TheBanyanTree: Harvest Moon

[Janice Money]

I haven't been to Costa Rica but Sonya Kozicki-Jones is still there, working
at the university.  We're still writing to each other.  

Remember Sonya and Tim?  Tim died of renal cancer some 11 or 12 years ago.
Their little girl Phoebe is all grown up and is a mother herself.

Janice

-----Original Message-----
From: thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com
[mailto:thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com] On Behalf Of Jodene
Sent: Tuesday, 5 October 2010 3:16 PM
To: A comfortable place to meet other people and exchange your own
*original* writings.
Subject: Re: TheBanyanTree: Harvest Moon

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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