Articles by catshill

Snow in Atascadero, CA

I got up this morning to pouring rain and below freezing temperatures. Wait! that can’t be, but it was. As I was making my coffee I noticed that the rain drops looked different, larger and whiter then normal. Wow! It’s snowing! It was wet snow but hey, it was snow. As I watched, camera in hand, it got whiter and lighter, less wet. Suddenly it was snowing, like Lake Tahoe snowing. Real snow flakes, like big white feathers floating from the sky and obscuring the countryside.

Last night the prediction was for snow down as low as 3500 feet, we’re 850 feet! Boy were they wrong.

I took picture after picture and put them all, good and bad, up on Flickr to share. Feel free to look.

It stopped snowing at about 10:00 AM and by 12 noon you would never have known about the snow. It was completely gone, not a trace. Just a few small patches in the surrounding mountains, even those were gone by 2:00 PM.

It was so beautiful, like a fairyland, I’m glad I thought to take pictures.

Downtown SLO in about 1960

Originally uploaded by aroid

The Firestone bldg. halfway down the block is now the Firestone Grill.
They hadn’t planted the trees yet that now line the street.

Bugatti Veyron – my dream car

Originally uploaded by bikracer

We saw this car at the 2006 Los Angeles Auto Show. I love this car, if I had the money I would own it. Unfortunately it’s $1.5 million.

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals? more …

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors

Some things truly amaze me, among them:

• The number of people who think Sarah Palin would be a great president. If you vote for McCain/Palin that’s essentially what you believe.
• The number of people who think that Creationism should be taught in schools alongside Evolution. A vote for McCain/Palin will practically assure that it will be.
• The number of people with bumper stickers on their car that say; “Smile your mother chose life.”. Unless you were born after 1973 your mother had no choice. She could keep you, put you up for adoption or go to a back alley butcher. A vote for McCain/Palin could send women back to those days.
• The number of people who think Global Warming is a theory. A vote for McCain/Palin says that’s exactly what you believe.

Look up Sarah Palin’s beliefs, she’s no Hillary Clinton. This would not be a step forward for women but a step backward.

Remember freedom isn’t only about what you believe. In a free society each one of us has the right to make our own decisions based on our own individual beliefs. You can believe what ever you want but when it begins infringing on my beliefs it’s no longer freedom.

Wikipedia says:

Political freedom is the absence of interference with the sovereignty of an individual by the use of coercion or aggression. The members of a free society would have full dominion over their public and private lives. The opposite of a free society would be a totalitarian state, which highly restricts political freedom in order to regulate almost every aspect of behavior. In this sense ‘freedom’ refers solely to the relation of men to other men, and the only infringement on it is coercion by men.

As Voltaire said to Rousseau:

“I do not agree with a word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it”.

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Extreme Red-eye repair video

This was one of the most moving speeches I have ever read. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to hear him give it.

Cook’s Country – Recipes That Work

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Tags: cincinnatichilirecipes cooking food