Dana, your last few days have been rotten.

Marketted, where I only bought empanadas. Then leaves. 2 hours and 7 bags of leaves. My walk, the sidewalk of 4 houses and street. Next up: swim. After I eat something.

I have a maple pecan pie in the oven and the ingredients for the pumpkin pie sort of around. They bake at different temperatures, so I can't do both at once. That's ok—it'll keep the nice smells coming out of the kitchen for a longer time.

Sounds interesting, Matt.

He may have been, Burrell. He's not a fan of the West Side so he's not as likely to go out there. But I just sent him a list of Russian restaurants in LA. Esp since he's been out at UCLA doing research anyway.

[link]

The owner is from Uzbekistan, but their menu is about half Russian and features other countries too (I think plov is Turkish?).

Uzbek cuisine takes in all of the various immigrants into Uzbekistan, from Russians to Koreans (brought in by Stalin to work on the rocket system). One of their pickled vegetable dishes is spelled differently but sounds remarkably like "kimchee." (I have a few Uzbek restaurants near me--lots of Russians out here!)

Remember when we were different people and ate out together a lot?

Vaguely. I mean, it's hard to remember anything pre-this life.

Cashmere, we're doing these cookies: [link]

Spidra, back in 2004 I ate in a Russian place that was in a strip mall between Santa Monica Blvd. and Sunset. Maybe it's still there?

There's a whole Russian neighborhood around there. Pretty sure I go by one on La Brea b/w those two streets all the time.

Gronk. Had kind of a rude awakening when my upstairs neighbor walked in at 4 am. The door to the interior stairway I only really use if I'm going down to the storage and I must have left it open. She leaves hers open all the time and was coming home somewhat, um, altered.

She apologized, shut the light and closed the bedroom door, and then after a moment I realized she hadn't actually left but had gone into the bathroom. Where she stayed for like 10 minutes. I intercepted her when she came out, still not apparently clear that she wasn't at home, and walked her up one more flight to her door, stopped her from continuing on up to the rooftop door (yikes) and went back to bed.

Will be curious to see if she has any memory of all this.

I was positive LA must have a Russian neighborhood. Still, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or German restaurants are nowhere near as common as Chinese, Mexican, Thai or Indian here.

That sounds very, um, interesting, brenda.

Yikes indeed.

Oh man, Dirty Dancing is on. Good thing I did my errands already -- library, bank, groceries.

Goodness, Brenda.

One pie done (the maple pecan cracked a bit across the top, but otherwise looks good).

I over-filled the pumpkin pie shell with the filling, so it spilled. Lucky for me the hot bottom of the oven was there to catch it. Yay. Maybe that'll prompt me to clean the oven.

Probably not.