Opinion

Even though the oil and gas industry remains in a tough economic climate, some leading companies believe that better days are ahead.

One of those companies is the world’s largest oilfield service company, Schlumberger.  Just last week Schlumberger said it sees recovery in many regions of the world.

“The only place where we don’t see any signs of recovery at this stage is in Asia”, Chief Executive Paal Kibsgaard said.

Schlumberger said it expects “solid growth” in 2017 in the Middle East, Russia, and North America.

The San Antonio cattleman sat in front of the fireplace next to his tearful wife, slowly feeding folding money to the flames.

He’d had a lucrative contract with Confederate Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley to furnish his New Mexico-bound army with beef. While it had not seemed like an issue at the time, Sibley had paid for the cattle in Confederate States of America currency. Unfortunately, by 1864, when Charles C. French remembered seeing his father burning the bills, the currency had become worthless.

Mary Jo Bommarito, 90, passed away peacefully Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Mary Jo was born June 21, 1926 in Jacksboro, Texas. 

She was preceded in death by her husband of 60 years, Pete Bommarito. 

The Bommaritos owned and operated the Western Auto and a women’s clothing store in Jacksboro for nearly 50 years and worked side by side all of their years as business owners. Mary Jo was very involved in the Catholic Church and was loved for her sweet spirit by all of her family, customers, friends and neighbors in the community. 

I love technology. I love trying new things. I know that my grandchildren will laugh at this, but I do like to try new things. I’ve never gotten into tweeting and snapchatting. Those who “twit” need to have a following … someone to get my tweets. As of now, I don’t have anyone following me in the tweeting world. So, if I send out my thoughts in thirty-nine or sixty-seven characters, there will be exactly four people who will read them, and they are probably in Russia … or prison.

Fall is here with winter just around the corner. The leaves have fallen off some of the trees in my yard and the weeds and cockle burs are in their seed stage. 

There are burs everywhere. The wild turkey are gobbling and calling their mates and telling them to be careful the hunters will be out soon. The skunks are traveling outside and around the house at night. There has been one on the front porch two or three nights last week. I do not like to have them so close because they have strong perfume.

They called the killer Old Three Toe.

Sometimes, he ate his victims while they were still alive. Occasionally, he seemed to kill purely for fun.

Though roundly hated for what he did, most folks in Hall County grudgingly agreed he had plenty of smarts. In the early 1890s, when working hard from sunup to sunset earned a man a dollar a day, a $100 reward stood for anyone who could bring in the wily killer.

As our circus-like presidential election season continues, our country appropriately enough has entered into a state of clown hysteria.

To learn more about this phenomenon, I did some creepy clown sighting research. There is a great deal of material.

A Google news search of “clown sightings” yielded more than a hundred thousand recent articles.

I was reading recently about a minister who, as a young child, had been introduced to meteor showers by her father. In August every year, these meteor showers return to our night skies. This shower, called the Tears of Saint Lawrence, were seen in such abundance from the little balcony off her parent’s bedroom that she was in awe. She talked of learning reverence from the experience. While feeling a part of the meteor shower, she said it helped to make her feel the place she had in the great scheme of things.

One of the tens of thousands Texans who fought hard, if in vain, for the Confederacy was Charles Armand Schreiner. Born in 1838 in the mountains of Alsace-Lorraine, France, he had come with his family to Texas in September 1852. The family settled in San Antonio, where his father soon died. Four years later, his mother died from a snakebite. Except for his siblings – three brothers and a sister -- he was on his own.