Food Truck Festival This Friday

April 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The Food Trucks are coming back to Sumac…Friday April 20.   Bring your family and friends to the Sumac Elementary L-STEM Academy Playground at 6050 Calmfield Avenue in Agoura Hills for a Food Truck Fundraiser from 5:00 – 8:00 pm. A $5.00 donation per family (up to 6 people) allows you access to some of the most popular food trucks in LA, including: Slammin Sliders, NomNom Truck, The Dosa Truck, Jogasaki Sushi Burrito Truck, The Wien Truck, Tino’s Pizza Truck, My Delight Cupcakery Truck, Cool Haus Ice Cream Sandwiches, Tango Mango Italian Ice & MauiWowi. (Food is an additional cost).

 Also the iBroken truck will be there to repair your damaged iPhone, iPad, iPod or iWhatever (for an additional fee of course).

This Sumac PFA-sponsored event will benefit art, music, computer & PE programs at Sumac L-STEM Academy.

Check out www.sumacfoodtrucks.com for more info on trucks.

Filed Under: Around Town, Events, Local Businesses

Toydozer Makes Cleanup Time More Fun

April 17, 2012 by 14 Comments

 

I don’t know about you, but in my house, there are about 1,254,215 tiny pieces of plastic.

My two little boys have amassed quite a LEGO collection over their few years and they all manage to make their way to the floor of our dining-room-turned-toy-room.  All at once.

After a few days of this I get so fed up with asking them to clean up, having them say “But we’re still playing with them!” and NOT cleaning them up that I will just clean them up myself.  That is ending.  I do not have enough time in the day to shoehorn in cleaning up their toys when they are perfectly capable of doing it themselves.

Enter the Toydozer.

It’s not the imaginary LEGO vacuum cleaner that sucks up LEGOs and automatically sorts them into little bins by color, size, and type that I want someone to invent, but it’s a step in the right direction.

There is a scoop and a gatherer, which works like the blade of a bulldozer.  You just scrape the tiny toys into the scoop, dump into your bin, (over and over and OVER in our case) and then cleanup is done!  The boys even have fun with it:

 

 

A very thoughtful and convenient feature of the Toy Dozer is that the scoop and the gatherer are reunited by Velcro attachments so that you can store them together and easily detach for use.  We stuck ours in the corner for the next cleanup time.

My husband the engineer noticed a small design problem that makes the tiniest of the tiny toys sneak by the Toy Dozer’s process:

 

The flat edge of the scoop is curve just the slightest bit – which creates a gap between the scoop and the surface you are trying to clean:

Here he is pointing out that a plastic “rib” such as the one found on the flat edge of the gatherer would be a helpful part of the scoop so that this problem can be avoided.  You’re welcome, Toydozer makers.

The Toy Dozer sells online for $18.99, which is a bit high considering you can do the same thing with a dustpan and hand brush, but this is colorful and fun for the kids – they actually enjoyed cleaning up.  And I will admit it…so did I.

You can get 20% by using the code BLOGGER20.  We received a box of three to facilitate this review.

 

Filed Under: Products Tagged With: , , ,

Great Race of Agoura Hills 2012

April 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

For the second time Kid 1 entered the Family Fun Run/Walk portion of the Dole Great Race of Agoura Hills. This race day also includes two half-marathons (different routes), a 10K and a 5K, and a Kids’ competitive 1-mile race. Kid 1 is old enough to enter that but like me he has no interest in running. I sometimes decide I’m going to start running to get some exercise, and I am successful at the starting part, but then I remember that I hate running, and I slow to a nice brisk walk which is much more my style.

This year I entered the run/walk with him, so on a nice chilly Saturday morning in March, off we went with the rest of our family to Chumash park, which is normally a wide expanse of green where club sports like football and lacrosse have their practices or games, or people walk their dogs, or families cavort and frolic. But on this day thousands of people descend upon our sleepy little town and the park is festooned with business booths, inflatables, and the cool blow-up finish line that makes even the leisure walker feel like a champion when crossing.

The mile walk was an easy stroll around the neighborhood, where residents sat in their front yards with their young children, cheering us on. We ran the last, oh say 40 yards, which made us look pretty badass when crossing the finish line.

Kid 2 was pretty much only there to play on the bouncy things, but by the time he was ready to play the lines were really long. He waited patiently for his turn, and then made it worth his while by disappearing into the nether regions of a huge bouncy play structure and not surfacing until at least 10 minutes later.

Both Kid 1 and I received large metal medals for our meager efforts. I guess you get what you pay for, because even the family fun run/walk cost $25 to enter. The entire event raises money for LVUSD schools, so it seems worth it.

Here are more pictures taken by Agoura Hills Dad with an iPhone:

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: