Cottonwood Art Festival in Texas

Richardson, TX teachers are showing off their art work at the Cottonwood Art Festival through Oct. 7 at the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts in the same city.

The artwork will be available for public viewing 10-6 Mondays through Saturdays and during all public events. The event features over 200 artists from across the U.S., England, and Canada as well as live music.

Sharon Campbell is one artist whose work was featured in the festival in 1994 and 1993.

The address is 2351 Performance Drive.

The Eisemann Center features three venues for performing arts and corporate presentations according to their website. A dramatic lobby mediating among the performance spaces and the adjacent public plaza, connects the venue on three levels, states archrecord.construction.com. The 116-square-foot facility cost $43 million to build. It opened in Sept. 2002 and is located in Galatyn Park.

In unrelated event news, the Fifth Annual Clean Air Bike Rally will be held Oct. 27th at 9 a.m. in Trinity Park in Fort Worth. The event is free and will take place rain or shine for the ride which is 12.5 miles long and has various levels of difficulty. The ride is limited to the first 300 registered riders and there are no children under 12 allowed riding bikes and no training wheels. No racing is allowed and riders must stay with the group at all times. (Source: dfw.daybooknetwork.com).

Cyclists in Fort Worth can fill out a survey online which is being used by the city to draw up a new transportation plan including bikers. The website is fortworth.gov/tpw and the deadline is Nov. 9.

In other event news, on Nov. 3 if you have tons of documents to shred and are not a business, check out Shred Day, a free event in Fort Worth from 9-2 at Vista Fibers of Fort Worth, 1100 NE 23rd Street. All Fort Worth residents are eligible to participate. Limit is ten boxes or about 500 pounds. Destroying documents with personal information is an excellent way to thwart identity thieves. For information, go to fortworthgov.org/dem.

"As if it's not enough that a theif is stealing someone's identity every 79 seconds and the Federal Trade Commission reports that identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the U.S., you should also know that in more than 25 percent of all cases, the victim knows or is related to the thief," says Brian Koerner of idtheft.about.com. "Even the dumbest identity thief is likely to know that your mail and personal documents will hold the key to the kingdom."

Nowadays you can even get mobile shredding to combat the problem of unscrupulous dumpster divers, for instance.

According to egovmonitor.com, more than 100,000 people are victims of identity theft in the United Kingdom each year.