This morning I got up, looked out my kitchen window and saw snow. In most of the country this is not very remarkable in the part of Texas it a rare event. We may get one or two snow storms a year and they mostly only last for a few hours. Getting a heavy snow that stays on the ground is very rare. The only problem is that the snow is going to make a mess out of the streets and traffic will be very bad. Oh well, everything looks really pretty under a blanket of snow.

The Fort Worth Stock Yards

I took a drive to Fort Worth today and walked around the old Stock Yards and took a few pictures.


from the 1870s until the 1960s the Live Stock Exchange in Fort Worth was a major cattle market in America. The stock yards are almost completely gone now, there is only the Exchange building left.


The stock yards originally had hundreds of cattle pens, today there are only a few left and the cattle there are only long horns that are on display.


Now the stock yards are home to tourist shops.


The Swift and Armour packing plants that used to process most of that cattle burned and now there are only a few ruined buildings left.







The neighborhood around the stockyards was never a very nice place, it was filled with shops, and resturants and it also had bars, hotels and brothels all of which were for the cowboys, ranchers and packing house workers.

Some of the hotels and bars still exist but the brothels are gone along with the packing houses and the cowboys. I love the only buildings and the cowboy heritage of the stockyards but I usually avoid the place because it is a tourist trap.

Halloween

Yesterday was Halloween and all kinds of kids showed up for trick or treats.




There was a cowboy and a cowgirl.






A beautiful princess came to my door.




and a monkey



Some were kind of on the grown-up side.

and some were little bitty babies.

and some were babes. The evening was a real treat for me and no one played any tricks on me, I look forward to Halloween next year.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/miltonted/sets/72157622583946963/

The Japanese Festival at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden

I have been working a lot of weekends lately but not this Saturday. Today I went to Fort Worth for the Japanese Festival at the Botanic Gardens. There were lots of things to see like bonsai

and ikibana

and a few really interesting people.


I had a real treat and got to listen to a koto concert

I have heard the koto before but never live. The music was beautiful but there was a lot of background noise. I thanked the musician after the concert and she promised to e-mail me when she is going to have another concert so that I can hear her play in a better setting. Something to look forward to.

A train show and a pottery sale.

There was an ad in the paper yesterday for a model train show at the Lockheed Martin Recreation Center in Fort Worth. I have never been to a model train show before and I thought it might be interesting. There were a lot of vendors selling model trains and supplies.

The big attraction for me was the model train layouts.

The model trains were a big hit with the children.

Some of the trains were very fancyful and some were very realistic and all of the trains were a lot of fun.

After I had looked at all of the trains I went to the pottery show and looked at pottery.

The pottery was interesting but there really wasn't anything I could use so I looked at everything and bought nothing then went home and cooked pork guiso for dinner.

A rainy Sunday afternoon

There is usually very little rain during the summer here in Texas and this year was no exception. The comming of fall brings cooler weather and rain and this week promises to be quite wet. There was rain all day Sunday and as much as I love rain it was too wet to get out for a walk.

I had spent the morning reading the paper and it was time to get out of the house or go stir crazy. There was a new antique store in town that had just opened so a trip there seemed like a good idea. I spent an hour looking around and taking pictures of their stuff.

I loved the barber chairs but they really belong in a barber shop; some of the furniture was nice though. Some of the dealers had a lot of household stuff.

The sewing machines were nice, my mother used one like the one on the floor for many years

One dealer had a whole wall full of clocks.

Another dealer was selling old radios.

Mostly they were just selling odds and ends. It was a really fun trip and I had a good time looking the place over but it made me kind of sad, I am older than most of the stuff they were selling. I thing they need to call this something other than an antique store.

The Arbor Hills Nature Center in Plano, Texas

I was driving about aimlessly when I stumbled on the Arbor Hills Nature Center in Plano. Plano is an affluent suburb of Dallas and the nature was very nice. There were lots of wide concrete paths and there were a lot of families there going for a walk

The city of Plano had done a great job of planting and restoring the black land prairie grasses and plants.

There were also quite a few places where they had planted native flowering plants that were quite beautiful.

The real treat for me was finding this beautiful fellow on the path. I believe it is a rat snake which is a harmless and as it's name implies it eats rats and other small animals. It is a very rare thing to see snakes or any other wild life in heavily used parks so I felt very fortunate. I also stayed long enough to be sure the snake made it off of the path without someone stepping on him.