Much to the delight of the community, our little town is sitting upon a 20 year reserve of natural gas. It has never been drilled before, because the price of natural gas has not been high enough to warrant getting to this reserve. This reserve has been hard to get to because of the shale that has to be cracked to get down to the gas, plus they have to do horizontal drilling which is a fairly new/costly technology.
Every weekend I see gas folks walking the neighborhood, trying to get people to lease their mineral rights and give them access to the gas under their property. At the same time homeowner associations are banding together to try to negotiate better lease agreements between neighborhoods and the big gas companies that have come to town to court homeowners. There is strength in numbers. The media has begun to talk about these activities, and one comment this morning was"our part of the country will not see a recession because the gas reserve is our own little stimulus package".
The people who own the land where a drill site is located and people with large pieces of property, will fair pretty well. I just don't know how much income this will actually generate for a homeowner. Nevertheless, if it were a little warmer, I'd invite the neighbors over to have a BBQ to celebrate our good fortune and we'd all take a dip in the cement pond.
The heat was so bad that before the concert, the concert organizers were out on the stage telling the girls to hold up their hands if they felt dizzy or felt that they needed medical assistance. Then they proceeded to spray down the crown with fire hoses, which 30 years ago I would have thought that was great fun, but not anymore, so we kept our distance. Luckily, I had been to my share of out door concerts as a teen, and had come prepared with lots of water, sunscreen and snacks. My sister and I also didn't let the girls out into the wild crowd until the very last minute. The mistake outdoor concert goers make, is they cue up early to get a good spot, then they end up waiting a long time for the concert to begin, all the while getting sunburned, hungry and dehydrated. What the newbie little girl concert goers don't know, is that if you travel light, you can shimmy your way to the very front at the last minute. So my sister and I filled the girls up with a good lunch and lots of water, and sent them packing with extra waters and a cell phone, to brave the little girl crowd of concert goers. As I expected, the two of them worked their way through the crowd and ended up front and center with a great view. My sister, my mom and I and the boys then sat at the back in the shade, sipping lemonade and eating popcorn in our portable soccer chairs that we had brought with us. It was great. They got to get up close so they could sing along, yell and scream, and we got to sit in the shade and relax. Sometimes it's good to be old.
The people there cannot move about freely, with out fear of harm. The majority of the inhabitants of that land do not recognize Jesus and his saving grace, and they have been thrown headlong in to a battle for their land, between the Taliban/Al Quaida and it's bondage and US, who we perceive as being the good guys. It's hard to keep that perception of being the good guys, when we do bad things (I'm thinking of the horrible prison incident in Iraq). I wonder often if the people of Afghanistan and Iraq know that the average American on the street really does not wish bad things for their country and their people. The average American, I believe, just wants to live in peace. So we send our family and friends to war, to hopefully help the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are at war to protect our own safety, as well as the hope of helping people we do not know or understand, but we wish for them to live as freely and comfortably as we do, and we hope that they will come to know the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
