Met a fellow Creeker today

[Nancy Laird]

Hi all,

LOML and I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Vaughn McMillan this morning. He was in Albuquerque on personal stuff (and to pick up his order of business cards we made for him), and we had breakfast together before he heads back to SoCal. He is a great guy and does some beautiful turning. He brought along some of his bottle stoppers and a screwdriver that he had turns, and I showed off some of my pens.

Here's a picture of him (right) and the spouse in serious discussion of something tool-related--random orbit sanders, IIRC.

MVC-022S (600 x 450).jpg

It was great to meet you Vaughn, and hope you can come back to the Albuquerque area often.

Nancy

[Lee DeRaud]

You were supposed to keep him there...didn't you get the memo?!?

[Norman Hitt]

I'm glad to see this report, Nancy, because I had been wondering where he was, because Vaughn had never been this quiet for this long on the forum before. I almost posted a msg a couple of days ago titled "Where's Vaughn", but got distracted and never got it done.

PS: Is the Rio Rancho development the one in the Northwest part of ABQ, or the one down by Belen? I still own a lot in the one by Belen, (that I bought in 1966 IIRC), and I've still never seen it.

[Nancy Laird]

Lee, I must not have gotten the memo, because we let him get in his new (to him) truck and head back west. He may be coming back to Albq some time in the future because he and his wife are tired of their "8 million best friends" living in their backyard. His father and a sister are here, and he graduated from high school here, so Albq is his home.

Norman, Rio Rancho is the town "on the hill", northwest of Albuquerque and up the hill across the county line in Sandoval County. It did not exist in 1965, when my spouse left here to join the Navy, and when we moved back here in 1993, there were 40,000 people living here. In the past 13 years, the population has passed 60,000 and we have surpassed Santa Fe to be the third largest city (in population) in NM. Intel has their largest fab plant here and makes Pentium wafers, and if it weren't for Intel, this city would be just a bedroom community. As it is, we are getting "uptown" with our own WalMart, Home Depot, Chili's, Starbucks, etc., so the residents' money isn't going down the hill into Albuquerque. The area has grown so much, even in the last 13 years, that you can't really tell where Albuquerque stops and Rio Rancho starts, except for the signs (sort of like California where you go through an intersection and you're in a different town on a different street name).

As far as "where's Vaughn", one e-mail I got from him before he came to town said that he had backed off from the forum for a while (don't know why and he didn't elaborate). I think he's just overly busy, like a lot of us.

Nancy

[Norman Hitt]

Nancy, I thought that's where Rio Rancho was, and for the life of me I can't remember the name of the development down by Belen, I'll think of it when the annual property tax bill ($5.00) comes in before long. Both areas were initially developed by Rio Communities, and I had the option of purchasing in either of them, but they just starting the initial development preparation for Rio Rancho, and were saying there wasn't adequate water for a Large development at the northern development and that the one by Belen would grow faster especially since a major Missle Co, (Martin-Marietta, IIRC) was about to build a plant on the South side of ABQ. Well.........that didn't happen, and needless to say the northern property took off and grew like crazy, and the Belen property just kinda Fizzled out in it's growth, (that's why I still own it). I kinda think the development name was/is Rio Grande Estates.

Sorry to hear Vaughn is taking a break from the Forum, as I will miss his project pictures.