TheBanyanTree: Harvest Moon

[Jodene]

Dale - I am older than you and I have
Learned Spanish in the last few years.
Costa Rica is a wonderful country and the people are very nice and  
they like
Americans(wonder of wonders!)

Re: water wars- northern Californians
have hated southern Californians ever
since they "stole our water" more than
half a century ago.

Take care.

Jodene







Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 4, 2010, at 8:43 PM, "Dale M. Parish" <parishdm at att.net> wrote:

> I'm starting my sixty-third winter now, and today was a reminder of  
> six more months of weather cooler than I enjoy.  Friday, I stepped  
> out of the Driver's License office and they were loading hay in the  
> same hay field from which I used to haul 45 years ago, and I  
> remembered the warm weather and being slathered with hay sticking to  
> our sweat-soaked bodies.  I wonder if I lived in a more temperate  
> climate, if I'd miss cool weather.  I think not.
>
> I think of the equator-- is that an extreme?  Maybe.  Couldn't say  
> until I'd tried a year or two there, but real estate on the equator  
> outside of Brazil doesn't appeal to me.  Costa Rica!  I remember  
> reading recently that Costa Rica abolished its army in 1949 and  
> diverted the money into education and social services, and now has  
> one of the highest literacy rates in the world.  That appeals to  
> me.  I don't speak Spanish, but I think I'm not too old to learn,  
> although language doesn't come easy to me.  Johnson O'Connor rated  
> me at the sixteenth percentile in language ability.  But to get out  
> of cold weather, I think I could learn Spanish.
>
> How high is the retirement age emmigration from this country.  Two  
> friends of mine left here and moved to northern Thailand, and are  
> still trying to talk me into joining them when I retire.  They make  
> it sound encouraging most of the times, but then they talk about  
> having to leave the country every month and go to Cambodia to cross  
> the border and return to keep their visas current.  Not sure how  
> that might work if one of them were to become hospitalized or  
> incapacitated to the extent that they could not make that trip.   
> Hope not.  For their sake.
>
> I've been thinking for twenty years that I'd like to retire to  
> central Texas, in the hill country.  But I know nothing about living  
> on that land-- I'm concerned about water rights.  Texas is about to  
> become divided politically over water rights-- while east Texas has  
> enough water, the Dallas/Fort Worth area has long since grown beyond  
> its means to provide water for growth, and a dirty fight will be  
> fought in the court rooms of the state trying to decide the fate of  
> the water from the Neches River soon.  T. Boone Pickens wants to  
> water-mine and destroy the Ogalalla aquifer and pipe it all to  
> Dallas, and would if he could.  The largest aquifer on the planet--  
> formed over 200 million years-- would be gone.  It seems to me a  
> shame to allow that to happen, but the white man's laws seem to  
> permit destruction of such things with little or no recourse for the  
> future.
>
> Texas has some strange laws regarding water.  The state owns it  
> all-- surface and subsurface-- but if you own the water rights,  
> you're allowed to take it from the guy downstream of you.  In some  
> cases you can use it but must put it back when you've used it-- in  
> others, you can use it all and return none to the stream from whence  
> it came.  But water is not a mineral-- you can own mineral rights  
> that give you the right to pump the oil or mine the minerals from  
> under your land, but you don't have to own water rights to pump sub- 
> surface water.  Yet.  If you don't live in a MUD-- Municipal Utility  
> District.  If you do, then you can be forced to buy water from the  
> MUD's well or treatment plant.  Strange.
>
> So where do I go that I feel like I can get enough water to  
> subsistance farm the rest of my days out?  Land's getting expensive  
> in the hill country, and water already is hard to come by there.   
> Guess it's getting tough all over.
>
> Hugs,
> Dale
> --
> Dale M. Parish
> 628 Parish Rd
> Orange TX 77632
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