The great Gila monster

If you've dealt with Municipal Services Bureau, you have dealt with Gila Corp. Gila does business as MSB, the ones Texans pay those high-priced surcharges to when they do something like get a ticket for no proof of car insurance.

To see how far-reaching this business is, take a look at their detailed description on Bloomberg. At the bottom of the description, it states that Gila is a subsidiary of Navient.

According to Forbes, Navient is a spin off of Sallie Mae, and both are portrayed in the media as using questionable practices and have had multiple lawsuits lodged against them.

So, Sallie Mae, Navient, Gila, Municipal Services Bureau are all interconnected.

Texas Finance Code Sec. 392.306, Use of Independent Debt Collector, states:

A creditor may not use an independent debt collector if the creditor has actual knowledge that the independent debt collector repeatedly or continuously engages in acts or practices that are prohibited by this chapter. 

 

That would mean that the State of Texas may not use a debt collector engaging in practices that are prohibited by the entire Section 392.

It seems to me that MSB is of questionable character because their parent companies are of questionable character. I believe that there's every possibility that they could engage in prohibited practices.

But who's gonna stop 'em?

Mojave goes up

- Look close, it's there! -

The rig for well 1H on the Mojave 31 Lease is visible from the road. I saw the platforms going by the other day. There's been a lot of wide loads coming down this little road. I think it's very exciting because it's the first horizontal well being drilled in the Hobbs area.

Last week there was a pulling unit up at well 1 on the El Capitan 63 lease, which is between Hobbs School and the Mojave 31.

I got a letter from some place in Dallas called Montaigne Minerals, offering to buy my mineral rights. What? Madness.

Are all these things signs of an oil field about to take hold? We've only been waiting forever. It puts me into a fervor, where I say things like "7000 feet",  "eastern edge of Wolfcamp", and "those permits are full of mistakes". I barely know what I'm talking about, but I'm having a good time doing it.

Wide open spaces

- Texas Winter -

The photo is of a typical winter landscape here in Fisher County. The area is north of my house, where the rolling plains become more hilly and craggy, intermittently broken up by cotton or wheat fields. This eventually leads to the Rough Creek area.

I want to know the name of the little bluff off to the left in this picture, but I can't believe how difficult it is to find the names of geological places in Fisher County. This is another time when I think Google is broken (I say this knowing the problem is my incapability to ask the right question). It just wants to sell me real estate.

Speaking of real estate, on the Ekdahl Real Estate site, there's a listing for Impossible Canyon Ranch, just west of Longhorn Valley. The sales video gives a nice representation of the topography of our area. I like the set up of three separate cabins and one common kitchen on the property. One house for me and each of my kids, how convenient. Now I just need to scrape up the 1.5 million for the purchase.

Check, next

- The Inner Me -

If I had a to-do list of things that were fitted to my actual daily life, it might go like this:

1. Disappoint someone
2. Get pleasure from something immensely simple
3. Be flaky, at least once
4. Make a mistake at work
5. Drive responsibly, then drive incredibly irresponsibly
6. Make a remark that sounds racist, then declare I'm not racist
7. Be rude
8. Be nice
9. Have one million thoughts, many of them contradictory
10. Love Texas
11. Hate Texas
12. Think I know everything
13. Think I know nothing

My human condition puzzles me more the longer I live.The photo today accurately portrays my true constant state of mind. The hands holding me in place are those of my mother, who, unfortunately, is not around to keep me steady when I'm swaying, although I often think, "WWRD"? What would Rosemary do? This is not really helpful, as my mother was a very confident and righteous woman and did not waver. Not very helpful for one weak sister (that's me). Still, it's nice to have a point of reference and lofty ideals.

Okay, well, now I'm off to finish my missteps of the day.

Well, well, well

- 1974 Southwest Mapping Co. -

The reason for the big pit has come to light. Mojave 31, a horizontal well, will be drilled somewhere behind the pit, which will be used to hold water for the goings on of such a project.

There's been a lot of traffic up and down this road, a bunch of gravel trucks coming and going. It's a good idea to watch your lane if traveling out this way. Those shoulders can be tricky if you have to move over, and it would be easy to flip over or over-correct if the wheel goes into a rut between pavement and dirt.

The photo is of our area on an old oil field map I have from 1974. It's delightful to see the old names and get a sense of who begat who, landwise.

Local newspaper fails to verify AP story

The Sweetwater Reporter failed to verify a recent Associated Press article about an incident that was purported to have taken place on Interstate 20 near the town of Sweetwater.

The article, published by the newspaper around January 16, reported that an army soldier, on leave, stopped at a wreck and saved a man's life by performing a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen. The event has been found to be untrue.

The newspaper ran the story without verification from the Texas Department of Public Safety, The Texas Department of Transportation, the Sweetwater Fire Department, the Sweetwater Police Department or the Rolling Plains Memorial Hospital, all first responding entities that serve Sweetwater and Nolan County.

Two emails sent to Sweetwater Reporter publisher Rick Nunez on Friday January 18 were unanswered at the time of this publication. A letter to the editor the following week was also unanswered.

The trouble with the landman...

Here is a recent Eleventh Court of Appeals opinion that gives a little too much insight to the way mineral rights deals happen:

Kerwin Stephens; Thunderbird Oil & Gas, LLC; Thunderbird Resources, LLC; Thunderbird Land Services, LLC; Stephens & Myers, LLP; and Chester Carroll v. Three Finger Black Shale Partnership; Trek Resources, Inc.; Tiburon Land & Cattle, L.P.; L.W. Hunt Resources, LLC; and Richard Raughton Appeal from 32nd District Court of Fisher County
 
Here's an easier version to read:

Kerwin Stephens; Thunderbird Oil & Gas, LLC; Thunderbird Resources, LLC; Thunderbird Land Services, LLC; Stephens & Myers, LLP; and Chester Carroll v. Three Finger Black Shale Partnership; Trek Resources, Inc.; Tiburon Land & Cattle, L.P.; L.W. Hunt Resources, LLC; and Richard Raughton Appeal from 32nd District Court of Fisher County

A variety show

- Tillage radish -

Something new in the field

When temperatures drop around here, a conflagration of winter weeds takes the place of the summer crops. I thought this was what I was seeing as I made my daily tour around cotton and haygrazer fields.

Last week I noticed that the green was not random, that it had a uniformity. Then I noticed large roots on the plants, roots that can be seen as one drives by.

A little finagling on the internet led me to an article about cover crops, after I searched crop rotation. These new dudes are tillage radishes. They say they're good to eat, but it seems they're planted for erosion control, not a cash crop.


Whatever happened to Bobby Templin 

In 1974, Templin made the front page of the Rotan Advance as a newly hired lab tech at the Rotan hospital. He and his wife, Rhonda (Schlegel), were a newly married couple from Shamrock.

On April 11, 1976, Rhonda died in their home by electrocution, when a radio fell into the bathtub in which she was immersed.

Bobby was later convicted of murdering her, in 1981, where he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. That conviction was overturned, but he was convicted again, in 1986, and, again, sentenced to 99 years.

There are many articles and books written on the topic, but it's hard to figure out what happened as the years went by and the flash of the story wore off. It looks like he may have won an appeal in 1994 and been released, that he may live in Mesquite, and that he was alive as recently as March 2018.


Tess of d'Urbervilles

I hear people talking about ancestry testing and I wonder if they've never read the story of Tess and her dire dramas brought about by finding out who she was be related to. Also, I don't talk to many of my relatives who are living, and I'm fairly aware of my family history. Why would I want to know any more?

This thinking gave way to an imaginative conversation between two people, and one trying to convince the other that God is real. One could say, "But you believe in results given to you by people you've never met, in a lab that you've never been to," then the other could say, "But I've seen a lab." This conversation could wind on infinitely, I guess, just like any other philosophical query. "If you were on a railroad track and could pull a switch that would save one person on one track or ten people on another track, what would  you do?". "Oh, I'd save the ten people!". "But what if five of the ten were murderers?", and so on.


Links

Here are some links I came across this week:
The Forage Radish: Bane of Tillers Everywhere
Search for Justice, written by Rhonda Schlegel's father, Norbert
West Texas: A Portrait of its People and Their Raw and Wondrous Land, which has an excerpt of the Templin murder
A Science News article on genetic testing
Cliff Notes for Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The state of my rural Texas internet

- My internet service -

The way I get internet is to turn on my cell phone hotspot and connect to my laptop. The phone is placed in a strategic position, atop a mirror, to obtain the maximum service in this area, two bars.

I've had satellite internet, but not since 2012, when DishTV changed their provider from WildBlue to whoever, and expected me to pay for new equipment. Perhaps, if they had been forthright about the change, I would have been willing to pay. Instead, they used a service call situation to say my dish was irreparably damaged and I needed all new equipment (after I took down the old dish, I saw all it needed was a new transponder, a small one or two inch box, that water had leaked into after the casing was broken by hail ).

Also, I told DishTV, before the installer came out, that I would not be paying for a new pole or whatever, a gimmick that has been used on me at least three times, to get me to hand out $100 on the spot. The installer asked for the money, I yelled, and that was the end of that.

Every once in a while I'll do a long search session to find new service, but the heavy handed sales jargon and the contracts and  the credit check, which will cause my credit rating to go down a couple of points, discourages me.

Also, I want internet service that will allow the playing of video games. The kids like that. It's just not available.

Until a real solution is found, I will continue to transmit these words via hotspot.

We all fell in the pit

- West of Camp Springs -

Hopefully not! The title of this post is just an allusion to a sitcom I like, Parks and Rec.

Anyway, the purpose for the activity that was mentioned last post has come to light. It's a huge water pit being dug for forthcoming oilfield activity. A water well was drilled on this piece of land back in January, according to a well report on the Texas Water Development Board website.

Other interesting information from the TWDB site is that Fisher County is in the Clear Fork Groundwater Conservation District, atop the Seymour major aquifer, and Blaine and Dockum minor aquifers. I'm not sure how well I deciphered this, because I clicked on a random well on a map on the site, which just happened to come up as a well of one of my relatives, Floyd Weems, and it says his well was drilled in the Whitehorse Aquifer, while other information points to the Whitehorse being in the San Angelo area.

According to the Well Owners Guide to Water Supply, published by Texas A & M, we are considered the North-Central Plains.

This is one of those times when the amount of information is too much for my mind to hold. Go on, just do a search for Texas aquifers and prepare to be overwhelmed.

More digging and dozing is going on at a new spot just west of the Camp Springs Cemetery, in Scurry County. This is directly across from the Houston 76 Unit, a horizontal well. There was a patch of dead vegetation where they are digging. I guess I'll watch and listen and do some digging myself, and I'll report back here when I figure it out.