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“To the ignorant, careless, selfish, dangerous woman in the white Ford going North on 528 this morning n you were tailgating me, almost hit me when I slowed down because the car in front of me hit his brakes, and you had the nerve to give me the finger. Then you zig-zagged in and out of all the cars ahead of me. I watched as you cut people off, ran up the bumper of the car in front of you, slammed on your brakes, cut into the next lane, and kept doing that all the way up 528. I had my son with me and we were on our way to school. Let me tell you that I had my son write down your license plate and I called DPS as soon as I dropped him off. Next time, I’m going to call 911. You are a danger to everyone on the road. And, just so you know, the road belongs to everyone.”

“Open rant to Jim Owen: I hope you got the message in the recent election that Rio Rancho doesn’t want you to be mayor. You are not the conscience of Rio either, so let the mayor and council alone. The new mayor and council can do better without you trying to second-guess everything they do. Don’t run to the AG if you get heartburn, take Di-Gel. Got it?” “In response to the column about people filing frivolous medical lawsuits and collecting disability payments for their own drunken accidents, I believe that there is a growing population in this country that feels as if they are ‘entitled’ to anything and everything their little hearts desire. My grandfather fought in WWI and was seriously injured. When he passed 26 years ago, leaving my grandmother with a mortgage she couldn’t handle, taken out to cover medical bills he had incurred, I was a newly graduated nurse. I asked the social worker at my hospital what Grams could do to save her home. She told me, and I drove my mom the four hours to Pennsylvania to sit down with my Grams and lay everything out for her. Grams was incensed. She looked at food stamps and the other programs available to her as handouts. Her family had emigrated from Austria and she was first generation American. ‘If I can’t pay the bills on this house, I shouldn’t have it,’ she declared. So she sold the home my mom had been raised in and moved in with another daughter. She lived to be 93 and till the day she died, she was fiercely proud of never having had to take ‘a handout.’ So all of you all that are looking to the government to support you for the rest of your lives take a lesson from the strongest woman I have ever known. If you want something, work for it. If you can’t afford to buy it, tough. No one owes you anything in this world. As JFK said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’.”

“This is in response to a portion of Ms. Parker’s letter from March 9 about those ‘damnable posts stuck in NM 528 near Ace Hardware.’ I am not a city engineer nor do I work for the street department. I just drive up the hill on 528 from Sundt to High Resort everyday like you must do. If you will notice, the far right-hand lane on southbound 528 is a right turn lane. There are three intersections along there with a right turn only sign at each one. That is not just a third lane to make it easier to get up the hill to High Resort or to allow more cars to wait for the light at High Resort. I have seen many people drive halfway up the hill on 528 and begin to merge into that right lane to turn right at Ridgecrest only to almost get hit by people who have jumped into that lane at the bottom of the hill and raced up to High Resort thinking they are beating all the traffic. I have also seen people jump into that far right lane and then at the top of the hill before High Resort merge left back into southbound traffic before they get to High Resort. You know, the ones that are too self-important to wait in line. Therefore the posts were installed there at the Ace Hardware intersection to help people obey the traffic laws. When people just kept plowing down the posts, bigger and better ones were put in and guess what? They work. Hope this clears that question up for you. Happy Driving.”

“Jim Owen’s remarks about Mike Williams in The Observer after the elections were disgraceful and childish. Mike has been steadfast and on the spot every time we have called upon him over the last few years. Mike is a man of integrity and action. He says what he means and gets things done. My personal experience with Mr. Owen was to the contrary. Three years ago we heard about a grant that could be used to bring E85 and Bio- Diesel to Rio Rancho, but it stipulated that a municipality had to apply for the grant. We took the information to then mayor Owen, who did not return our calls until we started passing out flyers at the schools to gain support. Once people started calling Mayor Owen’s office, he finally called us back and left a message at our office, after hours. We contacted a member of his staff, who told us that if we wanted it done, we would have to fill out the application ourselves, because they did not have time. They were very suspicious of our motives, and actually asked us what we were getting out of it. That is why Mr. Williams was re-elected and Mr. Owen was not. Mr. Owen needs to look at his own house of glass before he throws his stones.”

“I’m glad that the election is over and we now have a new mayor. But I get a vision, looking down the road four years from now, after the mayor’s been in office for four years, SAD 7 will all be done with and those people will quit going to every council meeting, reading the same speech over and over, and they’ll all have boats and be ale to go wherever they want, and have special sand-bag dispensers located on every corner, just in case it does rain. And all the trees that were planted around the semi-trucks will all be bearing fruit, and they’ll be able to feed their neighbors. And then we’ll look at the new Wal-Mart; it’ll be able to generate enough gross receipts taxes that Bernalillo will be called ‘Beverly Hills of Bernalillo,’ and in four years Bill Richardson will be elected dictator of Cuba and gone for good.”

“I am so grateful that the old Rio Rancho library is back open. It is so convenient so I don’t have to go across town. However, I am curious, considering that it smells like a romper room and the carpet looks like someone went Dumpster diving to find it, it doesn’t look like they did much to it.”

“This is in response to an article in Sunday’s paper about the water department not having enough money to work on their water mains; maybe if they’d stop buying new trucks for all their employees every year, then they’d have enough money to work on mains. Each truck costs a little over $30,000 and they buy 5-10 trucks every year. If anybody wants to bother to check, they can check their employees and see they all drive new trucks but they don’t have enough money to fix the mains.”

“I’m calling about the comments about Rio Rancho needing a movie theater (in Sunday’s Rants & Raves) and how everybody acts like a bunch of 10-year-old girls with their whining. I think that’s true. Here in Rio Rancho, we’ve got a wonderful city and it’s growing. If you moved here and you’re under the belief in your neighborhood nothing’s going to change, then you moved to the wrong neighborhood and people need to get off of that or find somewhere else to move. We need to move on and watch our city develop, helping our school system and government any way we can -- and stop the moaning and groaning.”

“Yey, way to go, Peary Perry, in the March 9 edition about us paying for all those people who are getting medical care at our expense, because they didn’t read, don’t know or tried to sue their doctors. Let everybody pay their own way, that’s what I say. And with KB Homes leaving the state, maybe we can cut down on some of the new homes we’re building and let the road structure catch up, let the water catch up, let the stores catch up and the schools catch up and stop putting so many new homes up, bull-dozing our prairie, taking away every inch of free land that we have. Let’s put a lid on our growth and take care f the people that are here: What a good idea.”

“I’m calling because I’d like to know what happened to all the decent people in Rio Rancho. The local porn shop, Mr. Happy, put on a public display a few weeks ago and nobody seemed to complain about it. I don’t think we need his type of business in our city because porn shops, in my opinion, cause injury to innocent women and children. To Mr. Happy, I would say get your business out of town; we don’t need you.”

I cannot understand why some people feel there is a need to keep Rio Rancho beautiful and some people obviously feel there is no need to keep the county beautiful. In fact, Rio Rancho needs more education on not throwing trash or littering. However, just outside the city limit the trash thickens with all kinds of discarded debris. People drive on the dirt roads and fling their trash out their window or stop and place it on the side of the road (I have seen this happen). There is no pride, no respect for nature or the land and how it looks. There are homes and trailers that have trash scattered all over their yards. And, some of these people even have trash collection yet don’t pick up their yard! Do people

who litter like looking at trash? I hope schools in Rio Rancho as well as parents are teaching children not to litter. This needs to be strongly enforced. The county roads are disgusting. Nature is beautiful and it is so sad that some people fail to appreciate it.