And how are you, FRiend? Next March the rice farmers lose their spigot to Lake Travis. They technically have already lost it (they get cut off at 50% capacity, and Travis is at 38%) but their review isn’t until March.
Meanwhile my neighbors are doing their best to drain the lake to water their yards. I guess a swamp for a yard is a higher priority than food and sanitation. Texas may not be habitable next summer.
The Basis of Rick Perry's Middle East Policy: It's Not Oil, It's Water......................."Begun back in the mid-'80s, the Texas-Israel Exchange has experimented with a variety of technologies to try to squeeze the maximum possible water from dry land, and to make the most out of what does exist at the surface. One early $50,000 grant under TIE, as it's known, studied whether some plants could be watered with salt water. (It worked for Blackfoot daises; on velvet sage, not so much.) Drought-resistant Israeli grains were cultivated for their genetic material so that they might be tried in Texas. One major effort involved using drip irrigation to grow rice, rather than the water-hogging flood irrigation method in more general use. The Lower Colorado River Authority and the Tel Aviv-based firm Netafim partnered on the project; proponents say it can grow the same amount of rice with half the water. Then there are projects focused on water reclamation -- that it, using treated waste water, including sewage, to irrigate, cool, or in manufacturing processes. For both sea-adjacent lands, desalination through either evaporation or forcing the salt water through a permeable membrane is seen to have potential. Texas has its eyes on its 350 miles of coast along the Gulf of Mexico, and what it says is 2.7 billion acre-feet of brackish groundwater. In 2002, Perry, then governor ordered the Texas Water Development Board to explore whether the state might build a large-scale desalination plant that might produce for Texans a supply of fresh drinking water."...........................
I'm doing fine. 20 something more working days until retirement. We are having Thanksgiving at our house again. Right now, it is a mess. The filler valve on the clothes washer stuck open and flooded the laundry room, kitchen and part of the living / dining room. About half the floor had to be pulled up, and the style has been discontinued. So we now have a wood / concrete floor.