Good Signs After A Hard Winter, Thus Far

A few days ago, I went to check on the hive of bees that had swarmed in late fall along a trail were I do my cardiac walks. I was somewhat concerned that the coldest winter in 40 years might had taken a toll on the hive.  At first, I grew more concerned as there were not any bees coming and going from the hive. In the fall the bees had covered the entire knot-hole on the tree trunk. Soon, I began to see bees coming out of and going into the hive. In total there were not that many bees, but the hive was alive and well and the bees had survived the winter thus far. There are pictures in the archive if any of you  missed the initial post.

My second concern of winter's wear on wildlife were the Monk parrots that have an established colony of 70 to 80 birds. Today, I saw four. They looked very healthy and somewhat less noisy than in the past, but the missing birds of the colony were every evident. Most likely, more did survive but several people were telling me today that they had been looking for the Monks, too, but had only seen the same four that I had seen. In the past, I have read reports from New York and San Francisco that  had large colonies thinned out by mother nature but the strong had survived hard winters in the most unusual of places. I'm hoping that the WRL colony of Monks will venture back to the lake as the weather becomes more favorable toward Spring. While the little parrots are noisy, they are part of the character of the lake and missing them completely would be a loss no one wants to see.

The early part of the this coming week, it's time to see the cardiologist again. Last week, because of the ice and sleet and snow, the day before, I had cancelled my appointment because driving was not going to be worth the head aces. As it turned out, the weather was right on target and it was a nightmare avoided. This coming week it is going to be in the 70s. Spring is barking for the calendar to turn March!

Monk Parrots

Last falls colony numbered in the 70-80s. Today, there were only 4 sported.

 16/02/2014. Corrected for displacements.

Watching A Plan Come Together

As most of my readers already know, I fully support the growth and expansion of the nation's largest light rail system, DART (Dallas Area Regional Transportation) .  Not only is it well planned in its stops and connection points, it is a clean and efficient way to move people en mass.

Yesterday, it happened again. While in search of one thing, one finds something else that is much more interesting from a photo shoot standpoint than what one has shot already. It seems that some of my most interesting images have come from just such situations. 

Several months ago, DART opened a new station beyond where the blue line ended in Garland. The distance isn't that far being right at the four mile range, but it opens up a growth area with half of it still in Dallas County. The other half is in Rockwall County on the other side of Lake Ray Hubbard.

I  headed toward Rowlett to check out the new DART station location before going to the grocery store. I had a vision of the station ending in a parking lot somehow.  That vision came from the Orange Line's Belt Line Station on the DFW Airport property. Ironically, the other end of the George Bush Turnpike  is within a mile of both the Beltline Station and the Rowlett Station with about 40 miles in between. So, DART has the metroplex well covered.

Come December,  a person can board in downtown Rowlett and ride DART with one change at either the Mockingbird Station or the West End Station downtown to DFW Airport's Terminal A. There are only a handful of cities in the US where one can do that. Dallas joins the ranks in December.

Surprise was a treasure hunt find. It brought back a flood of memories from my childhood that had stirred my emotional well. My mom, for years, pointed out to me, her view of what made a place or a thing a good picture or didn't. To this day, I still feel my mom's presence when I can't get my head wrapped around an image that makes it stand out above the competition. Even when I list images, I check out like images with other stock agencies and since I never re-touch an image, ever, sometimes, mine stand out in  a "plain Jane" kind of way. In the end, however, my images sell for the reason that I had in mind when that image was shot. That is all that I care about. Someone else spotted that one item or one thought or one uniqueness that separated it from all the glitz and glamor of all the others.

Having said all that, the connection is that my paternal grandfather grew acres and acres of cotton on his farm. As a kid, I bugged my grandfather time and time again to let me pick cotton along with his workers. One summer, he handed me a 14 foot sack and said, "are you sure you want to do this?" I can now say that I probably bit off more than I could chew, but overall, I did surprise my grandfather by hanging in there and filling more cotton in that sack than he had thought that I would.

Part of that experience also won me a trip with my grandfather  when it was time to take the raw cotton from all those bags to the cotton gin. It was my second industrial tour. The first was to the dairy farm where we got milk in those big thick glass bottles with the cardboard stopper!

It was the cotton gin in Rowlett that grabbed my focus. Somehow, I got the train leaving the station which sits behind the cotton gin.

Historic Cotton Gin  with DART's new Rowlett Station behind.

 

Aristide Cavaille-Coll

For some reason, the name Cavaille-Coll always invoked the Grand Organ at Paris' Saint Sulpice Church. Or that Daniel Roth was the titular organist there, having his name added to the long list of famous organist who have been organist at St. Sulpice; Paris' second largest church out side of Notre Dame .

It's only been the last year that I have researched Aristide Cavaille-Coll, (1811-1899) the builder of that famous organ and the importance of the systems designed by Aristide, an engineer as grand as the organs he built. There were some 600.

He came from a family of French organ builders. His father, Dominique of the French city of Languedoc and his grandfather, Jean-Pierre Cavaille of Barcelona. The family's legacy is traceable to before 1700.

French organs placed importance on color and contrast. The two things that I have always liked about French organs. In the states, I choose a Casavant Frères,  a prominent Canadian company in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, which has been building fine pipe organs since 1879. The sound is as close to a Cavaille-Coll as it gets.

Aristide invented many of the systems that took the old-world tracker action organs and allowed them to do things that had never been able for organist to accomplish because of pneumatic wind pressures that made pipes speak instantly when the keys were pressed. In the old tracker actions, you pressed the keys and waited for the sound to catch up. Needless to say, the delay between key press and sound was not only hard work manually, but mentally as the timing generally had  you pressing keys to play when the keys released were just producing sound. In other words, you were playing ahead of the sound that you were hearing. Add the echo factor in a great cathedral and you became an expert in delay management. Pneumatic motors and wind chest redesigns brought the organ into a more constant ratio of key press to sound hearing.

I laugh at the Lay Family Organ at the Meyerson Symphony Center here in Dallas. First, the organ is a muddy sounding Fisk and second, it appears to be a tracker yet it has all the modern features of pneumatic. The Meyerson would have been better served and the Lay Family's grateful donation, as well, had the organ been of French design with," a whole blossoming of wonderful colors ,a rich pallet of the most diverse shades, harmonic flutes, gambas, bassoons, English horns, trumpets, celestes, flute stops and reed stops of a quality and variety  unknown before," wrote Charles-Marie Widor about his Symphonie V, written especially for the Cavaille-Coll at Saint Sulpice.

The thing about Casavants in Dallas is this: They are generally found in large Methodist and Large Presbyterian Churches! I understand that characteristic very, very well. With the exception of SMU who in a weird way has many Fisk instalations that sound like a little Meyerson. Ironically, two blocks from the Meyerson in a Methodist church you will find a Casavant. If only Aristide were alive today and living in Dallas!

Homemade English Muffins

Since I was a kid, I have always liked the smell of yeast and dough whisking around in the kitchen, My grandmother made some of the best rolls,
ever. I've only had one in all those years that had that same taste as my grandmother's rolls. So when I got to wondering in the pantry this afternoon and I came across my guarded stash of yeast packets, I knew that baking was going to be the task of the afternoon, I just didn't know what I wanted to make.

When I got down the ole cookbook and started thumbing through the yeast bread pages I came across
something I had always wondered about but never thought to investigate further. That was: English Muffins. Within seconds the yeast was out of the packet and dissolving in my little yeast cup. Flour was going into the big mixing bowl and salt and cornmeal and warm milk and three tablespoons of vegetable oil were going in on top of the flour. Then, looking at the yeast cup, it was time to add the yeast. When the dough was molded into  a ball, it went back into the bowl and was covered with a towel. In an hour, it had doubled  itself and was ready to be pushed out into a quarter of an inch thickness on the  sheet and cut with a three inch cutter. Never mind the cut tuna can rings and that distraction. Cover a cookie sheet with cornmeal and flatten out the dough. Cut and leave on the cookie sheet.

Here is the most amazing thing. Take a cast iron griddle and lightly film with oil. Cook the cut-outs 10 minutes on one side and then 5 minutes on the other. Cool on a cooling rack. I couldn't wait more than a half hour before I took my bread knife, sliced one in half and popped it in the toaster. When it came out, I loaded it with butter and when it was all over, I had done that four times! I'll never buy another tray of English Muffins ever again.

Home made English Muffins

Big Game Sunday Here and There

The weather in Dallas is not the best today. It makes for a good Sunday to stay in and enjoy the big game with a bowl of  home-made chili, too, with low and grey clouds hanging ever lower as the day went on.
The sidewalks are wet and drive is wet from the storm system that has dropped about an inch and one-half over the southern portion of Oklahoma and northern Arkansas. The temps are right at 34 *F.

An old friend sent me a picture of her snow. She has about one and a half inches on the ground. She lives in the boot hills of the Ozarks in northeastern Arkansas' Randolph County. I don't think that we will see that here in Dallas, but sometimes, mother nature has other plans; counting on it is not in my cards anyway. She's north and east by about 500 miles.

Credit photo: Jean Carter-White

 

A Strange Sign is Finally Gonna Be Removed

This is both a follow-up and a new post all rolled into one. Since yesterday, I have been trying to decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Some of you may remember that in the Archive, there is a post about a strange park sign that was a one-of-a-kind made for the Valley View Trail that runs at the end of the White Rock Trail going north three-quarters of a mile to Hillcrest Park. It read: "Beware of Wild Animals".

In summary of that post, I had called the Director of Parks and Recreation  asking about the reasoning behind such a sign. He had explained that when 121 was being made into the Sam Rayburn Tollway, it had actually cut off a fairly large habitat for bobcats and some had gone north in search of better habitat and some had come south for the same reason. The problem being is that coming south put them right in the mix of Plano and North Dallas. Sure enough. About that same time, people in Plano started sending in pictures of bobcats in their yard. Some even had pictures of several bobcats in their yard.

The nature trail in reference here was a dirty path that ran on the west side of Hillcrest Avenue along side the woods that run by the golf course farther west going toward Preston Road. It was also along the path that the bobcats were using to  migrate further south into North Dallas. Because of that, the sign was put up by the Dallas Recreation and Parks Department; with good reasoning.

Yesterday, I got the word that the contractor will be removing that sign as they expand the White Rock Creek Trail Northern Extension project over that nature trail path. It is scheduled to be complete by July according  to one of the contractors that I spoke with. He also, when queried, stated that he had seen bobcats in the area but they should move on after the work is complete since they are rather solitude in their natural habitat. Runners and bikers will keep them on edge enough to cause their migration to continue, but a displaced bobcat in the city won't be happy until its in deeper woods. Hello, Trinity River Bottoms!

Here are some images of the area as of yesterday.

Capital Improvement Info Board

Let the trail continue north This is the new path that will be concrete and ties in at the 7 mile marker of the White Rock Creek Trail presently.

Looking under Hillcrest Avenue, the original trail is to the right of the orange barriers.

 

A Second Star Walk of Fame

Did you know that there is another Star Walk of Fame? There is and it's in downtown Garland.
Oh, it's not as glitzy as the one in Hollywood, but it is a Star Walk of Fame none-the-less. When Sid Grauman opened his Grauman's Chinese Theatre on 18 May 1927, it was the most spectacular in history for a theatre. Ironically, Garland's walk is just outside the Plaza Theatre.

Out side the Bisby Plaza Theatre

Theatre donated in 1991

Billboard list the names of the Council and others when the project was created.