauty bark had been laid down between two orange plastic fences.

There had been a Barnett Shale Natural Gas Trinity River water sucking operation going on that slowed up entering the park. But I could see no connection between the water sucking and the fenced off beauty bark.

Well, today, as you can see in the picture, all has been removed. Why was it temporarily there?

I did not stay long at Quanah Parker Park. I'm just not enjoying the outer world all that much lately. That and I have no idea where I might get hit by an anti-mosquito death cloud while out and about outdoors in Fort Worth.

I have not been swimming since Friday morning. You might intuit from that fact the fact that my pool is still in malfunction mode.

Why must swimming pools be such high maintenance operations?

I remember my first Texas swimming pool, up north of Fort Worth, in the hamlet of Haslet. At one point we got the pool chemicals messed up, resulting in the pool turning an unearthly shade of green.

A professional intervention was required.

I found it a bit disturbing how quickly the professional intervention, with the correct chemical mix, turned the pool from that unearthly shade of green to crystal clear blue water.

I am not much minding the unscheduled break from aerobic stimulation. I don't know what I did, but my elderly body's musculature feels like it feels after I subject it to a long hike up a mountain with thousands of feet of elevation gain.

Unfortunately, there are no mountains available within a reasonable distance of my current location that I could hike up and get real sore. Maybe I overdid it yesterday in the pool.

Changing the subject from Quanah Parker Park to Quanah Parker.

Recently, Hometown by Handlebar had a very interesting article about Quanah Parker titled “Deathly Perfume”: A “Noble Red Man Succumbs”

The article begins with...On December 19, 1885, Comanche Chief Quanah Parker and his father-in-law, Chief Yellow Bear, came to Fort Worth. Yellow Bear was father of Wec-Keah, Quanah Parker’s first wife. The two men had come to meet with Indian agent Lee Hall …

Click the link to read the rest of the story.

I Am A Hot Mess With No Pool & No Mountains To Climb

In the picture you are looking at the mid-afternoon, semi-cloudy, 3rd Friday of August view from my secondary viewing portal on the outer world.

The turquoise thing at the bottom of the picture is my swimming pool. I went swimming in that pool this morning. This morning may be the last time I swim in that pool for awhile.

A pump malfunction, again, will require some water withdrawal. I do not know how long this will take. If it takes too long I will also be suffering withdrawal, as in withdrawal from my daily dose of endorphins which cause me to feel real good real early in the morning.

I see a bad bout of grouchiness in my near future.

I think I mentioned last week that this week one of my nephews would be here. Well, he got to D/FW yesterday. He thinks he is in Lewiston. Lewiston is a town in Idaho.

Today my nephew left Texas, to go to Texas Light, that being Oklahoma. I got a text message telling me, among some other things, "going to OK today, Fort Worth Saturday."

I am guessing my nephew is going to Oklahoma to go to either the WinStar Casino or the Choctaw Casino.

Or both.

My nephew lives in a very casino deprived area, with only a few casinos in the Phoenix metro area, and such a long drive to Las Vegas, so I can totally understand why, on his first day in Texas, he'd want to leave Texas to go to Oklahoma to gamble.

My nephew's mom and dad, that being my sister and my favorite brother-in-law, may be coming to D/FW in September, for the first time, to attend the wedding that is the reason my nephew is here now.

I do not know if my sister and favorite brother-in-law will also make a beeline to Oklahoma soon upon their arrival in Texas.

This Thursday Afternoon Fort Worth Texas Is As Chilly As Olympia Washington

I just got email from one of those Pacific Northwest weather babies I've previously mentioned, this email coming from that weather baby who happens to be my baby sister, she being the sibling who lives in Tacoma, but commutes to Olympia regularly, where she dispense justice of some sort.

My sister's email contains one declarative sentence, plus one question...

My phone says it is 88 degrees in Olympia right now. Does that mean we are actually hotter than you today???

When I read the question I checked my computer based temperature monitoring device (because I do not have a phone smart enough to tell me the temperature) and was surprised at the answer to my sister's question, that being at this point in time we are both being heated (or chilled, depending on ones point of view) to 88 degrees.

As you can see, in the graphic above, the humidity in this swamp-like part of the planet has it really feeling like 95, which is still cooler than the above 100 HEAT we've been having lately.

Just a second, I will go check how hot it really feels in Olympia....

Well, in just the few minutes since I got my sister's 88 degrees email, Olympia has heated up 3 degrees, to 91, but, if you look at what the Olympia temperature feels like, it is the same as Fort Worth.

95 degrees.

Is this what is known as irony? Or just bizarre coincidence?

How come Olympia gets an EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING, but we don't get one here in HOT Texas?

The Ducks Of Fosdick Lake Happily Quacking Today While I Think About Not Getting A Taco In Tacoma

Happy Quacking Fosducks On The Move

I was not too surprised to see that our recent deluge has obliterated the beautiful Fosdick Lake beaches that had appeared during the period when Fosdick Lake was being deprived of any new water, either from rain, or from the ubiquitous Fort Worth water main breaks.

The Fosducks in Fosdick Lake, in Oakland Lake Park, were seeming really happy today. Such a cacophony of quacking.

Someone, not me, had kindly deposited a lot of bird feed on the shores of Fosdick Lake. I think all that bird feed is part of the reason for all the happy quacking.

That and I think maybe ducks like it when a cloud cover prevents direct solar radiation, along with slightly cooler temperatures and extremely high humidity.

I am not a duck, though I do do a lot of quacking. So, not being a duck, I did not react as happily, as the Fosducks, to the high humidity. Even though the temperature was only in the low 80s, that aforementioned high humidity has turned the outer world at my location into a swamp.

I ended up being a sweaty mess, and not in the enjoyable steam bath way that I have learned to enjoy.

I heard from a Tacoman this morning that the Western Washington zone is going to be in the 90s the next couple days. It'd be really amusing if Mother Nature played a dire trick on those weather babies and combined that semi-high temperature with some super high humidity. You'd hear the whining clear across the country.

Speaking of a Tacoman, it never occurred to me that the name for a person from Tacoma sounds like someone in the business of selling a Mexican delicacy, til I typed Tacoman in the previous paragraph.

I Bear The Burden Of Excessive Purple Prose With Limited Dignity

In the past couple weeks I have discovered that my little sister has a very strong aversion to purple prose.

At one point in the past week my little sister told me if I did not cease with sending her purple prose she would block my email.

I was appalled.

When the subject of purple prose first came up I was not sure it was a real thing.

Til I Googled it.

Googling "purple prose" I quickly learned that purple prose has long plagued the planet.

The alliterative "purple prose has long plagued the planet" may be an example of purple prose. I'm not sure. I think I may go into purple prose mode, inadvertently, and am now mortified that I have someone telling me I have been purple prosing.

That has ever happened. Til now.

The people who read my prose have been much too polite to point out that it is often purple. Except for my little sister.

Those who define such things define purple prose as a term which describes written passages written in prose so overwrought, so ornate, so extravagant, so florid, that it breaks the reading flow and draws attention to itself.

One of the most famous examples of purple prose comes from an author named Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who began his novel, Paul Clifford, with this famous sentence....

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

This sentence is often shortened to "It was a dark and stormy night," which gave rise to the famous, annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which writers compete to outdo Bulwer-Lytton with a piece of purple prose that exceeds his dark and stormy night.

Another famous example of Bulwer-Lytton purple prose, from the same novel that gave us a "dark and stormy night" is, instead of simply writing "Once the lady lit her pipe," he wrote, "As soon as the Promethean spark had been fully communicated to the lady's tube."

Now that my little sister has so kindly pointed out to me how out of control I am with my purple prose I am going to try, real hard, really, I promise, real hard, to try to make my prose less purple.

This is a worthy goal I do not know if I am worthy of attaining.

Water Has Returned To Arlington's Village Creek Chocolate Bayou

Village Creek Chocolate Bayou

Earlier today I indicated I would not be in the Village Creek Blue Bayou zone to see if last night's rain had restored the dry Blue Bayou to its usual blueness.

Me saying I would not be in the Blue Bayou zone was prompted by a comment to yesterday's blogging about the dried up Village Creek Blue Bayou....

Steve A said...
After last night, we'll be expecting a Blue Bayou update!

I was up in Hurst this morning, then back in my home zone earlier than I thought I would be. So, in the noon time frame I took off for my daily constitutional in search of some endorphin inducing aerobic stimulation.

I exited my abode thinking I'd go to Oakland Lake Park to walk around Fosdick Lake, but then changed my mind and headed east, instead of west, to walk with the Indian Ghosts I'd visited yesterday at the Village Creek Natural Historical Area in Arlington.

Upon arrival at the entry off Dottie Lynn Parkway I was prepared to find the park closed due to flooding, with Veterans Park being my flood free backup.

No need for a backup. Village Creek is running more water today than it has run in a long time, but not enough to go into flood mode.

Water has been restored to the Village Creek Blue Bayou, but it is not blue, as you can see in the picture above, the Blue Bayou is currently being the Village Creek Chocolate Bayou.

It is not very hot today, only 85 degrees at half past 2. Barely 80 when I walked with the Indian Ghosts. But it is HUMID. Very, very HUMID. Making the outer world feel very very HOT.

Today was the best steam bath, yet, so far, this steam bath season. When I got back to the air-conditioned comfort of my vehicular transport, my sunglasses instantly fogged up. Since no sun was shining the sunglasses were being a bit unneeded, anyway.

Below is a very short video I shot today of the raging torrent that Village Creek has temporarily become...

We Had Ourselves A Dark Stormy Loud North Texas Night

The view is cloudy from my secondary viewing portal on the outer world on this 3rd Wednesday of August.

We had ourselves a dark and stormy night in North Texas.

Lightning struck, thunder boomed, wind blew and rain fell.

I do not know if rain fell in amounts copious enough to have restored the Village Creek Blue Bayou to its blue state.

I do not believe I will be in the Village Creek Blue Bayou zone today to see if it is no longer a Brown Bayou.

The outer world at my location is currently being cooled, naturally, to 72 degrees. My windows are open. My air-conditioning is turned off.

More lightning is in the forecast today, along with a forecasted temperature high of less than 100 degrees.

Are the Dog Days of Summer over? Or are they yet to come?