Looks like another perfect day. I love LA.

Yesterday morning a heat wave hit Los Angeles. Like in the 90s, folks.

No, I am not making that up to be spiteful to my northern clime friends.

I got up around 10 and made breakfast while listening to Harry Shearer’s Le Show, which is one of my favorite things to do on a Sunday morning. Then Spooney and I headed out to Sunland Water Gardens to get some water hyacinths for the pond to replace those that were killed in our recent freeze. Yeah, we’re experiencing just a little bit of swing in our weather recently. Let’s just say I spend a good part of my day either opening or closing windows.

Anyhoo, it was hot as fuck up in Sunland, which is at the tippy tippy top of the eastern San Fernando valley, in an area that Spooney and I call “little Mexico.” There are more taquerias and donut shops than you can count, and the while the young men all dress in the typical shaved-head-and-baggy-manpris style of dressing that all young men everywhere seem to have adopted, the older men still favor the look of gentlemen in rural Mexico, which is to say that they all sport a neatly styled pompadour, boot cut jeans, cowboy boots, large silver belt buckles, western-style shirts, and cowboy hats.

To pull off this look correctly, it is preferable for the hat to coordinate in color with the shirt, by the way.

I must say that I am instantly charmed by these guys and how much care they take in their dress. It is a source of pride to them that they are well-groomed, which is an invaluable asset in any culture, if you ask me. As we were admiring one particularly dapper gentleman outside the check-cashing store, Spooney wondered out loud if the young men of Sunland would always continue to dress like all other young American men, or whether they would, at some point, revert to the style of their elders. It was amusing to think that at some point they would be told “Today you are a man. You must wear your pants tight, now.”

I, for one, would find it a welcome change if young men no longer resembled their fat uncle’s clothesline.

After shooting the breeze with the salespeople at Sunland Water Gardens, and exchanging tales of the freeze and the thickness of the ice on our ponds, I tore Spooney away from the turtles (Spooney loves turtles!) and we headed home.

But not without stopping first at Sunland Produce. Awesomest. Grocery. Ever.

My friend Alana turned me on to this place, which not only sports a HUGE inexpensive produce section (Cilantro! 8 bunches for a dollar!) that actually smells like dirt, but features cheap goodies from Latin, Middle Eastern, and Asian cuisines. We bought oil-cured olives, pickled eggplant and onions, orange blossom water, taramosalata, queso fresco, sheep’s milk feta, spices, nuts, wine, pomegranates, pears, and a proper pan ($6) for making Turkish, I mean Armenian, coffee.

We spent the rest of the afternoon working in the yard, and trying not to get too much sun. Around 5:30, when it started to cool off, we got out our bikes and tooled around the neighborhood. I showed Spooney the place down the block where the tree roots had pushed up the sidewalk and created a pretty decent jumping ramp. I’m sure the sight of two dorks in their forties riding over that and laughing was pretty funny. Then, on the next street over, we saw so many people driven outside by the weather. There were teenage girls sitting on a stoop, talking (and I don’t mean talking on their cell phones, I mean talking to each other), and a guy working in his driveway on his 60s-era Nova, and several boys playing stickball…we even saw our neighbors teaching their 3-year-old how to ride her tricycle for the first time. It was like freakin Norman Rockwell time, readers. I was even wearing pigtails.

Round about dusk we headed home. Spooney plated up some of our Sunland treats, and I found enough mint in the yard to whip up a couple of mojitos, and we sat by the pond, watching the fish and wondering what more one could possibly want from a day.

(thanks to Norman Walsh for the image)