Betrayed

There’s an old Latin phrase, “In vino veritas,” which I read is from a guy who was born a few years before Jesus died. It means, “In wine, there is truth.” But it really means that people will confess their most egregious sins under the spell of alcohol. I can tell you it works well with Tequila.

Busted at the US Border Crossing

Well, the smuggling operation was a success, but not without some problems. I went across the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor into Detroit. That has its own kind of nightmare — my Beretta started overheating on the downside of the bridge. The Ambassador Bridge makes a huge arc across and the traffic had my car idling for about 10 minutes as I got to the down slope of the arc. So I cut the engine off and coasted slowly forward. Naturally, I had trouble restarting it as I got to the actual customs booths.

Outback Marijuana

If you are going to visit the outback in Australia, prepare yourself for a long, bumpy, dusty ride. This is like Texas with the scrubby bushes and rocky ground. You really get the feeling that mistakes could be fatal.

Australian Weed

I was feeling a bit cooped up this week. Claire has school and I’m getting bored with ‘home life’.So I took my own advice on traveling and followed my nose and kept an eye out for some adventure. It started at the Kit and Kaboodle, a bar on Darlinghurst Road.

Mendocino Weed

Met Sammy Lopez today. He’s Alex’s counterpart at the Ft. Bragg car rental place. I turned in the Chrysler 300 and Sammy offered to show me the sights in Mendocino.

This amounted to driving around and looking at grow operations. These are little plots of weed growing in residential areas locally. People just have these little greenhouse gardens in the backyard, or maybe an extra room in the house. It’s too early in the season for outside grows, and there were a lot of baby plants in containers getting a head start inside under grow lights. I guess lots of people got into growing weed when marijuana was decriminalized in California, and Sammy seems to know many of them.

Babies

The talk was all about recent busts. Mendocino had a liberal, 25 plant limit up until last year, when they imposed a new ordinance and reduced the legal amount down to 6 plants per person. The county Sheriff and his bully boys have been busy in the last couple of weeks arresting people who were still growing at the old amounts. I guess these are just regular folks who turned to weed as a way to fight off the recession and pay their mortgages. They aren’t your typical criminals. Just ordinary citizens down on their luck.