It did have something to do with going down to the Fort to help College Girl clean out the old house and taking about a dozen black garbage bags to the dump, only to find out that the entire Fort Worth Dump enterprise had been cancelled for an “employee furlough day.” Yes, that is right. Labor Day weekend, some of us need to clean out the garage, side yard or whatever, but the City of Fort Worth cannot pay its bills, so it gives employees an unpaid day off on a Saturday and I have to drag all the half-ripped garbage bags back out of the Suburban, pile them in the side yard again, and plan to come back later.

I go to Twitter and read a few posts, and @LizardDawg is writing that we need to “take back what Obama has given away.” Tell me, @LizardDog, are you referring to Obama being responsible for taking away the dump operating hours? No, you can’t mean that. It must be the mayor, Mike Moncreif, and the City Council who did this.  They also closed all our public pools this summer, then said, “well, you can just go to the YMCA if you don’t have a pool.”

Now, the suburbs, for whatever reason, have not been driven to such an extremity. Denton has a beautiful public pool with a waterslide and friendly lifeguards and shade and a snack bar. And there’s other stuff, such as a school orchestra for my 5th grader. The Denton dump was open today (only until noon; I suppose Dentonites are earlier risers than the Fort Worthians, who may have been whooping it up at Billy Bob’s the night before and therefore unable to reach the dump before afternoon) but by the time I realized that Fort Worth’s was closed, it was too late to hightail it back north.

When I got home, I decided to change this site’s name to DFW Renaissance. We still cover Fort Worth, particularly College Girl will have an angle, but Dean wants to review some arts performances in Denton, as well as some stuff in Dallas in addition to the operas he’s been covering.  I knew it had to come to this, I was just uneasy about what people would say. Was I disloyal to my old friends? But no. Overall, it’s a win-win. We’re not abandoning Fort Worth, we’re … adding more of North Texas.

At any rate, now I’ve changed the masthead if not the URL. We are now, at least nominally, DFW Renaissance. I guess this means I should add some other DFW blogs to our blogroll. Stay tuned; I will see what I can come up with.