As we sat across from each other visiting over New Mexican food at Cecilia’s, I watched her pretty smile trying to catch a glimpse of her fangs, but her smile was as normal as she seemed to be. When Juliette came through Albuquerque about a month ago, we got together for lunch to visit and learn about each other’s life outside of the blogosphere. She'll be 156 in October, but she didn’t look a day over 30, and I thought to myself “there are some advantages to being a vampire.”

I’ve followed Juliette Kings' blog, VAMPIRE MAMAN | Musings of a Modern Vampire Mom, for a couple of years now. Her blog is made up of stories and anecdotes about the everyday life of a vampire family. As strange as a vampire family might sound, a lot of her family stories are similar to mine, so, as it turns out, we have a lot in common.

Juliette published a book of stories titled Morning at the Vineyard: A Collection of Tangled Tales in July 2014. I got her book a few months after she published it on Amazon. The stories are a lot like “Tales From My Youth…”, but while my tales only go back 30 to 40 years, Juliette’s tales cover hundreds of years.

Morning at the Vineyard: A Collection of Tangled Tales is a delightful set of stories that cover just about everything from young vampire love in the old days to taking care of old vampires today to vampire hunters and rogue vampires to ghosts, werewolves and lunching with zombies. There are stories of vampire intrigue, stories with morals, stories that have endings with a twist, and stories that just plain end. 

Juliette’s stories about the undead are truly “short” stories, and all of them are about as unpredictable as life itself. She tells tales about her and her bothers growing up, her life as an adult (married with children), and the adventures of friends and family living double lives that I could imagine is like existing in parallel universes.

Juliette’s book is available on Kindle at http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00M4V1DGI.

A motorcycle flying through the air and landing on someone is about as ridiculous as sharks falling from the sky and attacking people — while one is pure fiction, the other has happened.

I think the only thing he disliked more than motorcycles were dogs. Although his dislike of dogs seemed to be more of a true “fidophobia” than simply not liking dogs. I remember our dogs would start barking, and then I would hear the quick bursts of a siren, letting me know that Benji was outside wanting someone to come out to his car. If he had papers to serve my dad, he would “crack” the window on the car just enough so he could slip the papers over the top of the glass into my hands. My Saint Bernard would be looking at him through the driver’s side window, drooling on the side of his car, and he would yell something while almost sitting on the center console trying to distance himself from the large dog looking at him from outside. “Give those to your father” was barely audible as it made its way out through the slit in the window. “OK!” I would reply, as he righted himself in the seat, closed the window, and quickly backed out, leaving me standing in a cloud of dust as I watched him speed out of the driveway.

Other times he would get a call that somehow involved dogs, then he would drop by on his way to the call, and ask me through the crack he’d opened in the window if I would go with him and deal with the dogs.

I turned 13 in October 1971, the same year Corrales incorporated, and officially became The Village of Corrales. Now independent of Sandoval County, Corrales had its own governing body and police department. On the same weekend that I turned 13, dad took me and my motorcycle to the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Sandoval County Courthouse in Bernalillo and I got a motorcycle license. In the early 1970’s young people could get a restricted motorcycle license at the age of 13 in New Mexico by passing a written test and a riding test. I had no problem passing both. Not long after getting my license, I started having run-ins with the Corrales Police, AKA Benji, as I started expanding the geographic area where I rode.

I believe Benji was the only police officer in Corrales for several years after the Village incorporated, because I don’t remember dealing with other officers in Corrales until the mid-1970’s. If they had more, their shifts didn’t coincide with when I rode, but Benji’s did, especially when I was riding on the banks of the irrigation ditches on the west side of Corrales road, and the dirt roads that ran along the west side of Corrales. In the early to mid-1970’s, there were few houses on the mesa west of Corrales between Rio Rancho and the western most irrigation ditch, and there was a lot of open, sandy space between the dirt roads that ran east and west from Corrales Road up to the bottom of the escarpment below Rio Rancho.

I’d be riding along the ditch bank or one of the dirt roads at 50 to 60 MPH and I would hear a siren behind me. Instead of stopping like I was supposed to, I would just take off across the sand and through the sagebrush, leaving Benji far behind, as he could not drive his patrol car across the mesa without getting stuck in the sand. A few days later I would ride over to Corrales Market to get a Coke, and instead of taking the long way around on the ditch banks, I would get on Corrales Road and ride to the market. Benji would see me on Corrales Road and pull me over. After going through the formalities of inspecting my driver’s license, he would look at me and ask “Was that you who ran from me on the mesa the other day?” “Oh no, Benji” I would reply. “I’d never run from you. You know that!” Lying through my teeth. Of course he knew I was lying and would tell me he better not catch me speeding on the ditch banks. There were no posted speed limits on the ditch banks or most of the dirt roads back then, so what speeding on them was was questionable.

This ended up being a big game, as I continued to ride fast on the ditch banks, dirt roads and Loma Larga, and then evade Benji by taking off across country when he would see me “speeding” and give chase. Then he would stop me later when I went to Corrales Market, which was fairly often. Of course, Benji could have given me a ticket for riding a dirt bike with no lights or license plate on Corrales Road, but he never did. Now days, in our culture of zero tolerance, if a teenager tried to evade the Corrales police on a dirt bike, he would get chased down by a cop in an SUV, and mostly likely be charged with multiple felonies.

I eventually quit riding dirt bikes, moved up to big street bikes and then sold my last motorcycle when Laurie and I got married in 1982. Benji left the Corrales Police Department in 1986, and I had not heard anything about him until someone handed me a “Corrales Comment” in July 2008 with a headline that read “Benji Torres Dies in Accident”. 

The article explained how on June 14, 2008, Benji was waiting for his wife to pick him up after his car broke down on State Road 52 in Sierra County in southern New Mexico. State Road 52 runs west from Elephant Butte Lake through the Gila National Forest to the Western edge of New Mexico. In 2007, Benji and his wife had opened the Cuchillo Creek Cafe in Cuchillo, NM which is on State Road 52. 

When his wife arrived where he was waiting for her, she made a U-turn in front of a motorcyclist, who hit her truck — the motorcycle became airborne, flew through the air, landed on Benji and killed him. That was one of the strangest stories I ever read, and thought it was ironic that as much has Benji disliked motorcycles he would be killed by one flying through the air and landing on him. 

Shark falling from the sky

A street legal dirt bike

We had one of those very "Middle Rio Grande Valley" days where we had rain all around, but only a few drops fell at our house and no rain that I can remember fell on downtown.

Heavy rain on the West Mesa, only about 5 miles from downtown, stopped before it got downtown

“Ooooh that smell. Can't you smell that smell? Ooooh that smell.” The smell of green chile that’s all around you! It's that time of year, and the smell of roasting green chiles fills our New Mexico air.

Lola posing during a break while we were putting up green chiles

Spunk cooling off his tongue after licking a hot green chile

Chiles roasting

Waiting in line for "Snow Tha Product" in concert at the Sunshine Theater downtown.

Imperial Building Project on 8/6/2015. The 3rd Floor is well under way

The Imperial Building Project 8/17/2015. They have started framing in the 4th Floor.

While I have been doing "Tales From My Youth..." on Sundays for the past month, I didn't have time this week to create photos for a tale. The stories are easy to write, but creating photographs to illustrate them can be quite difficult and time consuming — it took me two weeks and almost 100 miles of driving to get the photos for the story about Ulysses. 

While I was out pulling weeds on the "north 40", I found a Praying Mantis that I brought up to the deck to show Laurie and since I had pulled the weeds she was hanging out on, I put her on our purple butterfly bush on the north side of the deck. When I finished weeding the section where I had found her, I came back up to the deck, put on my macro lens, and Miss Mantis was a very cooperative model. A tiny jumping spider with big, bright eyes jumped onto a leaf next to Miss Mantis, and seemed a little surprised to get a macro lens shoved in her face. Bright eyes had a spiky hairdo and isn't into shaving her legs.

After photographing Miss Mantis and Bright Eyes, I was taking a break, sitting on the deck, when what seem liked a swarm of hummingbirds flew by in what looked like a high speed ball of frenzied little birds. I put my zoom lens back on and just sat there, camera in hand, and one by one at least three (possibly four) different hummingbirds came back to feed on the butterfly bush. A Monarch butterfly flew around for the longest time before it finally decided to stop and have a snack on the butterfly bush.

When I first began pulling weeds, long before I found Miss Mantis, I had lost my Fitbit. I knew the general area it was in by where it synced with my phone, but I looked and looked, and Laurie looked and looked, but we couldn't find it. While I was looking, I spotted something under a weed that looked like it could be my Fitbit, but when I pulled the weed off, it was a fuzzy black caterpillar. I got it onto my glove and took it in to show Laurie that my Fitbit had morphed into a caterpillar. After photographing in on the table on the deck, I let the caterpillar go in another bunch of weeds.

Tristan came out to help look for the Fitbit and got the bright idea to see if there was a app for the phone to locate Fitbits. There were several, so I downloaded a mid-priced app for $3.99, which helped locate Fitbits by the amount of signal the app was receiving. We were getting "medium" strength readings near a bunch of weeds I had piled up, so we searched through the pile, but didn't find the Fitbit. Tristan went in to get water and I wandered over towards another pile of weeds that seemed too far away from where the Fitbit had been syncing with the phone before I got the locator app. The signal got stronger, so I started searching through the far pile of weeds, and there was my Fitbit hanging on a weed about halfway down in the pile. I had the Fitbit in a small pocked on my pants with a flap over the pocket. Somehow, the Fitbit caught on a big weed and was pulled from the pocket.

Fuzzy black Fitbit caterpillar