If I were you-weekend of January 29th

My "If I were you" event for the weekend of January 29th is:

The Cookies w/o Borders Bake Sale happening on Sunday, January 31st to support Doctor's w/o Borders and their relief efforts in Haiti.

What: Cookies Without Borders
Where: Scoop's Ice Gelato 712 N. Heliotrope LA, CA 90029
When: Sunday, January 31 from 2:pm-5:pm

You may know this event in its previous incarnation the yearly event "No Cookie Left Behind" organized by a great philanthropic blogger and the owner of Scoops , Tai Kim. No Cookie Left Behind was started three years ago to eradicate child hunger. (You can check out their list of volunteer bakers, which is a who's who of independent local bakers in Los Angeles, support them in their philanthropic off times too)

If you have been wondering how you can help the survivors of the Haiti earthquake earlier this month, this is your event. Sometimes you can be overwhelmed by the options of where to donate especially with all of the sites created just for this one catastrophic event. Doctors Without Borders is a fantastic organization check out their website.

My last two recommendations are get their early and buy a cupcake for $25, you do not know how good that tastes.

What I don't miss

The long expanse of bleak days and feeling like the main character in Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day"

Part 1:



Part 2:



part 3:

missing, if found email

Even though I have lived in LA for 4 years there are still things that I miss about MPLS. These are the things I am still longing to find here. Some of these are natural occurrences, so I won't have a lot of luck, with the exception of this week and maybe next.

(these are not in an order in which my heart aches for them)

The Chatterbox Pub- a bar where you can raid the game closet, sit on the couch and play atari and pretend you are hanging in a basement with your closest friends. (I guess there probably aren't basements here either)

A local music scene- A lot of Minneapolis music has become global. Congrats guys!

5 Spice Calamari from Rainbow Chinese- Tammy you are a genius. I wish I had a plate of that heaven now.

Walking the Minneapolis chain of lakes - I miss the change in seasons. I miss the spring when people would throw off their parkas in wild abandon to reveal arms, legs and the occasional belly button and walk around the lakes. I missed when Cedar Lake had Hidden Beach. For those of you who lived there then, you know what I am talking about.

Coffee houses-I miss mom and pop coffee shops that I can sit and read or write for hours without someone giving me the evil eye after twenty minutes or roll their eyes at me if you didn't order my coffee as a Vente, tall or grande.

Blueberry rhubarb pie from Turtle Bread Company- This is what being in love tastes like.

Lightning and hot rain

Aurora Borealis indescribable really.

If you have a recommendation on where I can find some of these things in LA please email me at kcattaraugus at gmail dot com

Say my name

My name is not Kitty Cattaraugus.

I got the name from an MTA bus driver who exclaimed one day on the 33 going west that the next stop was Kitty Cattaraugus. I thought that would be a great name for a blog if it isn't the name of a porn star.

It's not, so here I am.

Four years

California, I couldn’t understand why on earth people wanted to live here. If there weren’t earthquakes there were mudslides, if there weren’t fires there was intense drought. In fact in grade school social studies class I learned that it was predicted that there would be an earthquake so fierce that California would eventually fall into the Pacific. (Maybe Porfirio Diaz knew that when he sold the land to the U.S. for a million dollars.)

Why am I here in this city destined to fall into the sea?

Was it manifest destiny that made me pack up all of the belongings I could carry on a de-iced plane from MSP to LAX four years ago? Was it that I wanted to become an actress/model/recording star? No, it was none of those things.

I honestly had not done anything outside of my comfort zone since going to an arts based high school. Not since sixteen, that is way too long to go without risking something big. I didn’t want to be on my deathbed in the Powderhorn, Cochran or Hale Page neighborhood and think to myself “Wow, I haven’t done anything risky since I was a teenager. Who is going to feed all of my cats”

I was told by people before I had moved that Los Angeles would eat me alive, I guess I am here to say four years later that maybe I am not that tasty.