Today's Opinions

Maybe you’re a college student looking to rent your first apartment, or a downsizing homeowner reentering the rental market for the first time in decades. Whatever your situation, there are many precautions you should take before renting any property. The last thing you want is to be saddled with a 12-month lease you can’t afford or to be stuck in a neighborhood you’ve come to detest.
As one who’s been there, let me share a few tips for renting a home:
Before you even start looking, know how much you can afford to spend. Housing is the biggest monthly expense for most people, so if you miscalculate what rent is affordable, your budget will suffer from the get-go.
Besides rent, don’t forget such additional expenses as a security deposit, utilities, cable/satellite, Internet access, renters insurance, parking and laundry facilities and one-time, move-in expenses like window treatments, appliances, or rugs.
Scope out the neighborhood and determine how safe you feel walking around, especially if you’ll be parking on the street.
Come back to see if the neighborhood’s character changes at night, or on the weekend.
Also, note the proximity to parks, schools, grocery stores, public transportation and busy commuter routes.
Thoroughly inspect each potential rental:

Are biblical prophesies about the end of the world coming to pass or will global warming predictions beat them to it? We’ve been hearing both in the wake of recent natural disasters.
But it may not be as bad as it seems. Some weather watchers blame the hysteria on the Weather Channel and various weather Web sites pumping up minor disturbances with dire predictions. Last year, the Weather Channel began giving names to snowstorms.
Sometimes the storms barely materialized. Remember back around the time Congress was about to vote on sequestration, a major storm was predicted for Washington D.C.? It was termed Snowquestration. Jim Cantore, the Weather Channel’s disaster master was sent to town. His biggest chore was not hanging on to light poles to keep from blowing away. It was trying to explain why only a half-inch of snow fell.
We see the same situation on Albuquerque television. We wake up, flip on the TV and see some cub reporter stationed at Sedillo Hill in Tijeras Canyon, east of Albuquerque, waiting for the first snowflake to fall.
Occasionally, one of them will make a wry comment about being sent out to cover a non-event at an ungodly hour. They are being honest, but it probably won’t grease their way to an anchor position in the studio.

A current public issue is whether county water wells should be drilled in county park lands on the edge of White Rock Canyon.
The public discussion has dealt little, if any, with alternative drilling technology, namely, directional drilling, also called slant drilling.
Directional drilling goes back 50 years, but major advances came as computers became commonplace.
Directional drilling is the technique of drilling wells at a slant, instead of always boring straight down.
Not only can holes be drilled at an angle, their paths can curve and bend to reach more places under ground from fewer work sites.
A well can easily bend enough to reach places up to 1,200 feet off to any side of a drill site and thousands of feet down.
Lateral wells can extend much farther to the side — out four miles and more — at still greater cost.
Up to four wells can be drilled from a single drilling pad.
The other side of the story is always cost. Directional drilling is more complex, which may add $30,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a well within the easier 1,200-foot distance from the pad.
At more cost, the range can go out the four miles and more. These dollars have meaning only when compared with the typical cost of a vertical well: about $1 million.