GIGA GRANADA HILLS

The Petit Park playground has been ripped from the earth. The project, intended to bring the park's play equipment up to ADA standards, will have the playground out of service for about six weeks, according to GHSNC member and park employee Sean Rivas. "Our playground is no longer going to be a full sand structure. We will have a soft rubber flooring with a small sand area. This allows all persons with disabilities to utilize the playground," Rivas said via email. Much-needed shade awnings will also be added to the structure. With the removal of the articulated bridge, I guess that means no more ricochet jumps like the ones pictured below. The now-historic photos below were taken immediately after the (wildly successful, I might add!) Incredibles Movie Night and Food Truck Fest . Figure 1. Figure 2. These photos illustrate one possible use of the play equipment: recreation undertaken by young people. Yet unfortunately, these feats of daring, performed to a cheering...

Today, a seven-mile stretch of L.A. streets will be closed to cars and opened to bikes and pedestrians for the city's first CicLAvia event, and it's hopefully not the last. My question is, when are we going to do this in Granada Hills? Having San Jose Street closed to cars and opened to carefree pedestrians and bikes for just a few hours would be difficult to pull off in our auto-prioritizing town — heck, people even bitch about the Granada Hills Holiday Parade shutting down traffic for a few hours, and that's during the season to be jolly , for Christ's sake. But what a delight it would be, just once, to be able to take the kids out for an on-street bike ride that won't feel like a death duel. For complete CicLAvia route information, click here . Related Posts: CicLAvia , May 3, 2010

The things I miss by not having cable. To wit, Animal Planet's Pit Boss: "Shorty, aptly named, and his three cohorts happen to be little people with the biggest hearts for these adorable dogs, who often are bigger than they are... Pit Boss follows the everyday drama and joy of these buddies and business partners as they hit the streets of Los Angeles in their fight to overcome stereotypes — for themselves and the pit bulls they save." The interesting thing about this program — aside from the obvious question of how many screenwriter suicides can be directly attributed to the green-lighting of unscripted shows just like this one — is that it features Granada Hills' own Eileen Smulson of Operation Blankets of Love, doing what she does best -- providing comfort to shelter animals. American entertainment has come a long way since the days of circus sideshows. It's thoroughly tickling that we can now turn the channel to watch little people performing generous...

"Are you a spicy woman?" I am, but sometimes, a girl's just not in the mood for sausage. So Bill swaps out the hot link on my combo for the BBQ meatball sandwich, flanked by a spicy chicken taco, a pulled pork taco, and a little cup of baked beans, which Bill Kelley, a/k/a Smokin' Willie, has strongly advised me to try. "It's my mom's recipe for barbeque baked beans, and so is the classic barbeque sauce," he says. "It's the recipe she's been making since 1969." When I take a bite of the pulled pork, I'm instantly envious; my mom never made anything that tasted like this. Kelley, owner of Smokin' Willie's BBQ Truck, used to work for Warner Brothers Records for 26 years until AOL bought Time Warner and he lost his job "the American way," to outsourcing. After a stint in another doomed gig — the mortgage business, Kelley says, "I saw this crisis coming and said I was never going to work for a big corpora...

Hows Market is still open and will remain so for the foreseeable future, but the chain, which includes a Granada Hills location, has been put up for sale. "We're getting by with less help," said Eric Oerum, manager of the Granada Hills Hows, which has had to let some employees go. Otherwise, it will be business as usual at the store. "Hopefully, we'll be able to keep the stores open," said an employee at the corporate office, who declined to give his name, and said he could not provide any information about any prospective buyer at this time. Photo lifted from runchadrun on flickr