The House & Animals at 1019

Hello....I am Mike Firth and I live just east of downtown Dallas, Texas in a older part of town. My wife is a blind person who works downtown and I at Elliott's Hardware, the best hardware store in town (and probably in Greater Texas). I was a self-employed independent computer programmer from 1977 until I finally got burned out in 1996. I got my job at Elliott's because I have done some serious home rebuilding in the past, including leveling the house, re-roofing it, rebuilding the garage, and installing new sewer and water as well as new electrical service and wiring. I do some metal work and blacksmithing and I like cooking and having plants and birds around. My primary hobby is glassblowing.

This page is mostly for sharing photos with relatives and friends. We live east of downtown Dallas in an area of homes built in the 1920's that is slowly going back to ownership, mostly Hispanic, after years of increasing rental places with absentee landlords.

The house is not too large. The tree growing in the front yard is a native pecan, the second in the location, the first having been knocked down by the neighbor across the street backing out of the drive without brakes. At the date of the picture, I began working on reinstalling a split bamboo water trail around the tree, water being pumped from below the rocks and falling back on them. Barely visible to the right of the tree is a vertical brown post that will support some water drippers and glass spinners.
The wheel chair ramp was added on short notice after our friend Suzanne Whalen fell into a manhole on Valentine's Day weekend, 2000, and has now become fairly permanent as her recovery is limited. The short ramp to the left was added after she got a motorized wheelchair and got her retrained guide dog, Caddo, back. 2001-05-18

Note growth of tree later in previous year and huge growth of rosemary next to guy walking around car. At the end of May 2001, a post was added to the corner of the yard after these guys drove across it several feet in, you can see clipping the yard in the image above. The small white wood ramp above was later replaced with concrete.  2003-08-16 and the long ramp has since been replaced with one twice as long for less steepness and to repair the rotting plywood surface.

This is an aerial view of the house - enlarged and cleaned up in a graphics program.  1019 is the white roof centered in the image with the grey roofed smaller garage behind it.  You can see the original by going to the City of Dallas interactive maps or follow this link http://maps.dallascityhall.com and type in 1019 Martinique Ave. or try this http://tinyurl.com/ce22bd which points to [which Front Page finds too long to hide.] http://maps.dallascityhall.com/index.asp?ExtentLeft=2507219&ExtentRight=2508276&ExtentTop=6978297.67123046
&ExtentBottom=6977302.32876954&idCmd=NONE&x1=7&x2=&y1=199&y2=&tool=&click.x=7&click.y=199&
Requests=on&selectpt.x=2507748&selectpt.y=6977800&selectpt.stat=Parcel&mo=1&Address=&Zip=&Identify=All&Ae
rial=on&Cmd=ZoomIn&msize=small&AF=1019++MARTINIQUE+AVE&Update.x=11&Update.y=10

This is the plan of the house, a drawing first taken from a CADD layout that has lots more details and then the letters were added when we were discussing the replacement of the heating and AC.
  About 1100 square feet, D is doors, W is big windows (5 feet tall and 28-36 inches wide) while w is smaller windows.  The upper 4 rooms are Office, Bathroom, Bedroom and Utility room [left to right] while the lower 3 are Living room, Dining room and Kitchen.  All the rooms except the kitchen and utility remain pretty much as we found them. The utility now has the freezer, washer, dryer, and hot water heater, plus it lost two big windows.  The dimensions are given and if you can't read them, the zig zag is 1 foot on a side. Basically 24.5 by 40.5 feet not including the full width open front porch..  The lot is 50 by 75 and it runs at a slight diagonal (see the line at the bottom of the image - the house is square to the street. 2003-11-08. 

This is Gigi's newest Seeing Eye guide dog, Elana, who arrived home on 27 October 2005.  Although she looks more like a Labrador retriever than not, officially she is a goldador - a cross between a golden and Labrador.  She is heavier than Gigi's two previous dogs at about 65 pounds and older, having been born Sept 23 2003.   This is her official Seeing Eye picture.

And her Seeing Eye dog through 2005's summer, was Dolly, shown below in her official SE picture. Dolly is much smaller (under 50#) than Bianca, who was smaller than the previous dogs. Dolly was Gigi's 6th dog. She died very suddenly of an embolism, being fine looking at 6:15 am and gone by 6:45 am.

Gigi had a Seeing Eye dog named Bianca, retired as a pet, and this is she in the back yard.  She was put to sleep when movements became uncertain and painful.

Dolly was Gigi's lightest dog, starting under 50 pounds and later just over. She liked sitting in Gigi's lap as shown (awkwardly) here. Gigi's face is so red because at the time of this picture, she had spent the day selling NFB chocolate bars in front of Elliott's with other people from the chapter staying shorter parts of the day.

Blackie showed up in the backyard rubbing against my legs one day. She was taken for shots, etc., and scheduled to be fixed, but upon examination, she already had. Very skittish at the start, she now sleeps on the bed and allows petting and ear scratching, but not happy with picking up or cuddling. Will not play with toys or chase strings, etc. Kills mice and rats and brings them to us in the house. Fights off visiting cats, noisily.  She is not actually all black, but has a few square inches of white on her belly, which I didn't see for quite a while after she showed up. Thought of renaming, but she sort of comes to this one and I can't come up with a better name. She comes outside and follows me around as I work.

2003 with Dolly the Seeing Eye Dog

They are about 4 weeks old, so I have designated 5 August as their birthday.  The orange one is dubbed Amber and is a boy, the one with the neat line down its nose is a girl, dubbed Ebony and the mottled one is named Marble.  Ebony is amazingly symmetrical, the black making a mask over the head before a white shawl over the shoulders and a neat white path down the belly with a centered blob right where a cummerbund would be.  They are about 11 ounces each.

I don't know at the moment if I will keep all three.  Amber and Ebony are well matched for assertiveness, but Marble is usually the last in line, hanging back and watching although after two days, she is starting to participate in wrestling matches, etc.  They were introduced to Elana this morning and things were reasonable on both sides. More pictures here.  2007-01-04

We kept Marble, now renamed Spots, and gave away the other two, now named Punch and Judy to a fellow volunteer at Radio and Reading Resource (below)

Beginning in January 2006, I began volunteering at Radio Reading and Recording, by editing the Friday Newspaper of the Air which involves cutting up the Dallas and Ft. Worth daily newspapers and arranging the stories for four other people to read in pairs for an hour each.  It takes me 3-4 hours to do the job.  Picture taken in March.  I am also maintaining the web site for Blind Ambitions Groups where Gigi is doing office work.. 2006-04-26  So here is a rare picture of me taken by someone else.  Blind Ambitions and G and I have gone our separate ways with some dismay involved. 2009-03-24

This post was installed in the backyard so I can fool around with things moving up in the air. The center post is 12' tall and the supports go 42" into the ground. In the right hand photo, it is rigged with an 8' 1x2 with a lead weight at one end. It moved very irregularly and drove the birds crazy.

Now the post has a welded triangle frame about 6' tall that I hope to sag glass to install in the frame, clear first for testing, then colored. As shown below, for the time being I have sewn up a ripstop nylon panel to provide some color and a windmill blade. Not especially clear in the picture is that the two left hand tips are not level. They are almost over each other when this is laying on the ground, so the panel is at an angle to the bearing and the whole rotates in the wind.

This is the frame with glass finally installed in it. See more details at Whirljig.htm and other projects at Projects.htm