Rearview Mirroring TX Towns

Texas has 254 counties and about 1030 school districts. In googling for the exact number of districts, I ran across different totals. Every 10 years, school district boundaries require verification. Texas Education Agency (TEA) is in charge of delineating the borders. The project is harder than it might sound. School districts expand, contract, consolidate, disagree with other districts over where the borders are, use natural borders that change because of nature, etc.

Back in the early 90s, TEA hired me as a contract "mapping technician", a title much more impressive sounding than the reality. I, along with other co-workers, needed to verify Texas school districts' borders according to legal definitions. (School district superintendents mailed back a TEA-sent letter.) Also, we needed to read descriptions that might be subject to different interpretations. One task was taping narrow red tape (!) on paper maps to delineate the boundaries.

During my time at TEA, I logged the names of many cities and towns—160, to be exact—because they caught my eye. I recently ran across my hardcopy file while reorganizing my workspace. Because I couldn't find Broom City in my computer, I knew I'd need to re-key the list before I could write a decent article about the places. As I re-keyed, I could see certain commonalities gel—lots of food, bodies of water, communities, money, gaps and related, wordplay (homophonic), a few names that could either try peoples' spelling or induce residents to learn spelling quickly, comforting words, a few peoples' or celebrities' names, shooter's paradise, ...

I've listed my best theme categories and cities/towns, a subset of the group I logged originally. I omitted county names so they won't dilute the collective impact of the names. A file with the names of all 160 municipalities and their counties is available in a table-formatted file. An asterisk below (*) denotes a municipality that I put into more than one category (asterisked in its first category appearance).

Food (one of my favorite subjects)
Oatmeal, Pancake, Sunny Side Community*, Coffee City, Teacup Community*, Honey Island*, Pecan Gap, Atwater Prairie Chicken (national wildlife refuge), Turkey, Birds Nest [soup], Krum* (okay, not the most appetizing, not normal spelling), Plum, Punkin Center (ok, another not normal spelling), Crabb (phonetic anyway), Hungerford (not food, but related), Bootleg Community*

Water bodies and related
Runaway Bay, Lake Run-A-Muck*, Hide-A-Way Lake*, Lake O' The Pines*, Possom Kingdom Lake, Bland Lake, Lake JB Thomas, Newgulf (24 miles from Old Ocean), Old Ocean (24 miles from Newgulf), Canyon Lake, Canyon Lake Acres, Canyon Lake Forest, Canyon Lake Mobile Home Estates, Canyon Lake Shores, Canyon Lake Village, Canyon Lake Village West, Honey Island (42 miles inland), Rock Island (80 miles inland)

Communities
Bootleg Community, Teacup Community, Sunny Side Community, Tobacco Patch Community, Type Community, Profitt Community*, Ding Dong Community (in Bell County), Eulogy Community*, Welfare Community, Old Bowling Community

Structures
Structure, Sweet Home*, Fosters Store*, Guys Store*, Carls Corner*, Pearsons* Chapel

Words of comfort
Comfort, Point Comfort, Sweet Home, Blanket, Cool, Sublime, Happy, Smiley*, Sunny Side Community, Eulogy Community

Money
Cost, Dinero, Cheapside, Nickel, Dime Box, Jerry's Quarters*, Lohn*

Gaps and related
Cranfills Gap, Indian Gap, Buffalo Gap, Notrees, Nada

Names and celebrities
Bumstead, Kermit, Bigfoot*, Bebe, Panna Maria (Virgin Mary, not bread), Big Sandy, Jerry's Quarters

Shooter's paradise
Gun Barrel City, Cut and Shoot, Bangs*, Point Blank, Trophy Club

Body parts or features
Cheek, Wink, Smiley, Shiner, Bald Hill, Bangs, Whispering Wings, Bigfoot

Hyphenations and apostrophications
Jot-Em-Down, Lake Run-A-Muck, Hide-A-Way Lake, Lake O' The Pines, Hell's Half Acre, Jerry's Quarters

Apostrophe deficiency
Fosters Store, Guys Store, Carls Corner, Pearsons Chapel

Wordplay (mostly homophonic)
Lohn, Hoop and Holler, Priddy, Inadale, Arp, Tye, Blewett, Pyote, Rhome, Profitt Community, Krum, Dew

Other special names
Loves Lookout, Barwise, Pelican Spit Military Airport (Reservation), Tool

Rear-viewing Year of Blogging

I started blogging just about a year ago, having decided my output would be three times a month, which breaks down to one about every ten-day period. For some people, that's way too seldom. Well, that's the pace I can live with. I want to put out quality, well-thought-out writing that frequently includes links, which are often time-consuming to vet.

Journey start
I joined my writing clublet, TheWriteJob, a little over a year ago to meet other writers and would-be writers. The community blog sparked my interest in contributing to it, and to eventually launch my own blog. After having published six articles there, I registered for my own blog. I ported my previous articles over (truncated and linked the earlier articles); and have been publishing here since.

Theme
In setting up my blogspot, I thought about my theme. I came up with "writing mostly for language enlightenment, entertainment, and a-muse-meant". It became more of a guide for me to determine my article topics. Low standards—if I fulfill any of those broad categories for an article, I succeed in achieving my topic goal.

Theme expansion into categories
A few months ago, I added a line to the theme, as I felt categories were starting to pop up. My category labels—language, tech communications, EZ recipes, food, wordplay, humor, music, tech topics, and how-to's—also form the basis of my article today, compiling and analyzing stats of my year in blogging. I'm omitting discussion of Google Analytics. I use them, but don't have enough of a fan base or readership to report anything impressive. :-)

First compilation file
*LinkedIn membership required to view this file*
Awhile back I had created an compilation file that included the article title, linked url, publish timeframe (early, mid, late part of specified month), and summary. The format was 2-column landscape. Recently, I decided to redo the compilation file. Numerous times of adding and removing column breaks with every update to make the file look nice started to irk me.

Second compilation file
(Newer! Improved! Now with category descriptors!)
*LinkedIn membership required to view this file*
The impetus to change the formatting was wanting to categorize the articles, logically the descriptors I thought of. Also, I knew I'd want to write and time an article pertaining to the 1-year milestone. I removed the column formatting and breaks, then converted it into an 11-column table. The first column has the title, URL, and summary, the second column has the date I published, and the rest of the columns have the category descriptors and check marks. Because food is near and dear to my heart, I highlighted food rows in yellow to make them stand out.

For each article, my new compilation file has check marks in the categories I consider appropriate. For further enhancement, I highlighted the rows that had food themes. I did pause over designating some category names for a few articles. For instance, can a food article be a tech article? Yes, I decided "Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel" fit the descriptor of tech topics because of history, techniques, and related background.

I waffled (food!) over articles about language and technical communications. Most that fit in one category also fit the other category. In looking at my table (place for food!), language was more predominant than my profession of tech comm (writing, editing).

Stats (drum roll! yum!)
Since September 6, 2009, I have published 36 articles. I don't include the current article in my stats, although I will have updated my table to include it (code green). Deciding categories was the longest part of the process. The fun part was tallying everything—the number of check marks for each descriptor, the number of checkmarks for each article—first for each of the five pages of my printout (yes, hardcopy!), then adding them up. Natch, if I had a LOT to tally, I would have put everything into Excel. I used Word. (Gasp!)

Category	Qty check marks
Language	20
Tech communications	14
EZ recipes	8
Food	11
Wordplay	15
Humor	21
Music	10
Tech topics	16
How to's	18

Articles with the most descriptors—a 3-way tie with 6 descriptors each
Fish Fries Telephone
Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel
Technical Communications Means

Articles with the 2nd most descriptors—a 5-way tie with 5 descriptors each
Vocabs of Steel
Greater Less Fewer More Thans--More or Less
Bad-Prose Rants from Lady Wawa
Pronunciations Heck with Hermione and Homage
Color N R Lives

Rest of article quantities (titles omitted)
Note to novice statisticians: I tic-marked the article quantities and added them up to confirm they total 36—no duplicated counts and no undercounts.

Qty articles	Qty descriptors
2	4
10	3
4	2
2	1

Categories for this article
For this article, I would categorize it into technical communication, food (coupla nibbles!), humor (minor rib ticklers!), tech topics, and how to's. I don't consider light mentioning of the other categories to quite warrant checking off all the descriptors. :-) Although I did not include numbered steps that indicate a process, I think there's enough of a road map feel here for people who want to put information on a grid.