texas – Page 2 – To Hither and Yon

San Antonio Parks: Cathedral Rock Nature Park

Okay, so you turn off of Grissom Road into the little parking lot at Cathedral Rock and see a little play area and a little picnic pavilion.

Cathedral Rock Playground, 2018 — The playground at Cathedral Rock taken from a creative angle again because I didn’t want to risk getting any of the kids playing nearby in the picture

You walk a little farther and find this:

Cathedral Rock Park path — A path at Cathedral Rock Park.

And then a little farther on you find this:

Cathedral Rock Park Map — A map of Cathedral Rock Park

And you realize that there’s quite a lot of park to explore here. I focused on the corner of the map for the picture above because Cathedral Rock Park is also a trailhead for the Leon Creek Greenway and the Greenway takes up most of the map.

I took a lot of pictures here and don’t know how many I’ll use. I think there are actually more paths at Cathedral Rock than are pictured on that map, because I was following the map on Pokémon Go rather than using that map and almost all of the paths that they had on the game were there in the park (the only exception I can think of is I think it might be that loop there in the upper-left-hand corner looks like it comes straight back from the lower-left part and rejoins the main path in kind of a reverse D-shape rather than that lasso kind of shape it has on this map).

Most of the paths have the San Antonio trail levels assigned to them, where Level 1 and 2 are usable by people in wheelchairs and Level 3 is usable by really incredibly fit people in wheelchairs and Level 4 is probably not usable by people in wheelchairs. Some of the signs showing which level applies to which paths were in pretty bad shape when I was there and could use some replacement signs.

Finally, why Cathedral Rock? Beats me. The park itself is mostly level with the occasional scattered bits of limestone. Once you get to the greenway, though, you find this:

Which is way more impressive than it looks in the photo. Maybe if the deer had stood there while I took my picture rather than freaking out and running away it’d look less uninspiring.

Now I guess it’s time for a gratuitous Amazon link. I looked at books about limestone, since the rocks of what I assume is Cathedral Rock are limestone, but, eh. So I went back to the same link as I used before and dug up Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail: Washington: Section Hiking from the Columbia River to Manning Park by Tami Asars. I’m not planning on going on the Pacific Crest Trail anytime soon, but the picture on the front sure is pretty and it has 4.9 stars (out of 5) so why not?

San Antonio Parks: MacArthur Park

On my master list of parks, I say that not all of the parks in the San Antonio area are actually owned and operated by the City of San Antonio. This is one of those other parks, which is owned and operated by Bexar County. And it’s quite a bit larger than I expected it to be. The entrance to the park is on the access road for Loop 410 so I figured I could cover it in 15 minutes. I stayed for almost 45. I was also there late in the day, so many of my pictures are slightly overexposed.

McArthur Park has several picnic pavilions and a bit of walking path, but the main feature of the park seems to be playgrounds. The park has three of those playscapes where all of the equipment is connected into one big sort of piece of park furniture and there are additional pieces of playground equipment including swings and a small monkey bar thing that looks like a flying saucer. I found that last one particularly interesting, but couldn’t take pictures of it because there were someone’s kids on it and taking pictures of other people’s children is considered to be kind of creepy. Maybe I’ll return someday and get a picture of that.

Have you played the “You are Jeff Bezos” game? The point of the game is to demonstrate just exactly how much $156 billion is. You wake up as Jeff Bezos and you decide that maybe if you spend all of his money you can get back to your own life. I’m not 100% about the things that the game designers think are priorities. For example one of the options is to revive Mythbusters. I’ve seen like two episodes of Mythbusters and have heard of a bunch more and I’m just not a fan. I’ve just never believed that the five-second rule really means that it takes five seconds for germs to attach to an item dropped on the floor. It’s more a winking “if you fix it fast enough it never happened” thing, I think. So watching two guys drop things on the floor and measure the germs on it just doesn’t seem like gripping television to me.

sad turtle, mcarthur park, san antonio — Concrete turtle in need of repairs, 2018

What I would like to spend a bunch of Jeff Bezos’s $156 billion on is fixing up parks. And McArthur had a bit of stuff that I’d like to fix. For example there are several pieces of concrete art that need a bunch of TLC. The paint is peeling (or has peeled) off and in several cases there are actual chunks of concrete missing. I really do wonder how much it would cost to paint and repair those poor things, if Bexar County would take a donation for that purpose, and if I could write it off of my income taxes.

Now I need an Amazon link. Does Amazon have some kind of “pick a random book” feature? I guess I’ll try to come up with my own. So, searching for “Parks” and sorting by customer reviews, the first result is Urban Trails: San Francisco: Coastal Bluffs/ The Presidio/ Hilltop Parks & Stairways by Alexandra Kenin. I guess that’ll hold me for this post, particularly since seeing the San Francisco area is years away at this point unless this blog thing really takes off or I win the lottery.

Tom Bailey, the B-52s and Culture Club at the Verizon Theater, Grand Prairie, Texas, July 11, 2018

Wow. It’s been an exciting few months and as anyone who has read more than, like, two of my posts will know, I’m a terrible procrastinator and the longer you procrastinate the worse it gets. So I’m pulling up a post I started in late July and finishing it up. I may have a sequel tonight (or whenever I get back to posting here).

Remember how sad I was when Tom Petty died? I may have told this story already, but the year I was in eighth grade, we had to write up the lyrics to our favorite songs for the poetry unit in ~~English~~Language Arts. My two favorite songs that year were Tom Petty’s Refugee (from his (Amazon link ahead) Damn the Torpedoes album) and Rock Lobster by the B-52s (from their (another Amazon link) self-titled debut album (I don’t know why it says “import,” but it is (as I write this) only $9 and it’s the only CD of that album I can find on Amazon)). Good luck figuring out the lyrics to those songs on your own (I’m still a little shaky on the bridge of Refugee, to be completely honest). So instead I picked a song that I liked well enough but, more importantly, that I could understand.

But that began my love of The B-52s. I’d never had a chance to see them live, though. When I realized that they were going on tour this summer, I looked it up and the only Texas show I could find at that point was them co-headlining with Culture Club in Grand Prairie. I’ve always liked Culture Club well enough, but not had a burning desire to see them live. But I figured that I’d get three bands (The B-52s, Culture Club, and Tom Bailey of the Thompson Twins as opener) for the price of one this way.

TL;DR version of the review: The shows were awesome. All of the bands gave great shows. The acoustics in the theater, however, sucked.

I (a) don’t have multiple hundreds of dollars to spend on concert tickets at this juncture (though maybe this part of my travel writing will someday be lucrative enough that I will) and (b) didn’t know about the concert until relatively late. As a result, the only tickets I could get were fairly high up in the theater. I don’t know if we were as high in the theater as we were for Weird Al Yankovic (we were almost up against the wall at the back for that one), but we heard Al just fine. If it weren’t for the way I could feel the bass in my chest, I might as well have been watching this concert on television.

After I bought the tickets for the show in Grand Prairie I discovered that the B-52s do have a stop at the Tobin Center in San Antonio. That show is October 24, 2018 :looks at date on post: and I was so upset by the acoustics in Grand Prairie that it pretty much guaranteed that I’d want to see them at the Tobin Center. That’s the sequel I was talking about. Alex has no interest in seeing the B-52s again, so I’m going all by myself to see them in, well, about 14.5 hours from right now.

Grand Prairie is in between Dallas and Fort Worth and so the day after the concert, Alex and I drove into Dallas to visit Dealey Plaza (where JFK was assassinated). I’d been to Dealey Plaza once before, in, I want to say 2005, but Thomas has those pictures, so I took pictures and we got the conspiracy theory version of events from a street vendor. I’ll hopefully be able to put together a post on that visit soon.

The 2018 San Antonio March for Science

On April 14, 2018, San Antonio held its second annual March for Science. The 2017 march wasn’t as well attended as I would have liked and the 2018 march had, from what I could tell, even fewer people. I haven’t yet been able to find any official numbers of attendees for this year, though.

2018 March for Science attendees — Some of the marchers. You can probably see what I mean about the sparse attendance.

We started out at Thomas Jefferson High School, the third-oldest high school in the city (the first two were evidently the Main Avenue High School (which is where CAST Tech High School is today) and Brackenridge High School (which is on Eagleland in between St. Mary’s and the San Antonio River)). A large number of famous San Antonians attended Jefferson High School including the Castro brothers — Joaquin (a US Senator) and Julian (the former mayor and who was Obama’s HUD secretary) and two Nobel laureates — Robert Floyd Curl, Jr (namesake of Floyd Curl Drive in the Medical Center area? Perhaps) and William E. Moerner.

Jefferson High School has a lovely building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Thomas Jefferson High School San Antonio, Texas, 2018 — Jefferson High School. I actually like this one pretty well.

The Motorsport team from San Antonio College was there showing off the car that they were entering in the Shell Eco-Marathon in East Petaluma, California.*

The opening remarks were given by Ron Nirenberg, the current mayor, and then we marched down to Woodlawn Lake Park, sort of buzzed the park a bit, and then back to the high school. The march didn’t get much attention in the media, so only a couple of people came out to watch us (we also were watched by, and waved at, some roofers who were working on one of the houses in our path). I listened to the speech by the faculty sponsor for the Motorsport team, took some pictures of the building, and then hung around until I started to see people leave.

It was a very enjoyable march. It’s nice to get out with people who share the kinds of interests that I have. I just wish that there had been more promotion of the actual march, so that more people would have turned out for it and maybe we would’ve gotten more spectators.

*They won first place in a design award and fourth in the actual race.

Harvey Update

Well, ultimately, Corpus Christi got off easy. Houston, Port Arthur, and Beaumont, on the other hand, not so much. A lot of charities are collecting stuff for refugees and my pharmacy has filled a bunch of emergency prescriptions for patients who left their medications behind (in a lot of cases, the scripts were ready in the now-flooded area of Texas but hadn’t been picked up yet). We have a “floater” pharmacist on many Thursdays and every Friday and our floater today was amazed at how many emergency prescriptions we’d filled.

Today’s panic was about gasoline supplies. Apparently the trucks with the gasoline for San Antonio are delayed by the flooding. We’ve been assured that there is gas available, it just will take about a week to get here. So now everyone needs gas right now and so the stores that had gas are sold out. Personally, I have about a month’s supply in my tank right now (I don’t drive much — in fact, I mostly end up needing new tires because the rubber degrades from lack of use), and if it takes much longer than a week, I can always take the bus to work on days when I start or end early enough (it’ll add about an hour to my commute time total on a daily basis, but it’ll save gasoline).

I’ve got Alex working on finding old clothes of his that we can donate to the cause. One of my coworkers was collecting clothing and things, but we couldn’t find the clothing in time. I hope that he’ll find it tomorrow and I can take it out on Saturday. Maybe I’ll ask my coworker where to drop them off in her name. . . .

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted about my project where I’m paying myself to study foreign languages. My goal is to get good enough at one of them (I’m really pulling for that to be Chinese) that I can go right to graduate school in the language once I’ve paid myself the thousands of dollars that I would need to pay the tuition and fees. By then I’ll probably be a retiree, but it’s something to shoot for. For reference, so far, including interest (which will go up tomorrow), I’ve paid myself $289.57 in 289 days. So we’re looking at just a titch over $1 per day. The, oh, $16,000 or so it’ll take me to pay for an MA in Chinese will take me about 43 years. I may have to step it up a bit.

Of course, by the time I can afford the degree I may not actually need the degree, except as a piece of paper to prove that I really do know how to do what I’ll probably have been able to do for 20-some years by then. Or maybe even longer if, you know, I step it up a bit.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got Chinese to study.

Harvey’s On Its Way

Author’s note: I started working on this post late on August 25 and while working on it, it became August 26. As a result, read all of the “tonight”s as “last night”s, all of the “tomorrow”s as “today”s and so forth.

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Hurricane Harvey made landfall not that long ago down in Corpus Christi. I’m really fond of Corpus and it looks like Alex and I may be visiting there again to see what it looks like after the storm sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Until then, though, here I sit in San Antonio, looking at the Weather.com map of my city and noticing that my neighborhood is pretty much surrounded by rain.

They’re expecting some flooding for San Antonio and at some point the electricity is going to go out. I got home from work a bit late, as we spent some time covering electronics with plastic bags and things, just in case the roof caves in or something. Then I got to work using electricity while I have it. Alex and I cooked some turkey bacon, I did a load of laundry (and probably will do another one while I settle down for bed), I’m running the dishwasher, and I’m charging pretty much everything that needs to be charged (I’m almost done charging my phone-charging batteries and am about to start on the bluetooth speaker that we bought for the Nebraska trip).

I’m probably going to do a lot of reading tomorrow (particularly if the electricity goes out), since the wind will probably stop me from really going anywhere. I may take a hike down to the creek, which is usually dry, to watch the water flow past (which will make a dent in the 6,700 steps I need to make to get caught up with my goal). And maybe I’ll start to make a dent in my next National Geographic post and, maybe even work on the post that will be the preface to our California trip, which will explain how Thomas and I ended up going to California for the very first time, in the mid-1990s.

Or maybe I’ll just stay in bed all day. That’s a possibility, as well.

Fiesta de los Reyes, 2017

I finally made it to exactly one Fiesta event this year, the Fiesta de los Reyes at Market Square. The “Reyes” of the title is, specifically, the Rey Feo (literally “ugly king,” but some of our Reyes Feos have been quite attractive in my opinion). From what I can gather, the man who becomes Rey Feo is the one who raises the most money towards a scholarship program.

The Fiesta de los Reyes came across as a pretty standard street festival. Fortunately, I love street festivals. There were several stages set up (one under Interstate 35, one on San Saba Street, and at least two down Produce Row).

Okay, you’re going to need some kind of a map. I may have zoomed in on this a bit much, but here it is:

1908 San Antonio Map of the Market Square area — Map of San Antonio from 1909 (and thus in the public domain) showing where Interstate 35, San Saba Street, and Produce Row are (also Houston and Santa Rosa Streets and Milam Park, for reference).

Interstate 35, of course, wasn’t there yet in 1909, because the Interstate System wasn’t even authorized by Congress until 1956. The US Numbered Highway system (things like US Route 1, US Route 6, US Route 30, etc.) wasn’t even in place yet in 1909.

Probably St. Anthony, Market Square, San Antonio 2017 — I’m pretty sure that this is St. Anthony. I’ve been to Market Square a couple of times in the past, but never noticed that little alcove up there before.

The bands that were playing when we were there in the early afternoon were a Mexican group called Dynastia Moreno (unfortunately, I’m not that familiar with Mexican musical styles to be able to identify their style of music. They sounded good, though), a Christian gospel/blues band called, well, Rev. Blues (they’re Texans, but blues bands always make me homesick for Chicago), a cover band of what looked like teenagers that was playing “Enter Sandman” as we walked past, and some other band at the Santa Rosa and Produce Row end of Market Square on a stage on the steps of the old Museo Alameda, which is now the Centro de Artes of Texas A&M – San Antonio. Unfortunately, it was too crowded for me to be able to read the signs giving the names of those groups. I figured I’d be able to look them up later, and I’m having no luck at all with that yet.

The Museo Alameda was an experiment on the part of the people at the Smithsonian. The Museo Alameda was a museum for Latin American art that was a full affiliate of the Smithsonian. It didn’t really catch on, unfortunately, and only five years after it opened, the Museo Alameda closed its doors. San Antonio still has a Smithsonian affiliate, though. Since 2014, the Witte Museum has been a Smithsonian affiliate.

That reminds me, the new upgrades to the Witte are done and Alex and I visited it and took even more pictures. I have to post that soon.

An overhead view of the crowds at Fiesta de los Reyes, 2017 — See what I mean about the crowds?

And, as I said before, Market Square was packed with people. It was a lovely day in the mid- to high 70s, so Alex and I had more energy than we do during the summer months, but it was even a little crowded for me, and I generally love the hustle and bustle of public festivals. So we walked once around and got a little of the fiesta spirit, took some pictures, and then went home. The “walk once around,” by the way? Took an hour and a half.

Fiesta San Antonio

Fiesta is the biggest party of the year in San Antonio and I’m afraid that I haven’t fiesta-ed nearly as much as I should have as a travel blogger.

I guess we probably should go back to the beginning. Well maybe not all the way to the beginning, because that’s when groups like the Apache, the Comanche, the Caddo, and the Coahuiltecans were the only humans in this area of North America, and that’s beyond the scope of this post (I may share some of that part of the history of the area when I write about the various mission). In the 17th Century, the government of Spain decided to expand New Spain, which was located in what are now Florida and Mexico, into the mainland of what is now the United States.

In 1810, Mexico (which included most of the southwest of the United States, which included parts of Colorado and Wyoming) began an 11-year process of gaining independence from Spain.

Well, once Mexico had its independence, Texas apparently decided that this was a pretty good idea, and so they fought a roughly six-month war against Mexico from October of 1835 until April of 1836 (you see that April there? we’ll be coming back to it in a minute).

The first major battle was fought in San Antonio on October 28, 1835. This was the Battle of Concepcion, so called because it was fought on the grounds of Mission Concepcion. The Mexican soldiers took comparatively heavy losses and retreated, making this a win for the Texians (yes, that “i” is intentional — it was the demonym for Texas back then).

Things wouldn’t go so smoothly on March 6, 1836. This was the date of the Battle of the Alamo, in which somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 Texians were killed and Mexico was declared the winner. Most of the bodies of the slain Texians were cremated on pyres near the site of the battle. The exact sites have been lost to history, but I have heard that the place where the San Antonio Fire Museum is currently located may have been one, and others may have been along Commerce Street.

Then, on April 21, 1836, the two armies faced off for the final battle of the war near present-day LaPorte. Ultimately, the battle, known as Battle of San Jacinto for reasons that I can’t quite get confirmation of, took 18 minutes. The Mexicans retreated and the Texians reportedly chased them down, killing as many Mexicans as they could. Nobody ever said that the Texians were good winners.

In the late 19th Century, the city of San Antonio decided to mark the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto with, well, a party. Originally called Fiesta San Jacinto, the centerpiece of Fiesta was the Battle of the Flowers, which was sort of like the Tournament of Roses Parade, if people would rip the flowers off of the floats and throw them at each other. Look, I’ve lived in Texas for 24 years, as of next month, and sometimes I suspect that I’m no closer to being able to explain Texans now than I was back in 1993.

Fiesta San Antonio decorations, 2014 — Plastic papel picado decorations on the River Walk, Fiesta 2014

The name was changed to Fiesta San Antonio in 1960 and Fiesta is now ten days long, beginning the Friday before April 21 and ending not that next Sunday, but the Sunday after that, so an entire week and two weekends. The day of Battle of the Flowers Parade is a day off for many, including all teachers, staff, and students of the schools of San Antonio.

In my 24 years here, I’ve never gone whole-hog for Fiesta. I’ve been to Fiesta events at the Botanical Gardens and I think maybe the zoo once. My mother and I went to Fiesta San Fernando, which is music, dancing, and food in Main Plaza one year, I even attended the Battle of the Flowers Parade in 2014 (it was a parade; except for the Fiesta princesses on some of the floats, it didn’t look much different from the Fourth of July parade in my Chicago suburb home town), but not much else.

I began writing this post on April 28, which was Battle of the Flowers Day, but it took several hours to compose and so now it’s Saturday. Later today, if I can get the energy up to do so, I hope to rectify some of my Fiesta non-participation. I hope to make it to Market Square for their Fiesta event and if I can hack the hour walk there and back, I might check out the King William Fair, as well.

But, before I can even consider doing any Fiesta-ing, I’d better get some sleep.

Update on My Diabetic Cat and A (Actually Travel-Related) Thought

So we’ve been doing the insulin shots for just about a week now. I say just about because we had a bit of an adventure. I gave Kiliamo his first shot on Saturday, April 1, at 7:00 pm. Then I got up at 7:00 am on April 2 and gave him his second. While I was showing Alex how to draw up the insulin, he bent the needle of the syringe and we had to start over. Somehow, we ended up knocking the vial off of the counter and it shattered.

So I called the vet to leave a message asking for a new vial and we had to just hope that another 13 or so hours without insulin wouldn’t cause any damage. Monday morning, I got a message from work asking if I would come in an hour late to cover that shift instead of my original shift, so I planned to get up whenever the vet called and get the insulin. When they hadn’t called by 9:30, I called. The new vial was ready, so I went to get it. While I was driving back from the vet’s office (the only way to make it easily back from the vet’s is to continue down that street, turn at the next corner, and come back up a different street), I get a text asking me to come in right then. Well, I hadn’t eaten, or showered, and still needed to give the cat his insulin. I said I couldn’t be there for less than 45 minutes (and that would have required me to eat while I drove), and someone else offered to come in instead. So I was back to the later shift.

By the time the cat got his insulin, though, it was after 10. When you move a cat’s insulin dose, you’re supposed to move it in half-hour increments. Moving it half an hour at a time, I would have ended up late for work on Wednesday. So I ended up moving it in 35-minute increments, and now he’s back at 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. I’m going to have to move the doses again in June, because Alex stays with his dad for the month and so I’m going to have to work only the late shift and give him his dose at 10:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. for the duration.

Well, it’s definitely been an experience.

In other news, I am often after Alex to take pictures of things and places that he thinks is important or memorable, because they won’t be there forever. I’m having that kind of experience on two levels right now. I was just at North Star Mall getting my pedometer steps in and I remembered that the mall has a basement. When my now-ex and I moved here, it was an Oshman’s Sporting Goods store. And as I walked around the mall, I could not remember where the escalator to the basement was. I think I’m pretty close, but still not quite enough. I wish I’d thought to take a picture, if not of the escalator, of the spot where the escalator had been once it was gone.

The other thing is that the Santa Anita Derby horse race was today. I’ve been past Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California. The first time my now-ex and I went to California, I borrowed the rental car while he went to work and we agreed that I’d find a pay phone and call him at some specific time (I think it was 3:30?) so we could arrange when I’d come pick him up. I passed the racetrack at pretty close to the time we were supposed to talk and I went to a supermarket to make the call.

There was a brief pause there while I gave my cat his insulin. Where was I? Ah, yes, Santa Anita.

So I’ve looked for a supermarket near the racetrack a few times and can’t find anything. This summer, Alex and I will be staying in that part of the Los Angeles area, so I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find that supermarket again. I’m certainly going to try. It was more than 20 years ago, so the area has probably changed irretrievably (?), but just maybe I’ll get lucky and find that store again.

I’m Going to Start Adding Another Dimension to my Park Posts

I’ve found an organization called Falling Fruit, which is attempting to make a comprehensive map of places where foragers can find food. One of the things they are collecting is information on public (or publicly accessible) trees and other plants that are edible. San Antonio has a lot of plants that can be used for food, but its representation on the website is really kind of pitiful, with only 160-some things marked on the map. Austin is a lot smaller but has nearly twice as many locations marked. Falling Fruit is also a licensed charity, so if you are in the United States and want to make a charitable donation, donations to Falling Fruit are tax deductible.

There are prickly pear cactus absolutely all over the place here, and not only can the fruit be eaten, but the pads themselves are edible as well. I certainly wouldn’t want to see the all of the prickly pear cactus being eaten by foragers, but it’s nice to know that it’s there, all the same. And I’m not even listing the thousands of live oak trees that litter the area, even though acorns have been used as food for millennia.

This does mean that I’m going to start revisiting some of the parks that I’ve already visited, to see what I can find there. Today we went back to Phil Hardberger Park and found more prickly pear and a mesquite tree (mesquite pods are edible). There’s supposedly Texas persimmon in the park somewhere, but I haven’t found any yet.