Well, we've got a couple here, you bet: Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia: StarSong Art Gallery opens in Floyd, Virginia

Lucky for you I think they're both taken. Laurelsong paints leaping dolphins; Starroot paints little dots. My life is enriched beyond measure just being within the same energy vortex as are they.


Bullseye

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Five screws and 3-1/2 inches.

Mountains of East Tennessee here. Basically only the transplants and "half-backs" are a problem.

A "half-back" is a citified northerner that wants to move to the South, so they go to Florida or Georgia, can't stand the heat, and come half-way back, ending up in our neck of the woods.

As someone said, I will tolerate neutrality, but I just don't associate with the anti's when they hit the zealot level. Around here though, I honestly can't think of any.

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I hope I copied that right

I agree completely with you Sip, regarding concerned parents and possible employers. I think you are setting a great example. I'm just referring to social interaction with leftist looneys, who think we should be locked up, just because we own guns and have no problem with the idea of using one to defend one's life, family, property, or liberty. I want these nutjobs to know that I take my 2A very seriously, and I am very intolerant of anyone trying to take it away, or restrict it. Note: I don't have any kids. Dang, you know, you don't look anything like Dean Martin. I guess that next, I'll probably find out that Caj doesn't look like John Belushi. (No, Lee, I never thought you looked like that.)

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Wayne
Torn & Frayed

I read the first post and two things stood out. First was "lived a short distance away" and the second thing was "arrange a play date". What ever happened to "go outside and play-I don't want to see you until lunch time". Play date indeed!!You aren't arranging a marriage for cryin' out loud!!! The only time our parents ever came out to check on us was when they couldn't hear us making noise-then they knew we were up to something-like making black powder from the sulphur. saltpetre and charcol we got from the local apothocary My goodness, a big mound if that stuff and a box of strike anywhere matches we would filtch from the kitchen-now THAT was a playin'

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Forum consigliere

We made it though to adulthood with all our fingers & toes and both eyes - playing with a little home-made stump-blowin' powder was just good clean fun. Fortunately, I had enough instruction and sense not to try to stuff it into a galvanized pipe "muzzle-loader" like one Einstein down the road. He wasn't seriously injured but he carried some unburned powder under the skin for the rest of his life . . . "Play dates" were no doubt originally devised by over-protective parents that thought their kids were too good to play with the neighborhood riff-raff and bused 'em over to a more "refined" group of curtain climbing crumb crunching juvenile delinquents.

I hate I missed that event.

Warning: Do not try this, injury or deadness could result!

My uncle once told me that they would take .22s and slip one through the hole in a yardstick and slap it against a rock. Luckily, he didn't tell me that until a was out of high school.

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Wayne
Torn & Frayed

I look exactly like Dino...you just have to close your eyes!

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Thirty characters. Exactly...

Regarding play dates, I agree that it would be nice to revert back to what it was like when I was a child and played outdoors in the woods or around the neighborhood from sun-up to sun-down from age 5 on. My mother used to fire a shotgun (louder than a dinner bell) to get my brothers and I out of the woods and back to the house for meals. Unfortunately, things are a bit different, now. Less than a mile from where the other family I mentioned lives a pre-teen girl was grabbed in her backyard. The guy attempted to drag her into the open fields adjacent to the property, and one of the girls friends was able to run in and get the girls father who managed to scare off the would-be abducter. I used this incident as an expample of why owning a firearm might be a wise idea, but it fell on deaf ears. I toyed with the idea of saying to the father of my daughter's friend that I wouldn't allow my daughter to play at his house because he lacked both the tools and the backbone to prevent my daughter from being abducted or harmed while at his house. I decided against saying it, but it wasn't easy to hold my tongue.

There have been about four or five attempted abductions of young children in VT in the past year or so. If that doesn't make you want to be prepared to defend your family, I don't know what does. There have also been several home invasions, most with non-lifethreatening injuries resulting, but still a terrifying prospect. I imagine it's much worse in more urban states with larger cities and denser populations.

Given my druthers, my family and I would be living in Alaska, Texas, or New Mexico right now, but family is important to my wife and most of hers lives here in VT, with some in North Carolina and a few in Bahrain. VT's nice, but getting more socialist by the day, and more crowded as well. I have a trout brook 40 feet from my master bedroom. I can fish from my grill in the back yard, and there are 300,000+ acres of National Forest directly across the street from my house for hunting and hiking, but the library and local playground are both less than a half mile's walk down the sidewalk. Nice mix or rural and neighborhood, but moving farther out is looking better and better every day given the nutcases that seem to be flooding the area.

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Hastings

My wife is originally from Pennsylvania, near State College, so she was used to hunters and hunting.

When we met and married, she obediently accompanied me to the pistol range and shot a bit, but never really cared for it. She got a CCW and carries, sometimes, but not a lot.

But, a few years ago, she got her paws on a 12 gauge shotgun at the trap range and life changed dramatically.

She's become an avid trap shooter and last Sunday, at a fairly good-sized shoot, she won the Lady Catagory in Handicap and, sadly for me, she beat my score by five birds.

First time she ever beat me (she's won several other times, but I've always shot a higher score), but sadly again, probably not the last.

And, yes, we called them "English Racers" back in the 50s and 60s.

Bob