It's mighty cold here where we're visiting in upstate NY. Though the snow is melting a little today, it's clearly just going to settle a bit with a foot or two on the ground where it hasn't been plowed away or in direct sun. It reminds me of when I was a very small person living in northern California near Mt. Shasta. My family had a house in a tiny town with a one-screen movie theater that'd get releases several months after all the other theaters had finished with them, one grocery store, and not much else. Every winter it would snow like crazy, for months.

We'd get completely snowed in sometimes, 2 and 3 foot icicles would form slowly on the roof, and we'd mostly eat whatever my Mom had canned during the summer or that my Dad had shot during hunting season and put in the big freezer. There was a lot of agriculture in the area, and the families we knew through our church would keep track of when farms and orchards were done with their harvest and opened their gates to gleaners. The woodstove was kept going all winter.

My Mom, btw, makes the best blackberry jam ever. OMFG. And don't get me started on the clove pear preserves.

When Dad got sick, and after he died but before we moved to Los Angeles for good, other church members would come and chop wood for us in the winter. Neither my Mom nor my older sister were strong enough to do it all themselves and you couldn't be without a well-stocked wood pile in that weather.

These days, they've got a video store in town and residents don't need to chop nearly so much wood. It only snows for a week or two anymore there, if that. It's anecdotal, sure, but the Sierra Nevada snowpack that waters California has been much reduced in recent years, including this one. Either not as much snow has fallen as water administrators had come to expect as normal, or early, warm spring weather has melted it off much earlier than the usual summer months when the state needs it. This year's drought cost state farmers $260 million, and 80,000 acres of farmland went uncultivated.

Anyway, the following is what I'm reading today. Share your top reads and/or memories of the season down below, if you'd be so kind.

- Yes, Rick Warren is an insulting choice.

- The coal companies are poisoning our sushi, and covering the countryside with toxic slurry with their latest spill bigger than the Exxon-Valdez disaster.  

- Ask Iran to free these two AIDS doctors.

- LED holiday light sales are booming, as more people realize that the energy cost savings pay for the higher up front cost of the bulbs.

- Dear California courts, please don't divorce these families.

- The South: their elites hate us for our freedoms, and good wages. Agreed that it's time for a Third Reconstruction.

- More good stuff to read than you can shake a stick at.