I am a 100% disabled veteran married to a wonderful Mexican woman. I met my wife while I was living in Mexico. We now live in Texas, but we still maintain a home in rural Mexico. We also own a house in Tampico, and my wife, who was a widow, has a small sugar cane farm.

I believe in religious tolerance. God is paramount in my life. Calling it belief trivializes it. It is awareness that God is everywhere, always.

I became unable to work in 1990. Living in Mexico on my VA pension seemed like a good idea. In 1994, when I returned to the US for a time, I was diagnosed with hepatitis "C". Interferon treatment did not work. I am not a candidate for re-treatment. Hepatitis is acceptable, but it does give one to moodiness. Oh, well.

I enjoy cooking, bird watching, astronomy, and long walks on the beach. (Oops, wrong application.) My favorite participation sports are swimming and boxing. My favorite spectator sports are basketball (Go Spurs) and bullfighting (Go matadors). I am an intermittently avid fisherman. My wife loves to fish, and once we camped out for nine months. For Christmas that year she asked me to take her to a hotel "with hot water." She is a jewel.

I love living in a small town. We live in Luling, Texas, population 5K or so. Luling is famous for a barbecue restaurant, City Market. It was rated among the top ten BBQ joints in the state by the Texas Monthly, a rag that devotes itself to important research.

Every year Luling has a dog and pony show called "The Watermelon Thump." The parade passes by our house, and one of the highlights of the event is a watermelon seed spitting contest. There is a dedicated Watermelon Seed Spitting Pavilion, called "The Spitway," and one year the World record water melon seed spit was performed here, according to Guinness. It was sixty-eight feet and change but one out of town girl thinks she can do sixty-nine.

Here is a snippet of life in Luling:

We are newcomers here, having only been here three years. This afternoon we took a drive down to the river for a break and to let the dogs have a bit of a run. There are a couple of stray dogs that live at the park on the river. They don't bother anybody, and the dog catcher even takes them food once in a while. He won't catch them because he is afraid they will bite him. Some dog catcher. My guess is that he got his job because his sister sleeps with the city manager.

We didn't see the strays, so we let our dogs run a little. Eagle-eye Boo the Labrador spotted one of the strays, though, and ran over to show him who was boss. We had to go pick up Boo, who was too engrossed in the territorial imperative to come when he was called.

As we were coming back into downtown Luling there were three police cars headed our way. My wife Mely said she thought something important must be happening, and there was. It turns out we were the subjects of an investigation. Some civic minded person had called the police and reported that we had dropped off two dogs at the park, the poor untruthful soul. I hope nothing bad happens to him. People somrtimes turn out bad like that when they don't have a father.

I thought the cops were going to draw their sidearms. One, who I call Junior, stationed himself behind a car to return fire just in case I were to come out shooting rather than pay a fine for dropping off stray dogs. He had one hand on his mike button, to call for back-up if necessary, and the other hand was hovering around his holster. He looked happy to be wearing body armor, and seemed to be itching to show off how well he was trained at the internet police reserve and bounty hunter school. I caught Junior in a lie one time and he has been waiting for the chance to shoot me or mace me for over a year now. His Dad is a good guy, the Chief of Police here, but I think his mother used to skip Sunday school to smoke cigarettes out in the alley behind the Dime Store.

I explained to the nice angry officer what had really happened, and after he came down from his adrenaline rush, he sent Junior and Tiny to the coffee shop and apologetically let me go on my way. No shots were fired, no arrests were made. No coupons were passed out.