TONY IS DEAD- part one

One day I decided I wanted to have a restaurant which would sell rotisserie-roasted chicken. I diligently searched for a location on Cape Cod with no results... there was always a problem.
After a couple of months, I was speaking on the phone to my brother Tony, who was out in California, and he said he had the ideal location right on his property in the mountains of the north. He said I should move out there. Tony seemed to relish the idea of his baby sister living close by. There were frequent phone calls back and forth.
During one such call, in the middle of the conversation, Tony lowered his voice to a whisper that I could barely hear, saying, "You just have to watch out for the growers."
I had him repeat this because I thought it made no sense. I asked him to explain and he said he'd tell me later. I all but forgot about the statement as the weeks passed.
Being very impulsive, within two months I had rented a truck and was on my way from Cape Cod to California with my soon-to-be husband, Allen, a cockatiel named Kermit, and a load of equipment. I arrived at my brother's place in May 1991. And thus my little adventure began...
My brother and his wife had 114 acres on Marcus Mountain. There was a redwood house built on a flat area and farther down the mountain on another flat section was a separate redwood building that was styled like a warehouse. Tony told me the buildings were built of the redwood trees which had grown on the property. It had been milled right there. There were a lot of redwoods on his side of the mountain, mostly less than a hundered years old. There was one more flat area which had a large cleared field with a horse coral, small barn, and huge satellite dish off to one side of the field.
He used the two story warehouse building for his video game business and as a kind of art studio. He told me I could use as much of the building as I needed for my restaurant and that Allen and I could live in the little efficiency apartment which the building contained.
We met his wife Jean and her daughter Angie who was a blind, slightly retarded teenager. Then we met Nicole and Willie, who were offspring of Tony and Jean. We all went up the hill to the house and Tony lit a fire in the fireplace and fixed dinner for us all. Then we settled in for the night in their guest room.
The next morning after we had unloaded and returned the truck, we began our task of turning a part of the warehouse into a restaurant.
After a week or two of work, I decided to look around the little town we had moved to. I walked down the steep hill and crossed Highway 101 to Highway 1. It was a short walk to town. There wasn't much to it. There was a sign that stated the name of the town and the population: "LEGGETT pop. 198" I thought, "Well, now there's 200." The main street had a tourist info center, a grocery store, a school, a post office, a motel, a gas station, and two restaurants (one of which was not in business). A couple hundred yards down the main street was a small courthouse and the world famous Drive-Thru Tree. This is a live redwood tree which has a path cut through it to allow cars to actually drive through it, if you paid a fee to the owners of the property. It attracts a lot of tourists. I remember, when I was a child, my next door neighbor came back from a California vacation and told me about Disneyland and also about a drive through tree. I was more fascinated by the Tree than Disney. I never dreamed I'd get to see the Tree one day, let alone live in the same town.
........to be continued.....

A New Nation

I was thinking about the founding of our great nation, The United States of America. I was thinking about why the founding fathers, by way of the second amendment to our Constitution, guaranteed us the right to have guns. Back in the days of the Revolution against the tyrannical rule of the king of England, the people needed weapons to secure their freedom. Words wouldn't cut it. Had they merely written documents and had no weapons to back it up, they would have been crushed. And once the battle was won, we needed weapons to maintain our freedom.
Then my thoughts went to the war in Iraq and how the Americans confiscate any weapons they find, leaving the people defenceless against the Iraqis and others who want to rule that country by force.
I have come up with an exit plan for the US to be out of Iraq in a jiffy:
Simply supply weapons to every adult Iraqi and let them decide who will rule them the same way the US decided so many years ago. They can organize their own target practice sessions and their own militia.
Give them the guns and LEAVE!! We can make sure they have sufficient ammunition and weapons and let it go. This may seem barbaric to some but it will be a lot more civilized than making them helpless victims of the evil ones who get all the weapons they need from Iran and Saudi Arabia. The evil ones have a free hand against the simple Iraqi citizen right now. Americans can't be everywhere to play cop. Look at all the mass murders that are happening over there. They would think twice if the citizens were armed to defend themselves.
This is how we got our freedom and why we still have it!
You may ask, "What if most of the people there are on the side of the evil ones?"
If most of the people there are evil, we can never hope to win by military force anyway. Why not let them have their evil-people country, if that's what they want. Our government is claiming the Iraqis have a desire for liberty and self-rule. Then let them prove it! Give them the weapons they need and stop disarming the populace!
I feel the same way about our population here in the US: everyone should be allowed to have a gun. It is a proven method of crime reduction and it will keep the state from thinking they can become too powerful. You don't have to use the weapons, just have them. It has a marvelous deterrent effect. The only time the government would fear it's own people is if they knew the people were not pleased with their leadership. (Or, if you are a conspiracy-theory-minded person: for the government to be able to impose some sort of objectionable rule over the people in the future, they must disarm them first.)
Arming the citizens of Iraq is the only rational way our heroes in the armed forces will be able to depart Iraq in the near future.
Give the Iraqi adults their guns and ammo. And then let our heroes come back home. (And let the United Nation cry and pass all sorts of resolutions against us! Who cares!? They already hate us.)