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One of my favorite things about our neighborhood is that it’s ideally set up for the Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge. There’s a grocery, a green grocer and a TJ’s all within two miles of the house. The green grocer (Dogwoods) we’ve ridden to a couple of times for the produce run. Pavilions we walk to whenever we’re only picking up a couple of things. The TJ’s, on the other hand, has always seemed a bit ambitious to us. Our usual run there is food for the week, which we just don’t have the gear to get home on the bike. Today, however, we’re going to a Chardonnay tasting, and that’s definitely within the realm of what we can fit in the rack bag:

Perhaps the best part of biking to the store is that it feels more like a fun outing that it does an errand. It’s nice to know that TJ’s is within easy bike distance for small runs.

By way of brief product review, we use a pair of TransIt grocery bag panniers for the Dogwoods run:

They can hold our produce for the whole week and come with shoulder straps to make shopping with them easy. We even took them on a bike camp out with Fletcher’s scout troop, on which they very capably carried our sleeping bags and tent. Recommended.

It’s been a long week. There’s a cold going around Mayflower. Stephanie is just coming off of it and I seem to be merging on to the expressway to Chicken Soup land. Good times. On a Friday night during these exciting times we go to bed early. Or at least we want to. As soon as we turned out the lights, we saw alien craft out our back windows.

What the? Oh, wait: we live in Los Angeles. It’s a film shoot.

Stephanie did a quick bit of sleuthing and found out that a show called “October Road” is shooting all over town this weekend. They’ll be down at the good old Aztec/Brass Elephant all day tomorrow.

The coolest thing? They made it snow. The whole block and all of the lawns along the street were covered with snow and the houses all had Christmas decorations up. It was pretty surreal. There was even a contraption up on a crane to make snow fall during the shoot. (I apologize for the horrible picture here.)

Here’s a better shot of the giant area lamps that they were using to light the entire block up:

There was a pretty good crowd doing more or less what I was doing: Watching the Hollywood people work and taking pictures. None (or very few) of the people in this shot were involved with the shoot. They were all just locals taking in the strangeness.

The only actor there whose name I recognized was Laura Prepon. She seemed nice enough, agreeing to take pictures with the people standing around when she was done working. I didn’t really want to wait around for that, so here’s a very blurry shot of a famous person.

Anyway, fun times in Monrovia, I guess. I’ve lived in and around LA for 13 years now and I’ve never really watched a film shoot happen. There sure is a lot of waiting about.

I’m just sayin’.

Thanks to the comment thread over at Eye Level Pasadena for pointing out the JPL Weather Station. No thanks to that rotten sun for cooking all of us over the last week.

I need a new bank. Wells Fargo has committed unforgivable sins of customer service, so I’ll be switching within the next week. Does anybody really like their bank? I’m looking for a pretty vanilla checking account with a branch that I can walk in to. (Because I like walking in to the branch.)

The story started about three weeks ago when I ordered new checks. I had changed the address on the account some months ago and asked twice to confirm the address both on the account and on the checks. The current address is on the checks, and we’re sending them to your current address. Wells Fargo sent the checks to my old address, anyway. Thanks, guys. You’re great.

So now there’s a box of my checks sitting god knows where in Temple City. Wells Fargo graciously offered to put a 60 day stop payment on the whole box — an offer I took them up on — but after that: nada. Nothing they could do, the banker told me. They offered to switch me over to a new account, but that would mean that I would have to fiddle with my direct deposit and with the external accounts I have drafting directly out of my checking account. If I have to go to all of that trouble, why wouldn’t I just move to a bank that doesn’t send my checks to the wrong address?

The best part? At one point the banker tried to bust my chops for waiting as long as I did to ask about the checks. Hello? Would we be having this conversation in the first place if you didn’t send my checks to the wrong place?

For all you banks playing along at home, here’s what you’re supposed to do in a situation like this:

• Apologize. Up front. Don’t demand that the customer remember the name of the teller they spoke to before you admit that you screwed up.
• Put a permanent stop payment on the checks in question.
• Next day — and by next day, I don’t mean “third day” — a new box of checks to the customer in question.
• Apologize again. Seriously.
• Give the customer a tracking number for their checks. “It’ll get there in seven to 10 business days. Trust me.” doesn’t cut it.

So while I will graciously accept Wells Fargo’s tree-freaking-day air checks (The banker told me “next day” not once but twice while she was trying to make up for what she admitted to be their mistake. Thanks again!), I’m not staying with them any longer than I absolutely have to. If you love your bank, I’d love to hear why.

My most infamous middle school moment came while we were reading Shakespeare. Richard III, 8th grade. I didn’t get in to it. It was just so dreary and boring. Every day we read it felt like somebody was dropping an anvil on my balls. From an airplane. Or maybe from space. At the end of the play, our teacher asked us what I though. “Shakespeare should be shot,” I told her. If she ever wrote a book, she promised me, I’d be in it for saying that.

When I came home today, I found out that The Kid had drawn “family read-along” as his next book type in the MPL summer reading program. Stephanie and the kid were pitching me really hard for reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which, given my previous experience, I was skeptical of.

Stephanie has been telling us for years now how much fun reading Shakespeare aloud is. I trust her (and I was outvoted), so we gave it a shot.

It was great!

Getting in to the characters, doing the voices, and periodically getting quick story or history explainer from somebody who studied as much was a ton of fun. We read the first act tonight. Stephanie read Hippolyta, The Kid read Egeus and I read Theseus, and we divvied the rest of the parts up as we got to them. It was tremendous fun! It’s astounding to me that something I hated quite so much growing up quite be quite so much fun with the proper crowd and the proper attitude. I can’t wait to read the other four acts.

My only question at this point: is doing Bottom as William Shatner over the top? Perhaps so.

First off, thanks to everybody who voted in The Kid’s ice cream poll. He had a ton of fun with the project. Here’s a brief snapshot of his results:

Vanilla edged out mint chip by one vote. (11 for vanilla, 10 for MC.) Rocky road an coffee brought up the end of the top nine (he was supposed to find the top eight, but there was a tie) with four votes. The Kid put together a much more complete report for school, learned about different ways to visualize data and how to use it to draw conclusions and make a point. I’m pretty happy that his class did the assignment.

I’m sorry it took me quite so long to get this posted. I burned the hell out of a couple of my fingers on Thursday morning, and it wasn’t until later on this weekend that I was able to type again. The lesson here was: don’t touch the engine of a lawn mower shortly after you’re done using it. Anyway, all’s better now. Stephanie took such good care of my fingers that it doesn’t look like the blisters are even going to break, which is braggable.

The overwhelming majority of junk eating that I do happens at lunch. Here are some Metafilter threads on packing lunches that I might actually eat:

• peanut butter, i think i hate you…
• I’m tired of plain sandwiches and pasta salad
• PackMyLunchFilter!
• SalationSalvation from Super-Sizing!

Somebody please fill me in on what all this “below freezing” noise is about. I live in Southern California, in one of the valleys. It’s not supposed to get that cold.

I’m totally going to grill tomorrow night if it snows, by the way.

We’ve been on and off with an ugly cold for a while now. After a certain amount of time, the cold wears on you and you have to fight back any way you can. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the NyQuil Bomb.

You say “NyQuil…”

I say “Bomb!”

Hoo boy. Good times.