Heading north

Later this morning we'll be throwing the suitcase back in the truck and heading north towards Wisconsin. It's been an interesting few days here in east Texas. Wound up being here longer than originally planned due to the Younger Daughter's car blowing a head gasket this past Friday. She'd been hoping to nurse that Ford Tempo along for a few more months (it only had 235,000+ miles on the odometer) but no such luck. So instead of just being here for the weekend, we stayed longer to drive her around to banks, car lots, her insurance agent, and the garage where the tow truck driver had dumped the Tempo. (Slight digression -- had the rare experience of seeing an honest mechanic. Instead of trying to persuade her to spend a ton of money on an engine rebuild the man told her to junk it, which is what she was planning to do anyway but it was still nice to not have the garage owner try to persuade her it was fixable.) She managed to find a used Chevy Cobalt that is now the newest and nicest car she's ever owned, so she's happy.

Our visits to shade tree mechanics and various car lots was not exactly the type of tour itinerary the local chambers of commerce would probably recommend for visitors to the Texas pine forests, but it was interesting. Got to see several very sad looking downtowns, the courthouse squares that once were the center of economic and community life for towns like San Augustine and Hemphill but now just look abandoned. San Augustine's is actually healthier looking than some I've seen (Jasper's is like the aftermath of a disaster; completely ringed by vacant buildings with not even a bail bondsman or a lawyer's office to be seen), but even in San Augustine there's one entire side of the square lined with empty store fronts, and quite a bit of the rest is occupied by "antique" stores. I don't think there's anything in any of the buildings on Hemphill's square -- maybe an insurance agent, but that's it. No stores, not even a coffee shop that people with business at the courthouse might stop in before or after going to pay for license plates. It's not as derelict looking as the Jasper square, but not by much.

It's a shame from a historic preservation point of view, of course, because those empty decaying buildings are often quite interesting -- much more fun to look at than the basic metal pole shed that gets thrown up these days when Family Dollar comes to town. Nothing against Family Dollar -- I'd rather shop there than at the Evil Empire -- but they don't exactly have the 21st century equivalent of McKim, Mead & White designing their stores. Not that Family Dollar would ever locate on a courthouse square; Family Dollar, just like its bigger box competitors, wants to be on a busy street or highway and not tucked away where there's less vehicle traffic. It's an old pattern, of course. This country is full of town sites where communities dried up and blew away when traffic patterns shifted. In Hemphill you can even date when the shift away from the square began -- there's a very nice 1960s brick bank building done in a kind of futuristic heavily influenced by the Jetsons style that's oriented toward the highway that bypasses the square about two blocks to the east. It seems likely the Texas DOT re-routed the highway circa 1960 to bypass the square instead of looping around it, and businesses began mutating towards strip development instead of being centered on a square shortly after.

So what happens when people start doing less driving? Good question. They're still not going to be walking to the local town squares, not in rural areas like this one. The YD tells me that when she first got here last fall and asked about where to shop, she was told most people in this area go to Jasper (~45 miles away) to shop at the Evil Empire because the Brookshire Brothers store in Hemphill isn't very good. Having been in that Brookshire Brothers store exactly once, the only problem I saw with it then was it's a whole lot smaller than the Publix I'd gotten used to in Atlanta, but perception is everything. And, given the love affair Texans seem to have with both trucks and driving, gas is going to have to get much, much higher per gallon before they start re-thinking driving anywhere -- one of the problems we ran into while car shopping was that 90% of the used vehicle inventory on most car dealers' lots was trucks. Big trucks. Full size or better trucks with quad cabs and dual rear wheels.

I would love to know how people are managing to buy those vehicles. Texas is not noted for high wages in general and the cost of living doesn't seem to be appreciably lower here than anywhere else in the country. YD pays as much in rent here as she would for a comparable house in Omaha. Maybe it's more creative financing, like with the strange schemes the mortgage industry developed to fuel the housing bubble. Or maybe the reason those quad cabs are popular is that for more and more people the trucks are becoming their primary residence. I have a lot of days when I wonder just how average people, the ones who fall someplace close to or below the median household income for the U.S., manage to survive.

In any case, the Texas phase of the vacation is about to end. Did not get to do the one thing I had hoped to while here -- confer with the owner of the sawmill house -- as he's on a fire detail somewhere out west this week, but that can always be done via telephone or e-mail. Overall it's been a nice visit with YD, and, if the weather forecast wasn't for 90s with humidity to match, I'd say I hate to leave.

The news has been on in the background as I've been getting the morning caffeine fix while typing this, and I am tempted to do a rant about feckless weasels like Scott McClellan (as in "where were your balls when they would have done the country some good?!") but I'm not even going to do a link. Anyone who's reading this and is interested has either already done his or her own rant, or simply doesn't care. Besides, it's time to get dressed, throw the suitcase in the truck, and hit the road.

Willis Carrier deserves sainthood

We're in Texas. It is hot. Forget the usual pantheon -- here in east Texas the one person who should be on prayer cards, tacky candles, and cheap medallions is the guy who invented central air.

Your tax dollars at work

The Large Nameless Agency definitely got its money's worth in the filtering software it's using. Check out the web site it won't let me vist:

Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to this web page at this time.
Reason: The Websense category "Sex" is filtered.

URL: http://www.scholar.google.com/

Taking a break

Heading out on vacation tomorrow morning doing a road trip that will take us over to Texas to visit the Younger Daughter in the piney woods of Sabine County, then up through Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin to Upper Michigan. Once we hit the U.P. it will be like stepping back into the 1950s at the "camp" with no computer, no telephone, and no indoor plumbing. There is electricity so it isn't totally rustic. The S.O. and I will be spending part of the time working on the retirement bunker, but most of the vacation will be simply . . . vacation.

No Wolf Blitzer for almost three weeks. It's going to be wonderful.

[Note to self: pack lots of mosquito repellent.]

Blogging isn't an obsession; it's therapy

Jason at the EvolutionBlog has a link up to an interesting piece in Scientific American describing research that's another example of telling us what we all already know:

Blogging--It's Good for You
The therapeutic value of blogging becomes a focus of study

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

I always thought of self-medication as involving kegs or qualudes, not keyboards, but I'm not going to argue the point.

Sawmill houses

A few months ago I got asked if I'd help with a possible National Register nomination for a house located in the east Texas pine forests, a really nice example of vernacular construction and style. The house is one story on stone piers (probably loose laid, but I haven't taken a close look at them yet) with a hipped roof and a veranda that runs the full width of the facade. It's got the classic deep South windows, the ones that come close to being floor to ceiling in height, front door is centered and there's a stone chimney on each side wall. It's a style I always think of as Acadian, but I'm told is referred to as French Creole. It is, in fact, a considerably down-sized version of the plantation house in the photo -- same general concept with the deep veranda, the big windows, hipped roof, but all done a whole lot smaller and minus the attic dormers. It's an east Texas vernacular farmhouse, after all, not the remnants of a high-style plantation.

The style isn't the interesting thing about the house, though. What makes it potentially NR eligible is that it's sawmill construction, and still looks it. Sawmill construction is a technique that's only possible in situations where load-bearing walls aren't going to be supporting a whole lot of weight. An alternative name for the technique is box construction. Putting it as simply as possible, there are no wall studs. As the above photo of the interior of the Klepzig Mill illustrates, there's a stringer at the top, a stringer at the bottom, and sometimes a stringer across the middle, but no vertical studs. The walls are nailed to each other at the corners. What you're seeing when you look at the vertical planks is the backside of the exterior wall. From the outside it looks like this:

The gaps between the vertical planks would be covered with battens. The technique was widely used across the South. It was fast, it was easy, it was cheap. Lumber companies often built dozens of sawmill houses for use as lumber camps or company towns as a cheap, temporary solution for workers needing housing; settlers moving into rural areas to farm used the same technique for similar reasons. Ozark National Scenic Riverways has three examples I'm familiar with: the Klepzig Mill building and springhouse (interior pictured below) associated with the Klepzig farm, and the Suzie Nichols cabin. Although the written descriptions of sawmill construction always talk about it being a 19th century transition between log cabins and balloon or platform framing, the OZAR structures are all twentieth century.

The house in east Texas in some ways is a totally typical sawmill house, while in others it's rather unusual. Among other things, it still looks like a sawmill house -- it has the original board and batten exterior. I've no doubt Sabine County had quite a few others like it built around the same time, using the same floor plan and materials, but they're all either long gone -- razed because they were too small and too old-fashioned -- or so thoroughly covered up with aluminum or vinyl siding that they're now unrecognizable.

I'll be back in east Texas next week. Here's hoping the house still looks as eligible the next time I see it as it did eight months ago.

Speaking of gender equity

Nothing surprising about the headline these days; the twist is in the lead paragraph.

Computer charged to Ga. Tech used for porn, documents show
Employee fired last fall, charged by GBI with theft

A former Georgia Tech employee who was recently charged with theft as part of the ongoing state purchasing card investigation used the computer, Web cam and headset she bought with her card for pornography, documents show.

This is news?

Another one of those no shit, Sherlock, news reports.

No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says
Academic Success Linked to Income

A new study to be released today on gender equity in education concludes that a "boys crisis" in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.

The report by the nonprofit American Association of University Women, which romotes education and equity for women, reviewed nearly 40 years of data on achievement from fourth grade to college and for the first time analyzed gender differences within economic and ethnic categories.

The most important conclusion of "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education" is that academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said.

Go check out the rest of the article. It's definitely another one of those "Doh" moments where social scientists affirm what anyone with two brain cells to rub together would recognize as being fairly obvious to begin with.

Of course, I've no doubt some of the right-wing "men are victims of power hungry feminazis" wackaloons out there (the name Phyllis Schafly comes to mind) will claim the fact the study was done by the AAUW renders its conclusions suspect, but from what I can glean from the news article the methodology and data sources used meet all the criteria for solid research.

Happy anniversary to me

Lots of milestones in May. May 19 marked exactly one year at our current address in Atlanta, last week was the one year anniversary of employment at the Large Nameless Agency, so I spent the weekend kind of moping around the house missing Omaha, missing the Park Service, and generally doing the usual second guessing about roads not taken. I still have very mixed feelings about the lateral from NPS to LNA, even though it did provide more job security (went from being a term employee with an uncertain future to being Permanent [I always feel like should use text art on that magic word, and maybe include some special effects, too, kind of like in the Disney movies when Sleeping Beauty or Snow White wakes up and suddenly there are butterflies fluttering around and birds singing]).

Some of the mixed feelings come from remembering what we left behind -- the 1920s Craftsman bungalow with the great front porch, the quiet neighborhood, and an actual yard -- as compared to what we've got now; some is probably lingering culture shock, both professionally and away from the office. The work I do now is generally interesting and possibly important, but there's no way sitting in a cubicle editing an article on one particular aspect of tuberculosis is ever going to be as much fun as hiking the backcountry at Buffalo National River or getting out on Lake Superior at Apostle Islands.

Addendum: Then again, I did get handed an assignment last week that encouraged me to dream up a nasty contagious disease that started off looking sufficiently benign to lull clinicians into not worrying about it immediately but then had victims dropping like flies -- it isn't every day that a person gets asked to channel Stephen King. I have to admit that this job, too, has its moments.

The Book Meme

The Book Meme is making the rounds. I caught it from Yellow Dog Granny and am about to pass it on. Here are the rules:

1..Pick up the nearest book.

2.Open to page 123.

3.Locate the fifth sentence.

4.Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...

5.Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

The book I grabbed kind of randomly off the shelf was one of John D. MacDonald's Travis Magee novels, Pale Gray for Guilt. Opening it to page 123 I found:

"I might have some good news for you when I get up there."

"I need some good news, and you can believe it. When are you coming up?"

And I'm tagging Bob, Tracy, Jean, (((Billy))), and DaveO.