As you all know,

As you all know, the Old Gringo has been up here for a bit of time due to health matters affecting a family member.  We have been in communication with our place down near Cd. Victoria, Tamaulipas with some frequency.   Our chief of operations will probably be ready to beat me over the head with a hoe-handle by the time of my next arrival, but for now everyone has been very helpful and understanding of our situation.

      We are given to understand that during the past 10 days the Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre has received  13 inches of rain.   The legendary "sequia de la canicula" did enter on a wet spell and it was not very dry and it is ended with a very wet beginning of the rainy season.   Sequia de la Canicula...essentially means "Drought of the Dog Days"....which is a very common climatological phenomenae throughout Texas and Northern Mexico.   In Texas, there is a cyclic thing that seems to occur about every twenty years, more or less, like the Dust Bowl days of the early 1930s, the Drought of the early 1950s, the well-drying drought of the early 1970s, then the minor dry spell of the early 1990s, leading up to this period of the 20-teens decade...giving Texas a pretty stiff go of it.   This particular drought, in spite of what one might hear or read in the present day is something between the 1950s and 1990s situation.     I remember the 1950s drought as a child, and it would be incomprehensible to most people at this time.     The Rio Grande and the Rio San Juan, the Rio Sabinas, the Rio Salado, and the Devil's River all went dry....totally....during the 1952 - 1953 period.   Our part of the Texas -  Mexican drought was broken by Hurricane Alice in 1953 which killed several hundred people on both sides of the Rio Grande, all the way up to Pecos Texas.    Alice would be like Xena the Warrior Princess and Irene would be like Snow  White's sickly little sister when compared to one another.    Hurricane Alice flooded everybody for several hundred miles and filled  the recently finished Falcon Reservoir, which when at maximum storage could cover half of Vermont. (...yes....really.)

     As another aside, the Old Gringo's great-great-great grandfather was very much involved in the building and rebuilding of some of those Covered Bridges as well as many of the water-powered gristmills in Vermont back then.   He and his son, and his grandson...my great-grandfather....built both overshot and undershot mills in Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and lastly in northeastern Pennsylvania.   (from around 1730 to 1860). (For those OROGs who were not aware or who are new to the Blog...El Gringo Viejo really does have pure, "real" Yankee blood...from the entirety of his paternal line.)

     We have been encouraged by the fact that much of the negative activity has been reduced, as anticipated, by the massive deployment of military force in the area.   The "organised delinquency" has been reduced as much as 95% and is now almost exclusively conducted by incompetent punks in groups that are more like badly organised street gangs.   While we are a long way from returning to a Mexico situation of the 1950s, we are on the way in that direction.    We have had people coming out to visit and take advantage of our facility....like before....even some foreigners.    So...refer to the "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" by Allan Sherman...which rather sums up the feeling...if one listens all the way through the song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Hx_X84LC0

More Later....thanks for your time and interest.
El Gringo Viejo