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History through Philately — Texas becomes the 28th State
On this date in 1845, the Republic of Texas entered the United States of America as the 28th state.
When the United States bought the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, the U.S. attempted to include Texas in the Purchase. In 1819, after sixteen years of dispute, the boundary was set at the Sabine River, which is the current border of Louisiana and Texas.
From 1819 to 1836, Texas was part of Mexico. On March 2, 1836, Texas declared its independence from Mexico, becoming the Republic of Texas. As most declarations of independence do, this one resulted in a war between the Republic of Texas and Mexico, including the Battle of the Alamo, lost by the Texans, and the Battle of San Jacinto, which resulted in the Texans soundly defeating the Mexicans.
Texans elected Sam Houston as President of the Republic but also endorsed Texas entering the Union as a State. The likelihood of Texas joining as a slave state delayed formal action by the U.S. Congress for more than a decade. Congress agreed to annex the territory of Texas in 1844, and on December 29, 1845, Texas entered the United States as a slave state. A dispute involving the southern boundary of Texas resulted in the Mexican American War, which the United States won.
The Mexican American War ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in which Mexico ceded the current lands currently comprising California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as parts of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The southern boundary of Texas was set as the Rio Grande river.
Other interesting facts about Texas:
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The south Texas farming and ranching community of Kingsville welcomed me to the world on March 11, 1955. Kingsville is located in the disputed territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. -
Texas is pretty much a red state, which is one of the many reasons why I don’t live there anymore. I left on April 15, 1993, and arrived in San Diego 12 days later, taking a circuitous route to Fargo, North Dakota; over to Seattle, Washington; and down to San Diego.
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Texas has a gross state product (GSP) of $1.307 trillion, second behind California’s $1.936 trillion. If Texas were an independent country, its gross domestic product (GDP) would rank as the world’s 11th largest. -
Texas does not have a State income tax. Its money comes from property taxes and sales taxes.
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Texas has a population of 26,059,203, making it the second most populous state (behind California).
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Texas is the second largest state (behind Alaska), with 268,820 square miles.
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Texas is headquarters for 57 Fortune 500 companies (tying for first with California). -
Texas has three cities ranked in the Top 10 for population: Houston at #4, San Antonio at #7, and Dallas at #9. (California also has three cities in the Top 10: Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose.)
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My hometown of Kingsville has an average high temperature of 65°F in December. However, on Christmas Even 2004, six inches of snow blanketed the city. -
Texas has the most farms and the highest acreage in the United States.
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Texas leads the nation in livestock production — cattle, sheep, and goats.
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Texas leads the nation in cotton production.
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My alma mater, Texas A&M University, is the state’s first public institution of higher education and has the state’s largest enrollment at 53,337 students (fourth largest in the nation). It is the nation’s only land grand, sea grant, and space grant university. Texas A&M also has the largest main campus of any university, with 5,500 acres. -
Two presidential libraries are located in Texas: Lyndon B. Johnson in at the University of Texas at Austin and George Bush at Texas A&M University. A third one is in the workds, George W. Bush at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
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The Texas healthcare system is ranked third worst in the United States by the Commonwealth Fund; 25% of Texans do not have health insurance, the largest percentage in the nation. -
Texas emits more greenhouse gases than any other state, with Port Arthur (a heavy oil refining locale) having some of the dirtiest air in the United States.
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I survived many hurricanes and tropical storms while living in Texas, the most significant of which were Beulah (1967), Celia (1970), and Allen (1980).
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The deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States was the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 people.
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My childhood home in Kingsville, courtesy of Google Streetview:
I planted the two oak trees after Hurricane Celia in 1970. They were just a foot high.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Thank you to my Family!
Please, sit down. Let me tell you a story. It’s a story about discrimination, hatred, and prejudice. It’s a story about me.
I grew up as the product of a large Mormon family (mom) and a large Catholic family (dad). Both religions taught me about discrimination, hatred, and prejudice at a very early age. They are the main reason why I am not affiliated with any religion 57 years later.
I was born in Kingsville, Texas, in 1955, and lived there until 1960, best I can tell. We lived in Tyler, Texas, from 1960 to 1961. After my dad killed himself with a handgun, my mom moved us to northern Utah (Logan, Brigham City, Wellsville, Hyrum) to be closer to her Mormon side of the family.
I was a juvenile delinquent, and eventually either my mom and stepdad decided to get rid of me, or the State of Utah took me away from them. Either way, in September 1965 I wound up as a ward of the Thomas D. Dee Memorial Hospital in Ogden, Utah.
At “The Dee,” I met Barbara Hunt, an 18-year-old woman from Bakersfield, California. She also was a ward of the hospital. Barbara befriended me and helped me write a letter to my wise old grandmother (MWOG), my dad’s mom. We couldn’t send it because I had no idea where MWOG lived. However, that night an address came to me in a dream: “Mary Agnes Kirk, Kingsville, Texas.” That was it. We sent the letter. It arrived. By Christmas 1965 I was living in Kingsville, Texas, having been adopted by MWOG.
Without that adoption, I’m convinced that this juvenile delinquent would either be dead at the hands of a Utah law enforcement officer or spending life in prison. MWOG gave me what all children need, regardless of who they get it from (mom & dad, mom & mom, dad & dad, mom & friends, dad & friends): love AND discipline.
MWOG laid down the rules, and she told me what the punishment was if I broke the rules. After I broke a rule and was punished, MWOG would let me cry for five or ten minutes, then take me to the bathroom where she washed the tears from my face with a warm wash cloth, dried my face, gave me a kiss, and then told me that the same thing would happen if I broke the rules again. It only took twice to understand that she meant what she said — I wasn’t exactly stupid.
During my formative years in Utah I was exposed to the N word; blacks were not welcome in our
all-white Mormon neighborhood and school. When I got back to Texas in 1965, the Catholic side of the family continued with the N word but also introduced me to other disparaging words for Mexicans, Spanish descendents, Chinese, women who worked (i.e., were more than just a person to cook meals and provide sex to the man of the house), etc.
When I went off to college at Texas A&M University, one of my ramp mates in Puryear Hall was a black guy from Nigeria (I’m pretty sure he has nothing to do with all the email scams coming out of Nigeria). I acquired a newfound respect for people of different colors, nationalities, and ethnicities.
I arrived in San Diego in April 1993 and camped out on the beaches for eleven months studying the world’s great and not-so-great religions to see if there was a place for a coming-out-of-the-closet gay person. I determined that there wasn’t. At best, there were a few tolerant religions, such as Church of Christ and, to a much lesser extent, Episcopalians and Presbyterians. The latter two have taken a few steps backward since 1993. I remain unreligioned.
In March 1994, I put myself back into the work force. Eleven months doing nothing but laying out on the beach isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I hired on with a temp agency, and the first job they sent me to was a
foul-mouthed old man. I stayed for the morning but did not go back after lunch. For my next job I was supposed to report to a person named Alana Infantino. Being a naive country boy, I had no idea what kind of a name Alana Infantino was, but since the job paid exceedingly well, I went.
Alana was a woman. Ack! A working woman! Ack!
Alana and I hit it off, and eventually I took a full-time permanent position with her company. I was to be the legal word processor/project database manager/network engineer in Detroit, Michigan (Farmington Hills, actually). Alana took me out to eat and gave me a verbal introduction to the Detroit office. I found out that in the Detroit office there were working women, working blacks, and even working black women! Ack!
I made friends with everyone. Learned a lot about the world, too.
That was 1994. Here in 2012 I have a new family. None of them are related to me by blood. That family has been summarily dismissed. I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. My new family comprises Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Turks, Poles…..well, take a look at my WordPress flags from yesterday:
My new family also comprises women, men, gays, lesbians, straightees, married, divorced, single, old, young…. It’s a wonderful family and to my current way of thinking, much better than my old family. So here’s a “Thank you!” to my new family for keeping me involved in the world, and learning.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
I’m a cat napper…. So there! (cat napping pictures included)
Throughout my life I’ve never been able to sleep well. Or so I thought.
I’d be in bed at night, but after falling asleep for a couple of hours, I’d wake up. Not being able to immediately go back to sleep, I’d read a book….. under the bed covers…. using a flashlight. Man oh man was my wise old grandmother upset the first time she caught me. But just getting caught and punished didn’t stop me from reading. Besides, why punish a child for reading? It’s not like I was getting up at night and sneaking out the bedroom window to carouse the town. That didn’t start until a few years later. I wonder if there’s a correlation between being punished for reading and sneaking out instead. Hmmm.
At Henrietta M. King High School in Kingsville, Texas, I learned to schedule the late lunch (12:30; early lunch was 11:30), P.E., and Study Hall in the afternoon so that I wouldn’t fall asleep in an important class.
At Texas A&M University, I scheduled all my classes for 8:00 a.m. to noon, 1:00 at the latest. Then I could go home and sleep for a couple of hours. The nice thing about early morning classes is that all my final exams were on Monday and Tuesday. I was out of school two or three days early each semester over those people who always scheduled afternoon classes.
In the work world after college, I would never go out to eat lunch with co-workers, choosing instead to take an unknown-to-them nap in my car. Eventually the world found out about people like me and started calling our naps “power naps.” Whatever. They always made fun of us, though, for “always being tired.”
Now comes David Westcott writing an article, “Do Not Disturb,” in the April 23 2012 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. Westcott quotes Ronit Rogoszinski who describes herself as “an expert ‘practitioner of the power nap.’ ” Rogoszinski says, “By noon, my brain starts to fry.” What does she do? She heads to one of her favorite hideouts, her car, “to recharge” (code for taking a nap).
Westcott found that on Wall Street Oasis, an investment banker Internet forum, people were obsessed with daytime napping. He found tips on “sleep hacking” (developing “polyphasic sleep schedules“), lists of places to nap, and tips on how to act if you’re caught napping.
One commenter discussed napping on the toilet, saying that it’s best if you have your pants up and the seat down. The toilet stall is one place that I never tried. Maybe later today.
There is a difference, though, between using naps to make up for lost sleep, such as when you have a newborn child, or a close family member is in the hospital. There are some people — like me! — who have no specific reason for losing sleep and needing to make it up during the day. We are called lazy when we’re caught napping during the day, or, at best, “short sleepers” or “sleep pros” if we still get more accomplished than our non-short sleeping colleagues.
Westcott quotes Dr. David Dinges, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who encourages workday napping, or “multitask relaxing” (can’t we just call it what it is? Cat napping!). According to Dr. Dinges’s research, one’s “cognitive ability depends on how much sleep one accumulates over a 24-hour period, not just overnight.”
Dr. Dinges encourages people to work for short periods followed by a nap — “sleep reinforcement” he calls it. “Rather than fighting to stay awake at your desk with diminishing cognitive returns, work on it in your sleep.” And I wasn’t even part of his research!
Whenever I have a particular problem to solve, I have found that a quick nap, a cat nap, helps me solve it, often to the point that I will dream about it and various ways to solve it, including benefits and problems relating to different scenarios. These are not REM dreams because I never reach REM sleep, according to the sleep research 
that I have been involved in (Boston Medical Center, Houston Medical Center, UCLA Medical Center, Texas A&M University).
We cat nappers are gaining acceptability, but since we’re only one to three percent of the population, we need to “come out” to our family, friends, and
co-workers as what we are:
cat nappers. I’m a cat napper….
So there!
SNIPPETS are short posts about anything and everything.
Each SNIPPETS will have at leasst one picture.
After all, this is Russel Ray Photos.
