Silently bounding—
A great cat in the forest;
The puma passes.
This is the one and only haiku I have ever written. It’s not my favourite type of poetry, but I must admit it’s better than free verse. In my humble opinion, haiku is more suited to the Japanese language than to English.
…at least not until now! Although I’ve made quite a few websites for myself and for others, and even though I’ve had the domain name benjaminbruce.us for quite a while, I have just recently gotten around to making a central website to be a hub for all my other ones.
So, if you’d like to, please check it out! It was lots of work making the design for this website, but I finally got it looking like I wanted it to. It’s even trilingual, so hopefully more people will find it that way.
An update: I recently purchased the domain name benjaminbruce.com (whoever had it before finally let it go), so I am in the process of switching everything to this domain. BenjaminBruce.us will still work, but I’ll be phasing it out, so go ahead and change your bookmark if necessary.
An essay on the proposed merger between Hudson Oaks and the Annettas
Things are changing rapidly in east Parker County. Of these changes, growth is probably the most significant, as it has triggered many other changes. Growth is inevitable, and as our area continues to grow in population, special care must be taken that good decisions are made, and when various issues arise they must be handled properly and in a way that would be of most benefit to the people.
The Annetta Community was first settled in the late nineteenth century, and through the industry and perseverance of its people, it has endured to the present time. Long before the community was incorporated, it had a school, a general store, a post office, a cemetery, and three church buildings. Although in past decades the population of the community declined, it was incorporated as the three Annettas in 1979, and soon thereafter, if not before, the population of not only Annetta but also the surrounding area began experiencing rapid growth, which we are still witnessing.
The city of Hudson Oaks, to the north of the Annettas, was incorporated in the late 1970’s, and has also experienced tremendous growth in recent years. Probably due to its location along Fort Worth Highway and Interstate 20, many more businesses are located in Hudson Oaks than in the Annettas, and consequently it has much more of a “big city” atmosphere about it.
Read More
I identified this shiny green beetle as a Fiery Searcher (Calosoma scrutator). I freed it from the bucket that it was in earlier in the week, but just yesterday I found it again (or another just like it) in the same bucket!
This is a (usually) dry creekbed near our house, and last week we had enough rain that it started flowing!
In an effort to tidy up my web presence a bit, I have decided to take the most drastic step of getting rid of Blogger and switching to WordPress. Nothing against Google, it’s just that I was tired of the boring template and all the formatting trouble it was giving me.
Having said that, I now officially welcome you to my new weblog, christened Ziphen Central. The history behind the name “Ziphen” goes back to my early years in homeschool, when I did a certain assignment which required me to create a menu for a fictional restaurant (a very interesting activity, to be sure). Being the creative person that I am, I couldn’t settle for just an ordinary name, so I came up with the imaginative name Ziphen’s Restaurant. A few years later, I liked the name so much that I gave it to my room, which was, for a time, the capital of the Republic of Niwic. Because I still like the name, and because it is the name of a very special place, I cannot think of a better name for my blog.
In closing, I hope you will continue reading my blog, though it is now in a different location, and please update your bookmark if necessary. I hope to someday make my own theme for this blog, but a Marscape will have to do for now. And, if you ever want to go back and look at BenjaBlog, it will still be there for those who want to search the archives.
