Goings On

Here are a few of this week's happenings in So Tex:

--I've been trying to buy a 2008 wall calendar. Tried Barnes & Noble and Quips N Quotes; both said they were out of stock until November. Office Depot had some kitten and puppy calendars and some wannabe Asian art; I wasn't about to pay full price for that. Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena stocked calendars year round, so I never thought it would be a problem to find one here in February.

--A local guitar teacher/music store owner was charged with raping a 13-year-old guitar student on Valentine's Day. Two days later, another front page story said he'd been accused of raping a 10-year-old relative.

Last year, I interviewed the same music store owner/accused rapist for a Valley Girl article. Mike remembers him being suspicious when I said I wrote for the newspaper, but I don't. I do remember not wanting to write about the place once I walked in.

--I took our recycling out to the bin and saw huge piles of debris along the drainage canal. The canal banks and bottom had been bulldozed and all the cattails and other plants from the canal were piled up dead on the banks. There's trash floating in the brown water. I saw that the gnarled Mesquite tree growing by a paved area of the canal was gone, too.

I'd seen turtles sunning themselves on the cement by the Mesquite tree. Occasionally, I'd see a white Heron looking for a meal among the cattails. We'd find toads in our yard that I'm sure spent their tadpole days in the canal. Whenever I'd walk along the canal banks or go down by the water for a closer look, there was a vibrant ecosystem at play: butterflies, dragonflies, minnows, birds, plus the turtles and frogs.

I know the drainage canals have a job to do, and they seemed to be handling runoff just fine. I'm sad that someone thought it necessary to denude the banks and canal bottom and scatter (if not decimate) the ecosystem it had become.