Free Shred Day Was Impessive!

Saturday was the 9th annual free shred day at Iron Mountain's facility in Mercer Business Park (luckily, I knew where it was from shooting the complex when it was under construction). It was an impressive operation and I left completely satisfied that my documents were shredded right before my eyes.

The event was co-sponsored by Fox News and Comerica Bank. They, in turn had also supported their community food pantry, the North Texas Food Bank. I had medical, old tax records, old bills paid 15 years ago (before the days of electronic billing known as going paperless).

The lines went fast. It was a stay in your car type thing. The volunteers brought a bin-cart right to the car, dumped the paper into the cart and then pushed the cart to the the big truck that lifted it to the top and dumped it into the shredder. It was out to the road where the Farmers Branch police stopped the I-35E service road traffic and I was on my way!

I've already started a box for next year! And this time, I'll bring some food cans for the North Texas Food Bank.

The line, the big shredders.

The dumpster carts, the big shredders

Lake-a-Palooza! This Weekend

Spent the afternoon keeping an eye on the Hawks and watching the stage being built for the Lake-a-Palooza at the Cultural Bath House at White Rock. Also had a chance to talk to the ladies from the Dallas Master Gardeners as they put new markers on the plants in the water-wise garden about the new flowers in the Water Filtration Garden. They were as I had explained what they looked like. The women had gone over to the filtration building. Today, they had their report and I am so glad that they had and ID on the blooms. 

Peony Poppy

This Weekend at the Bath House Cultural Center at White Rock Lake

The stage is under construction. The fence is going up where beer sales will be available and the weather is going to be sunshine and 85!

Storms,Torrential Rains, 70 MPH Winds, Flooding,

Getting to the Dock Might Be  A Little Bit Of  A Problem.

Humor Situation

Last night was a nail biter. The rain came down in barrels,not buckets. Winds hit 70 MPH, power was off for over an hour and flooding was everywhere. I'll do a couple of post with the damage. Some of it was a bit funny (as there is always some humor in the worse of situations).

One of Several Big Trees Down

A Deck Fell Into The Street.

Fourth Largest Metropolitan Area In US

New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas. That's the official numbers released over the weekend. From 2017 to 2018, Dallas added 131,000 new residents;since 2010 the area added more than one million new residents.

Today, since it was Easter, the lake would be a nightmare just getting around so I decided to point the car toward Deep Ellum and take the south Dallas route over to Lamar and come in the back door to  Reunion Tower, downtown and made it over to Trinity Groves to Sylvan. The flood gate off the bridge was closed so made it down to Irving Blvd. and the Design District circuit and outbound again  to Mockingbird; made the southern loop around Love Field, out Marsh to Forest and back roaded it into the drive way. For the first time in a long time, every spoke of the wagon wheel circuit had something going on in major changes. Every single spoke. I've been doing this for 10 years and have never seen all the spokes having something major happening in all the spokes. So, today was a good day pretty much for building the storytelling of this blog.

While making the tour, there are some things that deserve mention but for one reason or another, an image can not be published. Almost twenty years ago, now, I worked the  Deep Ellum area and called on the sales department for the Dallas Mavericks. The project came through channels from the CEO of a Fortune One Hundred. As a result, a grant was secured from the Fortune One Hundred for the Deep Ellum Foundation.

While I go to Deep Ellum on a regular basis with one of the spokes, I don't usually go by the Mavs building there as it is a bit off the Elm Main Commerce Streets that flow from Deep Ellum into Downtown and through the tunnels at Dealey Plaza. But, today, I discovered that Dirk has officially made a wall in Deep Ellum. It was is considered street art officially, but the mural was signed and while people do use the image, my editors will not take murals like that any longer, even as editorial and by rights, it is an editorial image with Dirk.It's kind of like a catch-22 situation.

I-30 "the canyon" on the south side of downtown before it hits the I-35E horseshoe

The renaming was done in good taste (pardon the punk WP)Wolfgang operates the restaurant in Reunion Tower, just across the tracks, but you can use the tunnel here to get there..

This was built as the Belo Corportation HQ, the operators of WFAA-TV and Dallas Morning News. The Belo Mansion is cross town on Ross Avenue. It was also a funeral home and Clyde Barrows of famed Bonnie and Clyde lay in state there. It's now home to the Bar Association as in Lawyers.

A big crane is out side First Baptist, multi-block campus downtown. They just finished about $130 Million expansion and the crane is  a sure sign that another project is at hand for the mega church.
One of the near by 10-story open-.parking garage is getting new louvers in an architectural cover to reduce the 'eye sore' of an open 10-story garage with all the construction going on. Dallas Museum of Art had a massive tent on the Ross Avenue side. The Belo Building had the second architectural  awning not only on the ground floor around the building but also on the roof as well. There is a new mid rise building north of Fountain Plaza ( that's the building that has a pointed design), Union Station's been renamed for Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson.

For the first time, I got to see the new "small" houses that the city built to some of the homeless. Actually, I wouldn't mind having one of them, myself!! There is a company in Garland that builds them on trailers. I've been looking at them and actully think that I would even like one of those. 

Have A Great Easter

Happy Easter

Metroplex Parking Garages Are Full.

Blue Iris

One guy even said that it looked at Christmas at the Mall. The storms are due to hit between 10pm-2am. Baseball size based on the strength of the storm seems to have everyone freaking out. Just last month, the area received over $100million in damages, plus. The car dealerships spent the last couple of days moving their cars into garages and under hail tents.  There has been so much damage in the Metroplex of late from large hail storm that people seem to be in panic mode. It's a catch-22 situation, too. The weather guys want to warm people and rightly so, but it gets carried to far with the way the news cycles are rigged.

It was even funny during the afternoon news that starts at 4PM here. One guy had covered his car with pool noodles, all tied together neatly. One , had covered in blankets, pillows, even a purse hanging over the door handle. And, a Gardener covered his cars and windows with bags of mulch. Now that seems to be the winner in my book because you don't have to tie those down. The weight of the bags are held in place by gravity and it's gonna keep baseball-size hail from breaking windows and putting dents into the hoods and roof.

One line of thinking came from a guy that said that it was cheaper to pay the $9 parking fee at DFW airport garage than pay the deductible of his car insurance policy for glass and repairs. Several of the large public parking garages had filled up by noon. One family parked three cars in one garage and drove the worse car to collect everyone at the garage from their family and take them home. The garage only had enough space to park one car.

Winds are expected up to 70 MPH. All-in-all it's spring time in North Texas. This is our month before it moves north in May and farther north by June and ding ding ding as the hail will sound. The universities cancelled classes and activities beginning at 6 tonight.

The forecast for Easter is sun, sun, sun and warm 80 degrees. Did I mention clear skies? Don't laugh. It was overcast today and by three o'clock this afternoon the sun was breaking through the thick clouds.That only adds fuel to the instability of the atmosphere and makes the strong storms even stronger The squall line is coming together as I type this. The overall system slowed down and it does seem that the hail cores have reduced in size to nickle, dime and quarter size.

Iris on a Lake

A male wood duck

Thunder,Lightening,Wind,Hail,Flash Flooding

It was a jolt from sleep. Normally, I hear muffled rumbles of thunder and weak flashes of light if  I wake up at all. Last night was something else. The roars of thunder were astonishing as was the flashes of lightening that lit up my bedroom through blackout drapes. It was so unusual, I grabbed my phone and checked the NBC weather App to see a line of storms covering the Metroplex all the way back to Abilene. As it was, tornadoes hit Franklin, Texas south of Dallas.

 While it wasn't as bad sounding after the initial jolt, it still could be heard enough that I cap napped for another two hours before finally giving in to a return to sleep. I slept beyond my usual time to wake up by over an hour and that was interrupted with yet another round of rowdy thunder and lightening. Had that not happened, I might have slept to noon.

It was closer to two before I got out of the house with umbrella in hand. And a troublesome tire picked today to be the day to split at the shoulder and was nearly flat. So, my first stop was to the friendly tire shop to get a new tire. Some days are just filled with surprises and I deal with them as they come up. There is no need to worry about things that you cannot control.

There were still several weather hazards still active of which one was a flash flood warning for White Rock Creek. That is always one that will bring me to the lake even if I hadn't planned on going. The flow of White Rock Creek is like a river, not a creek, and  in the summer, the Trinity River is more like a creek than a river. It's one of those misnomers that is somewhat of a paradox. The flow of plastic bottles and debris is rather sickening. It comes from all the northern burbs and get picked up in the runoff flow of alleyways, ditches then into storm drains and into White Rock Creek.

As I made my way around the lake, the secondary spillway and White Rock Creek below the tidal pool from the main dam and spillway were level with each other. That's normally a 30 to 40 foot drop. The USGS gauges in the tidal pool were all under water. I didn't even check the website because the readings would not be posting or at flood stage or above. But, it was drawing a large number of  people to take photos and selfish with the roaring water behind them.

When I made my way down West Lawther, the parking areas and docks were all pretty much empty but alone the shoreline, the high winds had pushed the debris flow all the way across the lake from where White Rock Creek enters the lake to the west side of the lake's shorelines. The water didn't get as high as I had thought that I would find it and that is a good thing. The clean up of plastic will be confined to the shoreline in a about a two foot wide band of wood and plastic.

This is the tidal pool below the main dam and spillway. Where  you see a line between smooth surface and more rough water is where the secondary spillway steps down that 30 feet drop. White Rock Creek begins again right at the bridge line going south into south Dallas where it flows into the Trinity River. From there its a few hundred miles to the Gulf.

Here comes the water over the dam and down the long and wide spillway into the two channels on either side of the island into the tidal pool before it makes that left turn at the secondary spillway that is big blocks like steps that drops about 30 feet in height where it returns to White Rock Creek again 

The west side of the lake where the debris has collected for several hundred yards.