Last night we spent with our old friends Barry and Sue. They are planning to downsize from their eleven thousand square foot home in the hills north of Los Angeles now that they no longer have most of their extended family there. If you are in the market for a new home, here’s the website, and here’s the view from the guest suite that they put us up in.

Compared with home prices in San Francisco it’s a steal. Sue tells us that the Kardashians often eat out in the neighborhood, but it’s OK apart from that.

This morning we headed down the freeway to LA, to our son Dan’s one room apartment which is about the size of Barry and Sue’s pantry. LA is known for its traffic jams…

smog…

and movie stars…

so we were happy not to see any of those.

We spent the afternoon with Carla, a friend of Paula’s since high school.

I have to ask, how can a menu item start with the promising words “SEA SALT CARAMEL MILKSHAKE” and end with the ominous “coconut bacon”.

Pigs.

Bacon is made out of pigs. A coconut is not a pig.. except apparently in affirmation based vegan cafés in Beverly Hills. The people there spend so much time looking in mirrors that they write the advertising slogans on the wall in mirror writing. Nice to see that at least in one way LA is living up to the clichés.