Four Days Until Christmas 2012

Hard to believe it is only four days until Christmas 2012.

I know this sounds like my grandfather but it really does seem as though "time just flies by". 

I drove 1785 miles from Texas back to Maryland about 6 days ago.

I wanted to bring a bunch of my personal stuff back to Maryland to store until I figure out where my residence in Texas will be in 2013.

Where ever it is it will not be in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV).

It defies common sense but despite the fact we are talking about bringing in excess of 1,000 sustainable jobs over the next few years to the area  in which we finally choose to locate our first USA based aquaculture operation, no politician, no land owners, no Chamber of Commerce member, no civic leader, etc., could help us secure the approximate 100 acres anywhere in the RGV, we needed for our operation. 

No matter that we were willing and able to pay cash and a fair market price for any suitable site, we just could not generate the enthusiasm in one of the most distressed areas in the United States to help us secure a location.

For us as a company it will probably work out much better. 

We are already looking at two or three every promising sites north of the RGV.

It will certainly be easier to recruit future employees three hours north of Brownsville and hence three hours closer to everything in the State of Texas.

In any event, early in 2013 we will close on a site and soon after we should begin construction. Our objective is to begin to harvest commercial level amounts of jumbo white shrimp in late 2013. 

It is nice to be back in the DC area for Christmas.

Washington, DC is one of the most beautiful Christmas time cities in America.

It is very easy to get into the Christmas spirit here.

The houses in my area (Potomac, Maryland) are decked out with lights and other decorations some of which are so impressive that people stop their cars to take pictures at night of the displays. 

On a sad note, my last labrador, Elle, a yellow lab 13 years old, died the night I got in from Texas. 

She wagged her tail when I got in and let me hug her and rub her fluffy old head. Three hours later she was gone. She had been battling a blood cancer and finally her poor body gave out. She went very gently.

I was glad she waited to say "good bye" to me. 

She was the last of four labs we had adopted, the first over 16 years ago. So for the first time in 16 years we do not have a labrador retriever in the house. It doesn't seem right.

Someday I will write an entire blog about how wonderful all dogs are and the special love and affection I hold for labs. 

Today, the loss is still too fresh and the tears would come the minute I tried to write even a single line.

I went and saw "The Hobbit". Loved it of course as I knew I would. Say what you will, Peter Jackson is a genius when it comes to taking the words of JRR Tolkein and bringing them to life on the big screen.

I will definitely see it again, probably in 3-D this time.

I am also very eager to see "Lincoln", with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Thinking of the movie, "Lincoln" in combination with Christmas being only four days away reminds me of a quote from Lincoln, himself that I have always found comforting. 

"Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day. No, no, man was made for immortality". 

Christmas is (for me) always a wonderful "reminder" of that sentiment. 

Mayan Miss

Well 12-12-12 came and went and the world seems to still be spinning.

Whatever the Mayans' prophesy was supposed to portend modern civilization evidently failed to ascertain. 

The Mayan doomsday "end of the world" scenario certainly made good fodder for countless sci-fi books and TV movie and even a full theatrical event of two, but in the end it was just another false prediction.

On a very positive note I managed to capture all five of my young possums, the ones I have been feeding for four months every since there mother introduced me them shortly after they were big enough to leave her pouch.

A very capable licensed wildlife rehabilitation picked them up this morning and after explaining to me how she will get their natural foraging instincts back in synch, using live grubs, crickets, etc. I feel very good about their future chances after they are released in a few months in a protected wildlife area. 

Now if I can just catch the stray black cat I have also been feeding here, I am ready to head back to Maryland for Christmas and for for the next three weeks, leave the Rio Grande Valley behind me. 

We have an offer to purchase a very desirable site about 100 miles north of here which will be the perfect location for our first first full scale farm which will see our initial production expansion phase over the next few years surpass 5 million pounds annually.

The engineers are standing by ready to do all the necessary site assessment and solid work in order to confirm that the site does indeed meet our needs. 

I anticipate that report will be positive and that we will close on the land early in 2013.

So, I am looking forward to being back in the DC area for Christmas. 

I am looking forward to seeing the first installment of "The Hobbit" from Peter Jackson. Being a big Tolkien fan, this movie is going to be a real delight.

I am very interested in seeing how Tom Cruise handles the character of Jack Reacher in the first movie adaptation of the Lee Child series.

Lori's MRI yesterday showed "no progression" in growth in her current brain lesion so that buys her another three-four weeks, a true Christmas blessing. (Thank you God). 

Stephen, my son, gets back from ten days in Thailand tomorrow so he will be home for Christmas which is very cool. 

I like the music, the decorations, and the food and flavors of the season, and must admit I even like the cold weather and the possibility of a few snow flurries in the air this time of year.

Washington, DC and its surrounding environs is truly one of the most beautiful places to be this time of year.

With a little luck I should be packed and on the road heading home in a day or two. 

Sometimes life "can" be sweet. 

Changes

Well, looks like John Lennon was right, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans". 

In the past ten days we have located an excellent site on which to expand our aquaculture facilities here in Texas.

We have a verbal agreement on all the terms, have made a written offer, and put down earnest money and now have to wait thirty days to allow our engineering firm to do a feasibility study to make sure we have adequate elevations and/or adequate cut and fill material to raise the elevations so our piping and other structural requirements have room under the pond drains to be installed properly.

The site is 171 acres and sits right on the shoreline of a beautiful body of water fed by the Gulf of Mexico.

It once housed an open air shrimp operation. That business was closed over ten years ago and the site has been vacant since. 

The location is about 100 miles (as the crow flies) due north of where we are here in Cameron county. From an operational standpoint this new locations works much better for us. We had anticipated finding a site here in Cameron County just north of Brownsville but unrealistic pricing by the owners of the few sites we were interested in forced us to look north.

It will be unfortunate for the residents and other businesses here far south in the Rio Grande Valley. This is a very economically distressed area and the 1,500 -2,000 full time sustainable jobs we will create over the next five years would have been extremely advantageous to this area. 

It just did not work out. We will keep the current 1/4 scale production model in operation growing shrimp and also it will be very valuable as a training facility as we begin to expand our management and production teams in anticipation of a much larger operation at the new location. 

I had hoped to buy a house here on South Padre and use that as my Texas base of operations but now I will be packing up after Christmas and moving temporarily to a hotel in Corpus Christi until I can get the time to look at the available homes for sale in the new area and make a purchase.

One complication has arisen for which I was totally unprepared. 

My possums I started feeding when they were barely two weeks ago are totally dependent on my nightly feeding station.

This island is very hard on wildlife and I am constantly seeing dead animals hit by cars.

If I leave my possums behind they will have to forage for themselves far abroad from my current backyard so long story short, that is not going to happen.

I have contacted a local "licensed wildlife rehabilitator" and have arranged to give her adequate financial support to transport them and spend the next three months to prepare them for  a "soft release' into a real safe state park that does not allow hunting or trapping. 

Possums are very solitary, have a very high mortality rate, and under the best of circumstances only live about three years. They do not do well in captivity as it is very hard to provide them with the complex and varied diet true "omnivores" need, so I am going to leave the mother here. She is old and has made it here this far so I see no reason to uproot her.

The four babies I will trap in "Hav-a Heart" live traps (I just bought two new ones) and hold them in large airline cargo cages until I can transfer them to the wildlife person, who is about 100 miles from here. 

Having been born and grown up in this sub-tropical environment they really would not do well any further north. 

I will also catch the small black cat that counts on my nightly feedings but her I will take back to Maryland later this week and have spayed and get her a home or put her on our small farm in Poolesville, Maryland. 

Before I am done this is going to cost me well over $1,000, which once again underscores my view that "no good deed goes unpunished". (In truth, it is money well spent).

I had an epiphany as I was buying new carriers, "Hav-a Heart" traps, a transport cage for the cat, litter box, extra food, flea spray, etc. 

I really should have been a Catholic. Any religion that lets you buy your way out of guilt is my kind of religion.

I mean, "you do something wrong and then remove the guilt through a cash penance", now really this would have saved me so much angst and guilt over the years.  ("Just joking, all of my Catholic friends"). 

Anyhow, the raccoons are staying, they look great, and they seem to thrive on the seafood diet and trash cans the island offers. 

                                          

But starting tomorrow night live traps will be baited with bananas and grapes (possums love both) and operation "marsupial capture" will commence.

I will keep you informed of my (and their) progress.

Thinking Too Much !!!

"We are dying from over
thinking. 

We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. 

Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. 

It's a death trap."  

(actor Anthony Hopkins)

I need a break from my mind. As we enter the 12th and final month of 2012 I am realizing I have been far too immersed in over thinking this year. 

I have spent hours and days and weeks reading about cancer treatments, comparing different procedures to limit the lesions associated with metastatic brain cancer, looking at the relative merits of different chemotherapy's, and have tried to think, "what would be the best choice to make to beat this very determined adversary?"

I have tried to think through hundreds of strategies in order to choose the optimum way to move forward to expand our production capability in the fastest, least expensive, and most prudent time period humanly possible here in Texas.

I have thought exhaustively about where in the world (literally), we should build our very first international production operation.

I have looked at at least 45 potential site locations, agonizing over the relative characteristics of each in order to decide which one would be the best place for our full blown Texas operation.

Think. Think. Think. 

All day and at all hours of the night, my mind has absorbed the data, analyzed the situations, rolled over the possibilities, all in order to think my way to making the best decision for that particular problem with which I was dealing at that moment.

You know what?  In every case, I mean in every one, all the thinking I did, all the agonizing I brought on myself, all the doubts I raised, all the fears I suffered, had not one whit of influence on the final choice nor did I. 

In every case, the choices and the paths forward were made for me. 

"How much pain have cost the evils which have never happened!" ( Thomas Jefferson)

The treatment for Lori's cancer came out of left field from NIH and was a clinical trial of which I had never heard.

The vaccine protocol that seems to hold real hope was in Israel and I agonized months over as to whether we should fly her to Israel once her lesions were stabilized by a current therapy. 

Guess what? As we are stabilizing her lesions at NIH that vaccine is now in trials in the USA so there is no need to even think about the logistical nightmare of moving our family to Israel.  When Lori is ready we can get her into a trial here.

It goes on. The site that suddenly looks as the "perfect" candidate for our future home for shrimp production in Texas just appeared 5 days ago. We had never even considered the area or were even aware the option existed.  

The engineers will do a site assessment next week, but all indications are we have an almost perfect geographical location to on which we will begin building our full commercial production center in early 2013.

And just a few weeks ago we came to a deal in principal for our first overseas production facility in a country I have never even considered but that now appears to be almost ideal as the first international operation for our aquaculture technology. 

So, I am going to take a little break from thinking. 

I have no doubt I will fall back in to my old habits of over thinking everything after a short respite but I am going to make a concerted effort to use this upcoming Christmas season as, (at the very least), offering me the opportunity to take a short hiatus from thinking. 

When I first read the opening quote I placed at the top of this blog from actor Anthony Hopkins, I thought, "That is a pretty clever observation by Sir Anthony." 

Now as I am just finishing this blog, I realized that the quote from Hopkins is not new, in fact a fellow named John Milton years ago expressed the exact same sentiment even more eloquently.  

"The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can Make a Heaven of Hell, and a Hell  of Heaven." 

How true is that?