This is the time: Wednesday Morning, April 1, 2015. This is the Place: Redondo Beach, California—otherwise known as one of LA’s thousand suburbs. This will also be my last visit to Granddaughter Teresa’s first grown-up apartment as a young LA professional—she’s off to grad school at Berkeley very soon and, given the cost of Bay Area real estate, I’ll probably be sleeping on a mat in the corner of a rented room off an iffy alley in Oakland when I next visit this girl-on-the-move.

THE KNOWN WORLD ACCORDING TO ANGELENOS.

Since it’s my birthday week, Teresa gave me quite a special present to commemorate my visits to her first homes-away-from-home: college apartment with four friends tucked up against the UCLA campus and now for life with her first job ever out here by LAX. The gift is a beautiful and detailed little globe offering up the Whole Word of Los Angeles. We have shared so many travel adventures and it has felt quite special to me to participate a little in her early ventures as an adult here in the crazy sprawl of ‘La La Land.’ This lovely little reminder from my special travel friend of our shared worlds is just exactly right. It is quite a happy birthday to me.

MY SUPER DELICIOUS RASPBERRY BIRTHDAY CAKE.