Pink Saturday - pink pig!

It's Pink Saturday -  Beverly, at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you.

Take a flying leap into the New Year! It's the fabulous pink pig of Topanga, festooned for the holidays!

Pearblossom HIghway

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CA route 138 is the Pearblossom Highway.  It runs through northern Los Angeles County's Antelope Valley, a high desert valley north of the San Gabriel Mountains and south of the Tehachepis.

It's dry here. It's so dry the vegetation is low, crabbed, and prickly - Joshua trees, creosote bushes, and cholla.  The ground underfoot is grey grit studded with rocks that are rounded from being tumbled in sudden washes, or shattered bits of quartz and granite.

Fancy Fusion

For several years now, we have enjoyed both the food and the drinks at chef Sang Yoon's gastropub Father's Office.

Earlier this year, the chef opened a new restaurant, just a few doors away from the Culver City branch of Father's Office.

Lukshon is more sohpisticated place, stylish and sleek, serving Asian-inspired re-imagined small plates. Old favorites of Asian cuisine and even street food are updated, turned inside-out, or re-invented.

The menu items are painstakingly described, with a list of ingredients that include things I've never heard of. Even the cocktails are made with specialized teas and herbs and garnished with exotic pickled delicacies.

Dinosaurs in the desert

We're taking a road trip to the high desert. It's wild out here!

Malibu Christmas

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 Christmas Eve, high on a hill in Malibu, looking out to the Pacific Ocean. That's Santa Barbara Island, to the left, and San Nicholas Island, on the right side.

Jack plays with his friends Franny and Lulu.

To the south and east, the lights of Santa Monica and the South Bay, and Catalina Island. And a giant edifice down the hill, new since our last visit, built by some mogul. Wonder which one of his chimneys Santa will come down?

Look Ma, no tailpipe!

When Our Son comes home for the holidays, it's a good time for him to catch up with old friends, and one of the biggest differences between London and where we live is that there's no public transportation here. L.A. is a town where you need a car, so this year when Our Son came home, we decided to rent a car so that all three of us could work, Christmas shop and visit friends without tying our schedules in knots.

Enterprise now includes the Nissan all-electric Leaf in its fleet. Because I work next to a parking garage with an EV charging station, I've been the lucky one to drive it, while Our Son drives my Honda Fit.

It's a beautiful blue, sleek car that glides silently down the "S" curves of the canyon like a spaceship. It can travel 100 miles on a full charge, but with my 10 mile commute, I haven't yet put its gauge in the "red" zone.

You can charge it with a regular household plug with a cord that travels with the car, but that takes about twelve hours. The one drawback about charging EV is that it makes a warm and cozy place for rats to nest - that's an issue here in Topanga. The one time we did charge it at home, we left the hood open, which is our standard rat-abatement method.

Plugged in

It seems much smarter to park it away from rat activity while at home, and let it charge up while I'm at work - the charging stations in Santa Monica are 220 volts and only take three or four hours for a full charge.

Today I went to the mall and found EV charging stations right there on the ground floor of the garage. The other cool thing about EVs are that - at least now - you can always find a parking place. The charging spaces are reserved for EVs, and the number of cars in use hasn't yet exceeded the number of charging stations in newer garages.

The charging station I use near my office is solar-powered - so in addition to driving "zero emission", I'm not powering up with carbon-based electricity, either. Pretty cool, don't you think?

The Leaf is a lot of fun to drive and surprisingly powerful, too. It has more get up and go than the Hondas. Or at least it feels like it, since you can't hear it reving. It has a GPS that also tells you where charging stations are located, if you're taking longer trips and worry about running out of a charge. For a regular commute, though, it's a great no-anxiety choice.

If you need a rental car for a short and predictable routine, next time try out a Leaf.

Have a Tiki, Tiki Christmas!

A bright, cold windy day and we're in the San Gabriel Valley. This is winter in Southern California. The Santa Anas are tossing the palmettos around high overhead.

Although we don't have snow, or mistletoe, you can tell it's almost Christmas.

Brilliant

This house in the neighborhood on the west side of Silver Lake has a huge tree in its front yard....

And the tree is bedecked with chandeliers.

Dozens of them. Dripping glittering crystal prisms.

They are wired, too.

I'll have to come here at night and see if they light up. I'm not sure whether they are just up for Christmas or whether they are up year-round.

What a wonderful idea.

Here's an LA blog that mentions the chandelier tree, and in the comment the owner/artist explains. Go read it!

The essence of L.A.

Our Son, who's been living in the UK for a year, has returned home for the holidays. And while he enjoys living England, this afternoon he savored once again the true essence of LA.

Yucas shares a parking lot with a liquor store

Sitting in the winter afternoon sunshine at a flimsy table in a parking lot, eating a burrito from a tiny food shack, while the traffic in the street goes by.  The orange grease oozes through the paper wrapping and runs down your wrist.

A cochinita pibil burrito from Yuca's on Hillhurst in Los Feliz.

It's Los Feliz, so you expect hipsters

A liquor store on one side and a nail shop on the other.

Jack likes it, too.