| By Alvin Engelke
 By Alvin Engelke
alvinengelke@hotmail.com
Some local residents wish that the global warming folks would quit flying around the world in their jets & blowing so much hot air since, apparently, some critters think things are warmer. In the Creston area Easter flowers are coming up, slime molds have formed fruiting bodies (appropriate for the pseudo-science politicos) and one spring peeper was singing. Back in December, frogs were out on the highways playing "chicken" with motor vehicles. Of course the fellow who "invented" or "discovered" the Internet couldn't be in error.
Rev. S. E. Cooper has been in very poor health and the family was called in the other day.
Euell Russell has been undergoing a series of tests in Grantsville & Parkersburg.
Former Burning Springs resident Gary Farnsworth is scheduled for esophagus surgery.
Nancy Hall is scheduled for more chemotherapy. Her brother, Keith Hall, is on the mend and is now staying with his son Brian.
Charlotte Jordan was on the sick list and was consulting her physician.
Former Spring Creek resident Linda Hall has been in intensive care.
Tammy McFarland has been suffering with a sinus infection.
Rev. Juanita Lockhart was on the sick list & was not able to fill her regular appointment at the Burning Springs M. E. church.
Hallie Cunningham is doing well after undergoing eye surgery.
Former Burning Spring resident E. Burl Dawson, age 72, passed away earlier this month. He had worked for the state road and the weatherization program.
Diane Ludwig was present at the Creston Area Neighborhood Watch meeting and there was a discussion over the purchase of radios for use by the group. The times for meetings was changed back to 7 P. M. from 6 P. M. The secretary noted that a peeping tom had been peering into her windows. Someone noted that the local neighborhood watch, could under such circumstances, easily morph into the Grimy Gulch Neighborhood Watch with the expert services of Claude Clay.
It was learned that the family that was instrumental in Creston having a neighborhood watch has moved again, perhaps temporarily to another state although the one gent is still boarding over in Doddridge County.
Dalton Griffin, son of Mr. & Mrs. C. Romeo Griffin, Jr. celebrated his 6th birthday with a Monster Truck, the Grave Digger, party.
Nancy & Jane Engelke were among the local residents who were at the W. Va. Fairs & Festival meeting in Charleston. Wirt County Fair queen Jordan Beckett placed in the top 15 and was elated to have done so well. The queen, the first & second runner-up and 4 others in the top 15 were all girls who had worked with Jane. Jane's booth at the convention won a blue ribbon for best of the show.
It was learned that Cabot Oil & Gas is planning on getting in on the coalbed methane action in West Virginia although their proposed financial remuneration to the property owners would better reflect prices offered perhaps back in the early 1900s not the 21st century. Dominion (the Rockefellers), CDX & Penn Virginia are active in the West Virginia CBM play.
Trial is underway in Spencer in the class action suit filed against Columbia Gas, Chesapeake Appalachia and allied companies. The trial is drawing lots of attention.
Another company, Foree Oil, has permitted CBM wells in Mason County.
The price of local Penn grade crude fell to $48.50/bbl and with warmer than normal temperatures the price of natural gas is back in the $6 range. Propane is 99.3 cents/gallon while natural gasoline (mountain high test) fetched $1.364/gallon.
Alvin & Nancy Engelke returned home after attending the American Farm Bureau meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah. On the way out they stopped to visit Nancy's brother & sister-in-law, Mr. & Mrs. Richard Martin, in Tucson Arizona and her friends Mary & Arlen Edmondson in a Phoenix suburb. Also they stopped in Oklahoma City at the site of the federal building that was blown up by a combination of local and foreign trained terrorists a few years back.
While there has been all sorts of bad weather in that part of the world, blizzards, deep drifts & ice storms the travelers missed all the bad stuff. I-40 was closed west of Amarillo, Texas so they detoured via Lubbock Texas and Roswell, New Mexico where there were plenty of aliens to be seen but many of them drove on Chihuahua (a state in Mexico) tags. On the return trip they kept just ahead of the most recent storm to hit that part of the nation.
Subsequent columns will detail various observations, etc. but one thing that is obvious is that the economic boom that has been so obvious in this part of the country extends at least as far west as the travelers traveled.
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