COMMENT OF THE DAY: LOOK OUT FOR THOSE TWEAKED TOWNHOMES! “. . . My reason for staying away from those townhomes…Any one of those townhomes could be easily tweaked in the future to be 2 apartments. Pair that with the common driveways and you could easily have alot of people sharing a pretty small area.” [justguessin, commenting on Comment of the Day: Here Come the Almeda Promoters]
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COMMENT OF THE DAY: HERE COME THE ALMEDA PROMOTERS “Washington ave is already done. . . . Whats next you ask….Almeda (59 to med center)….two bars opening right now and four more planned on the way. Wide streets, lots of empty places to park, a community who wants the crowd and can handle it better than wash or mid town. The two bars that are going in are building out in empty spaces right now but more on the way with some new buildings planned. You will all want to know where I get my info but [ride] down and you will see for your self what I know.” [Dj Ashby, commenting on Comment of the Day: Reading the Washington Ave Crystal Ball]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: READING THE WASHINGTON AVE CRYSTAL BALL “Eventually people will get sick of having no place to park and the hot spot will move on. Prediction is for Brixx to go out of business within six months, Eight will turn into a restaurant within a year and Taps will probably stay as it is. Not sure about Roosevelt – could become a restaurant as it does have a parking lot of its own.” [MC, commenting on What It’s Like to Live on Center St.]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: ASHBY HIGHRISE GAME ON “Ultimately, the developers used the intricacies of the city code to try to slip this by the neighborhood. Then they complained when the neighborhood used the intricacies of the city code to block it. Boo effin’ hoo.” [Fatt Fistery, commenting on Ashby Highrise Lawsuit: It’s On!]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SANDMAN BROUGHT ME A DREAM “I live near the Sandman Center, what some people erroneously call Shepherd Square (Shepherd Square is @ Westheimer; Sandman is @ Richmond), and this sort of thing is exactly what our neighborhood experienced during the heyday of the late 90s when the ‘in’ scene was concentrated at Richmond and Greenbriar with 8.0, the Pig Live, Guava Lamp, and all the others. Drunk people wandering up and down the streets looking for their cars, unable to remember which residential street they parked on, yelling to each other, peeing in your yard, leaving their beer bottles in your yard, etc. Add to that the fun of having your cement lawn sculptures thrown through your windows, as some of my neighbors experienced. The only remnant of the chaos of that period is the road humps on Colquitt and West Main, although at one time I believe those streets had ‘no parking this side of street’ signs, or “no parking midnight to 6AMâ€, or something like that. Be patient; in a couple of years the ‘in’ scene will move to someone else’s neighborhood, and your property values will triple. Ours did. But hey, I once found a $20 bill on the sidewalk while I was on my way to the post office.” [GoogleMaster, commenting on What It’s Like to Live on Center St.]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE SOUND OF LIQUOR SALES “There’s been much incidental info over 50 yrs or so (and specific studies since the 80’s) showing that increasing noise in drinking establishments predicts higher rates of consumption. I’m sure that’s in every every bar-owner’s bag of tricks now. In fact, there’s a point in the evening when the lights are perceptably dimmed and the background music gets louder.” [movocelot, commenting on How Does a Nice Meal at Discovery Green Sound?]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LIVING WITH A HOARD 
“. . . Children of hoarders are often very well dressed and high achievers – but they never invite friends over to their house because they are so ashamed. . . . My sister and I were honor-roll kids with impressive resumes. Yet we lived without heat or water for months at a time because my mom was too embarrassed by her hoard to call the repairman. We lived with 5-foot high stacks of moldy newspapers. But we were lucky – my mom never got so bad that she hoarded animals, or food waste. When she died, it took us 3 months to clean out the place. We found her missing diamond wedding ring in her old desk, among rotting rubber bands and rusty paper clips.
The person with this apartment is obviously very ill. . . .
Hoarding is notoriously tough to treat. Hoarders don’t respond to many of the drugs that are usually used to treat OCD. I wish that there WERE a magic pill I could pop to help me with my hoarding tendencies (for example, like a person with ADHD has problems focusing on schoolwork, I have problems categorizing objects and assigning them their actual value. That is why severe hoarders think that food wrappers and cigarette butts are somehow valuable and shouldn’t be thrown out).
Riluzole, which is a medication used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the few medications that may show some promise. I just happened to find out about this because my mom died of Lou Gehrig’s. In the last months of her life while she was taking the Riluzole, she allowed us to throw away ten years of newspaper stacks without a whisper of protest, which stunned us. . . .” [Ruthie, commenting on Inside the Messiest Apartment in Houston. Ever.]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: GOING ALL OR NOTHING WITH IKEA “There’s nothing worse than a room of quality furniture and then one piece from Ikea. The only way to do Ikea is to do everything Ikea and basically rip-off one of their show rooms.” [biggerintexas, commenting on Neighborhood Guessing Game: Loveseat Convention]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: READY FOR A FLOOD OF GUESTS “The Tremont House issued the following statement on this incident:As reported by the Galveston Police Department, there was an unfortunate incident on Saturday at The Tremont House which resulted in some slight damage to the hotel. Although the hotel still has two guest rooms out of service, the general operation of the hotel has not been disrupted. The hotel is currently determining the final cost of damages but estimates are approximately $25K, significantly lower than initial estimates. The hotel is operating as usual and is taking reservations for the upcoming Mardi Gras celebration including its 26th Annual Mardi Gras Ball scheduled on Saturday, Feb. 13. . . .” [Christine Hopkins, commenting on We Shall Rebuild! The Great Downtown Galveston Hotel Flood of 2010]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: LOTS CLEARED BY UNFORCED ERROR “In my neighborhood there is one empty lot where a developer purchased a really lovely old home, deemed it a “teardown,†and THEN found out that deed restrictions prohibited subdividing the [really] large lot. . . . On the other hand, if the potential buyers of the land in my neighborhood had done their due diligence at the beginning (when the estate was being probated the buyers were lining up, it was nuts), perhaps the old ranch house would have been renovated, or a new single home would have gone up, appropriate for the neighborhood. Now the land is empty save the old citrus trees and tumbled down brick wall at the egdes of the yard. And the owners get to pay property taxes based on their inflated valuation of the land, and keep it mowed, too. Maybe the present day lending restraints will prohibit such magical thinking by developers in our old neighborhoods. Meanwhile there are plenty of undeveloped lots laying around because the original plan didn’t quite work out the way the buyer intended.” [Karen, commenting on A Sunset Heights Lot Size Turf War]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: INSIDE THE STANFORD FINANCIAL GROUP OFFICES AT 5050 WESTHEIMER “I have been through this building and it is decorated entirely in a (expensive) mahogany-green marble color scheme, put in place about 10 years ago. There is a large Palladian skylight with an ornate stair connecting the upper levels. Sir Allen’s office was huge with floor to ceiling wood paneling with some impressive wood coffers on the ceiling. Allen wanted all the offices around the world to look the same, so they all used this exact same color scheme. The furniture was of the not-so-inspiring big heavy mahagony type and the art on the walls were bad Audubon print reproductions. What was so wierd about the office was how empty it was. This was 2002 and there was almost noone in the building, despite the extreme amount of money that he spent renovating it. There were rows and rows of empty offices and the parking garage had the same empty feeling. There was a private dining room and a commercial kitchen in the building also, with a full time chef (food was great!). The whole building seemed as if it was supposed to present an image of old money grace and prestige, but somehow, it just wasn’t quite right.” [mt, commenting on Westheimer Office Building and All: Allen Stanford Says Sell!]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: NO RESPECT FOR THE LAND “I was so infuriated when developers planted these oak saplings on what was once a lovely, open prairie!” [Unsid, commenting on Tying White Ribbons ’Round the Doomed Oak Trees: Is H-E-B Coming to Wilshire Village?]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: IS IT REAL OR IS IT HDR? “I don’t photoshop my pics. My skills are worse [than] this one. I wonder: What about HDR photography? I have never used it in my marketing, but some of the images sure border on fantasy as well.” [Thomas A. B. Johnson, commenting on A First Glimpse of the New Dynamo Stadium“]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: MAKES IT EASIER TO CRUSH THOSE COMMUNARDS, TOO “Parisian city planners were met with similar narrow-minded criticism when they decided to construct grand boulevards in medieval Paris. The result was the Champs-Elysees and other notable conduits. The visionaries at METRO must ignore similar insuferable fools and carry on the worthy goal of bringing automobile independent mass transportation to Houston. The University line is the lynch pin of the ongoing expansion and these plans should be approved with all deliberate speed.” [Landed Gent, commenting on Metro’s University Line Acquisition Line-Up: What Stays and What Goes Along Richmond Ave.]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW HOUSTONIANS CAN LIVE LONGER, MORE SATISFYING LIVES “I’ve managed to avoid the Galleria area for 2-3 years now and quite enjoy it! That area is a constant pain, construction or not. I’m sure I’ve added a few extra years to my life merely by removing Uptown as an option for anything.” [tanith27, commenting on Trimming Uptown Trees and Driveways: Where Metro Is Shopping for Land on Post Oak Blvd.]