Greenpeace

I joined the legions of Los Angelenos and bought a car, a 1998 Volkswagen New Beetle.  I could not afford a hybrid, but I will be looking into buying a used one, soon...I really want one!  The City of Los Angeles has a whole fleet of them, the Honda Prius, and they are GREAT!!! 

OK, so I got a pretty good look at what the Tujunga Wash Golf Course looks like, and I have to admit, the engineers did a pretty darned good job of blending in with the Wash.  I am still not convinced, however, that the Wash's ecosystem has not been damaged.  Apparently, the golf course WAS damaged during the last rainy season, just as I predicted, and it was rebuilt, with a lot of money spent.  This particular course can only be enjoyed by members, who, rumor has it, are exclusively upper crust Tokyo citizens on vacation from Japan.  I don't know whether this is true or not, but although it seemed rather exclusionist to exclude Tujunga-Sunlanders from the club, perhaps it served them right for appointing Wendy Greuel to their spot on the city council!

I work for the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, printing out building records for contractors, homeowners, prospective buyers, realtors...I have access to all of the city's building records from 1905 to the present day.

There is so much building going on, it is depressing.  I see more and more of the landscape swallowed up by development every minute of every day.  And no one seems to care very much.

There is a very delicate ecosystem, the Tujunga Wash, which was recently swallowed up by a  golf course.  Everyone thought that was just so great.  It would get rid of the homeless people who lived in the wash, and it seems everyone who lived in the surrounding area had stories of people beign attacked by the homeless as they would hike or ride their horses through the wash.  I talked and talked about the importance of the Wash's ecosystem to the surrounding area.  All I got were blank stares.  I thought it was a complete ecological disaster.  I lived on a ranch right on the Wash, which had been owned by the same people for over 40 years.  The woman who woned it had told me that she would will it to her sons, but the will stipulated that the land must never be sold to developers, only private parties who would keep it private.  When I lived there, realtors would often inquire as to whether the owner had changed her mind about selling, and I heard rumors of figures like $5 million being thrown around for the prime 16 acres.   I saw family photos from the 1960's of her sons dressed like Little Joe from the Bonanza TV show, right down to their hats and chaps and guns and holsters...they ran a real working ranch, with buffalos and clydesdales and steers...it was an amazing family dynasty that I'd hope to proliferate with the help of the family matriarch...Bless her heart!  Unfortunately, my engagement to one of ehr sons ended because he is an outlaw biker who just wanted to lay around and have me wait on him hand and foot all day...he had no intention of letting me run the ranch like a faily equestrian center...that would make him feel inferior, not that that was difficult...I left the ranch after fiding out he had a "secret family" tucked away up in Lake Los Angeles, 50 miles north of the ranch.   He is in jail for felony firearm possession, and I went on to become a civil servant.  Her son who inherited the ranch sold it to a private party, but will they keep it private?  Who knows... at any rate, I was hoping that the next big rainstorm season would wash the golf course out of existence.  Flooding gets so bad during an El Nino that people on the other side of the Wash have to be airlifted out by helicopter!  I thought, watch what happens during the next big El Nino; those golfers will be stranded on the 18th hole!  Little did I realize the tenacity of Japanese developers.  The course had evidently been designed to withstand such a problem.

 How DEPRESSING.

More later.