Ilene is here

Thanks to Ilene, my much better half, for writing about Vista Ford and the Woodland Hills area way back when. Anything past Encino seemed like a foreign country to me in the 1970s, and there were certainly no pastures of any kind in Van Nuys and North Hollywood at that time.

Look for Ilene's other blogs, Drawerspace in a Cluttered Mind and Food Smack for more good writing, including her master's thesis on antioxidants in rooibos tea, a noncaffeinated beverage from South Africa. (Nothing is perfect, unless you don't like caffeine -- and in that case, what's wrong with you?) Rooibos is surprisingly good-tasting, especially the unfermented or "green" kind. Since rooibos means red bush (at this rate I'll be speaking Afrikaans by morning), green red-bush tea, as a beverage name, would seem to pose a marketing problem. I also say this because we can only find one kind of green rooibos on the shelves, and that is a rooibos-honeybush blend made by Numi that Whole Foods carries. Try it -- it's probably one of the best herbal teas out there.