We have a lot of friends and colleagues that are considering a move.
Instead of droning on about how difficult the move was for my family, I decided to make a list of 20 things that making living here in Burbank absolutely awesome. We are very grateful for this community and the friends that have made us feel so welcomed. (I reserve the right to bitch in later posts, however.)
I hope that local friends will add their own things they love in the comments.
1. The weather. It’s mid November and since the winds are coming through tomorrow, it’s going to be in the 80s tomorrow. Well, it will be in the 60s when the kids leave for school, the 80s when I pick up the boys around 3, and in the 40s late at night. We go to the beach on New Year’s Day. We haven’t pulled out the winter clothes for two years.
Roses in November.
Swimming outside 9 months out of the year -- 12 if you're my kids!
Beach cave exploration.
The one time it's rained in the past six months.
2. School. We were okay with our school in NJ, but once we moved out here, things shifted. One of my kids has “special needs.” Within the first two months of school, his teacher alerted us and the administration and that kid has 5+ hours of services a week. I always “joke” that we’d have to sue the SOMW district for years to get half the services my kid gets now. Except it’s not really that funny. Another one of my kids is a GATE kid (Gifted And Talented Education) and that kid is getting a lot of services as well — a field trip to the Reagan Center where you role play the Granada Conflict, plus a board game gathering that I started and run. Our former school district in NJ had no gifted and talented programs, even though the state mandates one.
Plus our teachers can MOVE.
Arlo and his beloved resource room teacher.
Halloween artwork!
The Goose's classroom, admiring their Halloween Scarecrow. Yes, that is 29 kids in one classroom (with one teacher) -- it's not all perfect.
3. The library. We love our library. It is well-funded and cunningly-programed. My kids have attended multi-aged book clubs, story times, and “puppy tails” where struggling readers read to therapy dogs. We have three libraries and the librarians know all of us by name and appreciate my butted-in advice about comics.
The Goose taking out her first books with her very first library card.
Arlo bonding with Annie, the therapy dog he reads to every month.
This beautiful building is our library -- one of three, equally well-stocked and staffed.
4. The commute. Door to parking garage, if the traffic lights are aligned, Evan’s commute is 8 minutes. Worst case, 15 minutes. Since the studio office hours are 9-6, Evan can take his one-hour break and meet me for lunch, or pick up the kid after half-day kindergarden.
5. Movies. Movies are like religion out here. Nobody talks or texts during the film (except in certain theaters and showings you learn to stay away from). For big tentpole movies we scrimp and save elsewhere and go to the Arclight, home of assigned seats and awesome sound and good popcorn and attentive ushers. Otherwise we go to $6 screenings before noon or free test screenings of movies that haven’t been released yet. (Think about the two movies you actually look forward to seeing with your kids over the next 6 months. We’ve already seen them — for free. And we got to fill out a form that might actually change them before they are released! And sometimes we get to see them in swanky screening rooms on famous Lots with free popcorn.)
Oscar and pal Lucas at the Wreck It Ralph screening at the Disney theater in Hollywood, complete with a preshow, props, and free video games in the lobby.
Our local multiplex.
Props and costumes at the Arclight.
6. The Beach. On New Year’s Day. Every year. Also when ever you want — just bring a fleece. Rock climbing, tide pool discovering, body surfing, cave exploring.
7. The Food. In-and-Out, The Habit, Bob’s Big Boy, and better sushi and tacos in strip malls that you could get back east in the best restaurants. (We shall not not speak of pizza and bagels.)
Excellent advice, Even better donuts.
8. The people. We haven’t made a huge community of friends here like we had back east, but the ones we have are tight. They have been endlessly welcoming to us and our kids and have been a wonderful resource for everything from dentists to grocery stores to mechanics to comic shops.
We got boo'ed! That means we have friends!
Oscar and his buddies horsing around after school.
9. We are less than 40 miles away from Disneyland. Many of our single friends or families with preschool aged kids buy a discounted California pass and make excellent use of it. We have too many kids and they are too old for the yearly pass, but we manage to take them once in a while (by the grace of grandparents or dear Disney friends or by our poor wallets) and it is amazing. Remind me to tell you about the time I took Arlo to Disneyland for his birthday and we went on the Toy Story ride and Star Wars ride 4 times in a row. Each.
10. I always knew the drivers and car insurance sucked in NJ. We moved to LA, added a car to our account, went from one person driving less than 1k miles to 2 people driving 2.5 k miles each, and it’s still less than our car insurance in NJ.And believe it or not, the drivers here are more sane that in NJ on the local roads (not in the freeways).
11. The mountains. My kids have done (really cheap!) camps up at the nature center and are dedicated, if whiny, hikers. Evan loves to take them on weekend hikes. We spent a delightful weekend camping in a state park in the foothills of rocky mountains and a quick walk from our favorite beach. It just delights me that we are in super suburban Burbank, fifteen minutes from downtown Hollywood and Los Angeles, but we are also a seven minute drive away from a hike that will put us completely in the wilderness, away from any sight of civilization.
12. Farmer’s Markets — Oscar and I head out to the Farmer’s Market in Burbank just about every Saturday. We stand in the endless line for the egg lady (20 organic brown eggs for $3.50 — and if that sound like a lot, we almost always have to stop by Trader Joe’s for another dozen before the end of the week). Sometimes I drop Oscar off at the salad booth, since they have a son, Sage, who is the same age and they are happy to spend 30 minutes hiding in the trucks and under boxes playing with their parents’ iPhones. I buy tomatoes and berries and salad and kale and gai lan and lots and lots of broccoli for half of what it is at our local grocery stores and leave teeming with a locavore self-satisfaction. Sometime we even go to the Hollywood farmer’s market and deal with the beautiful people with their cunning baskets plucking one perfect radish from a table. Oscar and I blitz through there, patting baby goats and getting down to live jug bands, and horrifying the locals with our purchases of cheap non-organic broccoli.
13. Playgrounds. EVERYWHERE. Well-maintained, shaded (!!!) and always with working bathrooms. The park system in Burbank and LA is robust and well-funded. And the ice-cream trucks are year-round.
Our favorite Japanese Garden, complete with giant koi and friendly turtles.
14. Museums. Well, I know that we lived within 17 miles of New York City before, and we did take advantage of it, especially since Evan’s work got us in free just about anywhere. But that 17 miles meant a 1-3 hour drive roundtrip, plus $30 parking, plus $15 tolls. Or dealing with NJ Transit with three kids, stroller and diaper bag and snacks in tow. Now, we hop in the car and drive to the Getty, The Autry, the LA Zoo, LACMA, the Natural History Museum, the California Science Center, the FIDM, the Huntington — all within a 10-30 minute drive and a $10 parking fee (the zoo, Huntington and the Autry’s parking is free). The grandparents give us museum memberships instead of plastic crap for Christmas and birthdays and that’s what we do for fun. (The CASC and Getty are free but you pay for parking. The Griffin Observatory has free parking AND free admission.)
The Observatory.
The Natural History Museum.
Did I mention comic conventions? Here's Oscar/Ashe with one of his Ashe cohorts at Wondercon.
Sketching at the Huntington Desert Garden.
The Getty. (It's for babies.)
Public art outside FIDM.
Impromptu Day of the Dead cookie decorating outside FIDM after seeing the Emmy Costume show.
Boo at the Zoo.
At the Page Museum at the Tar Pits.
The San Diego Safari Park.
15. Cactuses and bugs and lizards and hummingbirds.
Bug catching at our local playground.
16. Burbank is a small town in a big city. We have awesome recreation classes, amazing public works, and lots of cranky old guys that pay their taxes, support their schools even though their kids graduated years ago, and march in the Burbank Parade every year. Even though Burbank is home to the WB, Disney and NBC Studios, the people that live here aren’t the executives. The people that live here are the union guys. The guys that work 90+ hours a week during pilot season, the guys that take a couple extra shifts at their theater when their kid needs to pay for cheerleading or SAT coaching or math league. They often have stay-at-home wives that prop up the local school system. I personally know dozens of parents (both male and female but mostly female) that spend more than 40 hours a week working for and at our schools on a volunteer basis.
Burbank on Parade.
Oscar and The Goose getting down at the Starlight Bowl.
Cooking class.
Art camp.
Climbing tower at hiking camp.
17. Cars. We don’t have salt on the streets here. We also have a lot of creative blue collar guys, That means we’ve ended up with a fleet of gorgeous vintage cars that are puttering around town every day. I’m sure that the fact that one can supplement one’s hobby of classic cars by renting them out to the studios has something to do with the preponderance of gorgeous round purple Ford trucks as well. I just know that I lust after the vintage woody station wagons (with extra seats in the back back) and Volkswagen Camper Vans, just like my folks had.
Seen in the parking structure at the Disney Lot when we were there for a movie screening.
18. “The Industry.” Almost everyone you meet out here is somehow attached the what is known as “The Industry” — the business of making entertainment. It makes cocktail parties and BBQ more exciting (I regularly attend a BBQ with an actress from my favorite teen movie of all time, a neighbor of some of our comics mob). Holiday decorations and costumes are totally out of hand. If you are wondering about a job or a movie or a book or an obscure bit of trivia, somebody knows somebody that can help out. And you get to see famous people at Trader Joe’s all the time. We've made a holiday tradition of going to see this one crazy street in Burbank on Christmas Eve.
Boney Island -- an amazing local house that puts on an amazing Halloween show.
19. Grocery stores. We have a lot of them and they are all great. From the high falutin’ Gelsen’s and Whole Foods to the midrange Ralph’s and the low end but totally fabulous Vallarta, they are all clean and cheerfully staffed. Of course there’s a Trader Joe’s every 2 or 3 miles and they all have absolutely impossible parking lots. (I know that grocery stores aren’t really a selling point for some people but our former town had a real dearth of grocery stores, and the ones they had were always getting in trouble for selling expired meats and rotten veggies.)
Dried chili selection at Vallarta.
20. Visitors! The great thing about living somewhere that people want to visit it that they usually do!
Bonus entry from my husband!
Record stores. There are multiple vintage stores that have tons of records and a great used record store on Magnolia called Atomic Records (tons of them cheap!) But the piece-de-resistance is Amoeba Records in Hollywood, which is enormous and features all sorts of new and used records in every genre. It puts every record store in NYC to shame. Yes, all of them. It’s like the Record Exchange (in Princeton, NJ) combined with Tower Records (in it’s heyday.) And its right near the Arclight Theater, the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, and Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffle. And they validate parking!
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