It’s been a pleasant week here, aside from the crazy wind yesterday. The under-renovation 20-story Sunset Vine Tower two blocks up from work was covered in a skin-tight Motorola ad for the first few months I was here, but that eventually disintegrated and blew away. Two days ago, workmen finished putting up a massive cloth banner for the new Transformers movie, a top-to-bottom ad on one side of the building. When I went to lunch yesterday, I saw it complete for the first time. When I left lunch, 20 minutes later, then entire banner, 20 stories tall and at least 75 feet wide, was gone, torn to shreds, flapping in the the wind. Probably because there was nothing to keep the wind from blowing through the building and out the other side, as there was when the Motorola ad was wrapping the entire building all the way around, the wind just tore the ad to pieces. It also created havoc for Aimee on her field trip yesterday, as the trains they took to get home were interrupted by dust in the engine and debris on the track, plus a commute full of traffic lights that weren’t working. We lost our cable, but not our power, which was sort of strange.

I attended the opening night of the Cinematheque’s 8th Annual Noir Festival last night, where I enjoyed the first film of the series, Act of Violence, starring a young Janet Leigh, an old Mary Astor, and the always great Robert Ryan. At the opening reception, the theater was offering four different types of juice, Bitburger beer (bitte!), and tiny cups filled with granola or miniature Famous Amos cookies. It was very weird. And not very noir. James Ellroy introduced the series, if ‘introduced’ is the right word; he just sort of spewed forth platitudes about what happens in noir films while swearing a lot and making a big deal about the fact that he was born in L.A. when film noir was at its peak. Great.

We won our weekly trivia night earlier this week, on the strength of doubling down on the first two rounds, and only getting one question wrong in the first four rounds. This is the second week in a row, I think, that the Space Needle has been in the picture round, and I’m still surprised how many people don’t know what it looks like. Coit Tower is another matter. We did really poorly on the last round, a multiple choice round, but it didn’t matter by that point.

Week 3 of training is almost over, and it’s a step back week, meaning I’m not running too much this weekend, just 5 miles on Saturday and 6 on Sunday. I’m still contemplating some races this spring, like a 4- or 14-mile trail race in May, and also maybe a 5k in Santa Monica later on that month.