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.

Disjointed

Sometimes when your plate is so full it is very hard to lay out a cogent train of thought.

I often turn to this blog late at night as sort of a catharsis. 

I was always a fan of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Proust and of course for me, the best example of "stream of consciousness" writing in the 20th century William Faulkner's " The Sound and the Fury".

I have always admired those artists who mastered that technique.

Sometimes the best way to convey one's thoughts is just to " go with it". 

So, in that vein, here are some thoughts disjointed as they may be tonight.

The shrimp project is finally getting exciting again. In the pilot module the post larvae are growing better than ever and are ready to stock next week. They are very robust and active and give me strong reason to think that once we are at commercial production levels we will improve upon our original grow out time estimates. 

The search for a permanent site on which to put a full farm is going well. We are closing in on one of three potential sites, any of which could be very good for our project. I hope to make a choice on the final site within three weeks.

The weather the past week has had torrential down pours. The facility has not been affected but a lot of standing water around the production module.

I finally committed to having south Texas be my base of operations for the next few years. So, that being my decision I bought a house. 

I think for south Texas it is very Key West looking and reminds me of a place Hemingway, one of my literary and real life heroes, might have lived. 

It sets on a beautiful canal on the bay of side of South Padre and I must say, it suits me.

While I love my house in Maryland and have no intention of selling it, I think for the next few years this will serve me well.

I am already feeding a family of baby possums out the back door near the boat dock so it feels right that I should reside here. 

Not a great picture but they are very shy. 

This is the runt (face toward the camera) I named Trinket. She comes to the food I put out every night about 8:30 PM within about 1 minute. How cute is that? 

I am very pleased with the financial team working on securing our finding to finance our production expansion. It is a very special blessing to work with people you trust, admire, and like. 

I am cautiously optimistic we have a great engineering team. The first month working with them has been very positive.

It is never easy to bring an emerging or even new technology into the mainstream and this effort has been fraught with a roller coaster of highs and lows. 

That said, we are currently on a high and this system will revolutionize aquaculture, there is no longer any doubt of that. 

We will succeed, it is no longer an "if", now is just a question of "when". 

I need to get Lori's "chemo" treatments moved so she can spend the fall and winter with me here on SPI. The cold in Maryland is just too damaging to her as she fights this evil bastard called cancer.

I am also working with some very wonderful friends of influence to get Lori access to the ImMucin vaccine in clinical trails in Israel. It has been frustrating to date but we will make this happen and happen soon.

Lori is too great a person to leave this world prematurely. 

(And cancer is just too damn evil to let it win. Not with her involved).

As I was speaking of Hemingway earlier in this rambling blog, I just remembered, recently I asked one of our financial partners (and a guy I really am growing to like as a friend) to read Hemingway's classic short story , "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". 

Do your self a favor, if you have never read it download it tomorrow and get to it.

If you have read it but like me it has been years, get it and re-read it. It has a lot of life's lessons and it is a brilliant story. 

I am glad college football is back but wish Michigan looked a little more formidable.

I am still working to much and stressing too much and I have not figured out how to have a life and de-stress, but I am thinking about how to do so with much more focus. 

I turned 60 recently and at 60 there are definitely more "leaves on the ground than on the tree". 

That said I am still looking to the next adventure, the next challenge, and the next success. 

First, I have help Lori beat this cancer demon. Everything else pales to that challenge. 

Ok, tonight the blog helped. I feel better just dumping everything out in a disjointed fashion.

Going to watch the end of "Big Jake" with John Wayne and go to bed. 

Tomorrow it starts all over again.