Food & Shelter

First, the Food
My favorite wife and I went for an old-style drive in the country today, a very welcome return to something we used to do frequently. The cost of gasoline being higher than it was when this was our weekend routine made this a bit of a pricey endeavor, but well worth it. Our destination upon leaving the house was the small town of Tioga, Texas, about an hour or so from our home in north Dallas, if one were to drive directly to Tioga. We tend to meander a bit. Our more specific destination was a barbeque joint called Clark's Outpost, a place we'd been to once before but about which neither of us remembered much. Roadfood.com says nice things about it, so we decided it was worth a try.

The roads to Tioga, at least the route we took, take you through horse country...lots of people in the area have, for one reason or another, decided that something is right in the area for raising horses. Mile after mile of white plank fences mark properties along the roadway, punctuatged with large, majestic entrances to horse farms named after families and old Mexican towns and letters of the alphabet. Development is moving toward Tioga at breakneck speed. It's a shame to see cookie-cutter developments racing toward the open scrub prairies and pastures, knowing that the land will be blanketed with housing, strip centers, new roads, and massive malls before long.

Anyway, we got to Clark's Outpost just before the luncheon rush. Most of the patrons were, or seemed to be, locals who knew the waitstaff and other patrons. And most of them seemed to have recently been at church, though none of them offered to convert me. My wife ordered a chicen fried steak with cole slaw and something else and I had a beef (brisket) and sausage plate, with a side of fried zuccini with horseradish dipping sauce and a side of collard greens.

I was satisfied with the food, but not particularly impressed...but the character of the place (a well-worn country restaurant that serves as a meeting place for lots of rural folks from the area) makes it worth stopping again if we're in the area.

We took our time coming back, stopping to look at some model homes that were intended to imitate the style of Savannah, Georgia's gracious homes and dropping in to a few grocery and sundry stores. I was impressed with the model homes, some of which had large covered and screened porches, complete with rocking chairs.

Shelter
When we got back, I discovered that one of my sisters had forwarded a link to an article on SF Gate about shipping containers used as the basis for housing design. I've always been a fan of such things, so I took a look. I suggested to my sister via email that we should go in together to start a family compound in Falba. Later, when I discovered that the lower-end cost per square foot estimate ($76) does not include foundation, plumbing, electrical, etc., etc. I think we may have to be our own general contractors. But I love the idea of using shipping containers. For one thing, their appearance lends them to being used to imitate some of Frank Lloyd Wright's spare style, or maybe they're really more like Mies van der Rohe's designs. In any event, I like the way they look and I like the concept. I wish I had the money and the free time to ramrod a project like designing and building a house using used shipping containers as the base.