Westward Ho!

Checking In

Posting from the LAPL's Echo Park branch, a nice newish building with good air conditioning and free wifi (and plenty of outlets). I like that on the desk where the public computers are, there's -- somewhat inexplicably -- a stack of Environmental Impact Reports, with a yellow label reading "Environmental Impact Reports" right above them. They look lonely. I should read them sometime. Surely I can't be the only planning/development geek in this part of the woods. Especially with Silver Lake being the modernist-architecture capital of L.A.

Speaking of architecture, I feel guilty for not having followed the ArchNewsNow list quite so regularly lately. A friend alerted me to the results of this AIA America's Favorite Architecture poll. Some interesting choices, some not so much. I'm a little unnerved that the once-reviled Twin Towers are in there -- is this contrarianism, revisionist history, nostalgia, or all of the above? With all due respect to the people in the buildings on 9/11, those towers were a blight on an otherwise grand skyline. Nicest surprise on the list: NYC's Apple Soho store. Good to see the Gamble House represented too.

Feliz Aniversário!

I moved to Los Angeles a year ago today. I hope the next 12 months will be as awesome as the first.

I haven't been online much lately because I don't have net access in my summer sublet (except for some very spotty leeched wireless). At the moment I'm parked in the Down Beat Cafe on Alvarado off Sunset, but I'll have to move soon because my laptop battery is losing power.

Catch you later,
Jody

Organic Express

It's happened; I've started in earnest to break the shackles of my dependence on supermarket frankenfood and all the pesticides and waxes and long-haul big-rig fossil fuels that that implies. Trader Joe's organic produce is hit-or-miss, Whole Foods' is beautiful but the chain is nicknamed "Whole Paycheck" for a reason, and somehow I never manage to make local farmer's markets part of my weekly schedule. But I think local is the key; organic produce is wonderful in theory, but not so much if it has to be flown in from New Zealand or even trucked 3000 miles from New York. I signed up last week with Organic Express, which is 100 percent USDA-certified organic and 90 percent California-grown. My first box arrived today. Here's what's in it:

-Bananas
-D'anjou pears
-Sugar snap peas
-Tommy Atkins mangoes
-Zucchini
-Cucumber
-Onion
-Romaine lettuce
-Gala apples
-Artichokes
-Broccoli
-Cauliflower
-Cherry tomatoes