Thanks to copious amounts of rain, in Oklahoma, Missouri and Nebraska, we elected to stay a couple extra days in Tulsa with our daughter Moira and family. Ann is getting into this new schedule of a retired kind of lifestyle. I hope that we don't wear out our welcome.

My kids live on the southern edge of Tulsa, close by the Arkansas River. Across the fence from their back yard a new housing development is a-building. It is interesting to walk past the construction in progress and to listen to the workers all speaking the king's Spanish. One thing about the Hispanic workers, they know how to work! They also show up to work on time, and rain or shine, they are hard at it.

Wiley told me of a Tulsa church group that is spending spring break in Mexico on a work project. The high school and college age church kids are building homes for needy peasants in an impoverished part of our southern country neighbor. Hmm, our kids are building $200 homes for the workers to live in when they go back home. Possibly it will be those same workers that are presently in Oklahoma building $200,000 homes for affluent Americans to live in. Do we live in a great country or what?

The Tulsa newspaper had an interesting article about an effort in progress to drill for oil in City Park Land. The comment was, that if you thought people complained about cutting down trees in the city parks, you will really see disparaging comments when oil derricks begin to sprout in the city parks. Evidently some sentiments are universal!

The thought of drilling for oil on city land is an effort by Tulsa City Fathers to find a way to finance street repairs. Another universal problem and perhaps a good idea. An oil well in Kelly Park, Barnett Park, or the now denuded Norris Park, might not look too intrusive especially if it was pumping out ten barrels a day of $100+ sweet crude oil. Being landowners, the city would get a one eighth royalty of all oil produced with no expense involved. If the Council was brave and paid 100 percent of the drilling costs then they would get 100 percent of the revenue but also have to pay 100 percent of production expenses. I just thought I'd pass along the idea!

Dean Edson, a friend from the days when I was active in Farm Bureau, has written an editorial for the Omaha World Herald speaking to a bill that is likely to languish in the Legislature this year. It is LB924, an effort hoping to shed some public light on the ongoing water tiff between Kansas and Nebraska. The thrust of the bill is to illuminate the "water savings" generated by surface water users so that water allocations could better be adjusted between surface and pump irrigators. In Nebraska, we have two separate, and in my judgment incompatible, systems for attempting to control the use of surface water verses water pumped from wells. LB924 is an attempt to make those two systems better speak to each other, hopefully with an end result of better serving Nebraska and placate Kansas. The bill will most likely go by the wayside this year as the Legislature is more interested in protecting their over-spending habits.

From the air, I notice that Nebraska is again starting to turn green. It always gives me a warm feeling to look down and see the hundreds of new baby calves frisking about their mamas out on pasture. Something about spring rekindles the sheer joy of being alive.

That is the way I see it.