February 2008. Four years after my first trip to Cuba I enrolled in the same dance program, with the same teachers, and was soon retracing my old routes on backstreets. I’d been in these neighborhoods dozens of times, yet they were never the same. I wanted it to...

Susan Unk is one of the newest members of the Atascadero City Council along with Heather Newsom. The freshman councilwoman is joining Atascadero Mayor Heather Moreno and other community members in this year’s Dancing With Our Stars, which raises money for the Friends...

Other than luck, success in life requires a balanced blend of discipline and creativity—not unlike a memorable wine imbued with a balance of total acidity and pH, creativity and luck. Recently, I sat down with Neeta Mittal who owns and operates a different kind of...

I moved my family from Merced, California to Morro Bay. In doing so, we moved from an area known for its poor air quality (the Lung Association said the Central Valley's soot pollution remains among the worst in the nation) to an area renown for its clean air and...

Timing is everything. When San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden education director, Lindsey Morgan, sent out an email announcing a couple of new faces on the Garden’s three-person staff, the Central Coast Journal ended up checking in just in time for volunteer day, on a...

Many chefs tell stories of learning the basics of their trade while spending countless hours in the comfort of a warm kitchen watching their moms or grandmas create everything from Sunday night dinners to chocolate chip cookies. But that’s not the case for The Spoon...

SLO-bispans talk about this show all year long. I mean, who can ever forget Katcho Achadjian doing The Oak Ridge Boys' "Elivra,"” or Dave Romeo and Christine Mulholland singing Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” or Pam Copeland flying onto the stage as Mary Poppins?...

The stories--both published and told around the small town—could easily claim the unparalleled event was “History in the Making.” It is doubtful anyone then would even guess that the saga of the Tank Farm Fire would last nearly a century. Today, in a notable moment of...

Growing up I recall a song playing on the radio that was a parody of a fictional “Camp Granada” set to the tune of Ponchelli’s Dance of the Hours. This novelty song by Allan Sherman and Lou Busch is said to be based on letters Allan received from his son Robert who...

Anytime you have an emergency, seconds counts. And that’s especially true when you call 911. The faster a 911 dispatcher can gather the information about your emergency, the faster they can start directing resources to your location. But now there’s an even quicker...