I live in a place that, when revealed to the right group of people, during the right time of year, is almost always answered with a heartfelt “I hate you.” But you see, no matter how much you detest my latitudinal position, no matter how many months of abuse you’ve endured in the cold storage of other climes, I assure you, I can erase all that animosity with a single California Honey mandarin from my local farmer. Unfortunately, you have to come get it.

The look on the face of my sister, slowly thawing during her visit from snowblown Denver, as she blinks open her eyes in my bedroom Sunday morning says it all. Beth used to live here, and we both know that this morning in Hollywood is sacred. Sure, church bells rally the faithful, Scientologist scuttle down the Boulevard to their posts. But the farmers market is our tent revival.

Soon, in the dead of winter, we’re sweating, clutching vanilla iced coffee, taste-testing Haas vs. Bacon vs. Fuerte avocados dusted with lime and salt (Bacon was best). We dig a mix of Russian Bananas and Purple Peruvians, choosing the fingerling potatoes purely on what color combination would look best in our homefries. Berries? We’ll take one pint of each; blue, black and rasp. After some deliberation, we decide that weight always wins over size for our mandarin selections, but we should get at least 20 to make sure. Beth eats one right away, two with breakfast, and perhaps as many as five when I wasn’t looking.

The hate, I find, comes in right about here, when my longtime so-called friends send me angry emails about my ability to wear flip flops while popping strawberries in the sun on Valentine’s Day. Last winter, my brother Luke—who until recently was incarcerated at a college in the bleak southern Missouri city of Rolla—demanded that I send boxes of citrus weekly to atone for my sins. But all I can think about is that postcard they’ve used to lure people here for a century: the palm trees, the orange grove and that ridge of snowcapped peaks in the distance. This can all be yours. You just have to come to California.

At the end of her visit, a newly-tan, 100% defrosted Beth sifts the non-winter elements she’s collected over the weekend from her bag. Sunblock she doesn’t need for a few more months goes back in my medicine cabinet; borrowed shorts head back to my drawer. But I see her making room for something else. She could have gathered up a truckful of disposable clothing at our brand-new Forever 21, bought a cheap pair of bug-eyed sunglasses from the kiosk in the mall. But she takes the best part of our Los Angeles winter back to Denver’s permafrost. She takes avocados and mandarins as souvenirs.

Okay, it was actually on yesterday’s DnA, but this month’s show was early (2nd Tuesday instead of 3rd) so technically I’m still ahead of the game. “BCAM Comes to Town” opens with a very timely feature this Valentine’s Day week: Where to have dinner when you want your date to whisper sweet nothings, and where to go when you’d prefer he’d say nothing at all.

To illustrate the rising decibels at restaurants in LA, Frances Anderton screams over the dinner din with my hero Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic for the LA Weekly. An acoustician explains the design decisions behind rock concert-level Osteria Mozza (complete with Mario Batali’s signature hard-rocking soundtrack, which if you don’t like apparently you can suck his, um, salumi) vs. the pleasant hum of Providence. Frances also recommends restaurants designed by Shawn Hausman—he did the restaurants at both of LA’s Standard Hotels—who actually uses the acoustic tiles as a design element.

The rest of the show is a round-up of talking heads commenting on the new BCAM, including a sexy Italian-accented interlude from architect Renzo Piano. I especially liked the descriptions of BCAM from three local critics: Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell both had issues with the building’s relationship to the street (”It’s a billboard,” says Greg; “monolithic travertine facade like a Macy’s,” says Sam), but Jade Chang, who also loved Chris Burden’s vintage streetlamp installation along Wilshire, thought the palm-fringed plaza had a nice pedestrian edge. Frances also mentions that BCAM is great for kids, and I completely agree, although you should be prepared to explain exactly why they can’t climb on the gigantic red toy firetruck.

One more thing to note: I edit the DnA calendar, so if you know of any design or architecture events in Los Angeles, please send them my way. Also worth noting, you can listen to DnA on KCRW live every 3rd Tuesday at 2:30pm PST, by podcasting through iTunes, or by streaming the audio at any time by clicking the little ‘Listen’ button underneath each show’s title on KCRW’s website.

Each year, ID picks the 40 best of something in the design world and dubs it the ID 40. For this year’s issue, which is on newsstands now, they picked 40 awesome creative workspaces, and I think they assigned me the very best one.

I got to spend an afternoon over at Ball-Nogues, the Echo Park studio of the adorable duo Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues. Actually, studio is really not the right word; it’s still very much the dusty three-car garage it was before they moved in. Well, actually, right before they moved in it was an underground death metal club. I am so not kidding. To claim the space for themselves, Benjamin and Gaston painted the garage fluorescent orange and hired a neighborhood kid named Ziggy to tag it with magic mushrooms (and perhaps on magic mushrooms). From this tiny orange shed on this quiet residential street emerges their world-famous larger-than-life installations, like Liquid Sky, which draped over MoMA’s PS1 museum in Brooklyn last summer, and Maximilian’s Schell, the shimmering vortex at Materials & Applications here in LA that got tons of press last year. Now you can check out the article online due to the wonders of Texterity.

Which is funny because I also got to write about Materials & Applications in this issue of ID. M&A is a little front yard in Silver Lake where directors Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess curate these massive temporary site-specific wonders, and currently, it’s home to Density Fields by Oyler Wu Collaborative. Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu created this somewhat menacing structure out of aluminum tubing and flagpole rope that reaches out towards the street like it’s about to take out someone on the other side of Silver Lake Boulevard. You gotta see this thing in person to truly appreciate it, something I highly recommend doing before it gets disassembled to make way for the next installation in March. Here’s the Density Fields piece, as a PDF.

There is one workspace online I’d love to send your way: The studio of my friend Marian Bantjes, who works in a house on Bowen Island, just west of Vancouver, British Columbia. And once you read it, you’ll understand how she has both the inspiration and the inclination to do all that gorgeously-obsessive work.

In which I look back at the week and try to encapsulate its essence into one delicious flavor.

Designers for Obama: Ev-erybody’s talking about Obama. Baracksteady gets a musical endorsement from will.i.am and a slew of celebs, propaganda by Shepard Fairey going for $400 on eBay and, like, a bazillion dollars in 48 hours or something like that. My Brit ex-pat pal Alice Twemlow (who can’t vote, incidentally) gives the greatest compliment of all in the NY Times: Obama is a Mac! But why would he want to be president anyway when Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People?

Super Bowling: Besides the fact I couldn’t double-dip the guac like I usually do, I think overall it was less boring than the usual Sunday spent in someone’s apartment drinking Budweiser for five hours. The Stewie vs. Snoopy balloon race for a Coke made me bawl; Tom Petty’s performance was pure Americana bliss (beard malfunction notwithstanding); and—oh my god!—the game was actually good, too!

Microsoft might buy Yahoo: Khoi Vinh tells why design couldn’t save Yahoo from its eminent demise. Are either of these companies Apple or Google? Then I don’t care.

Fifteen minutes of fame: I’ve often pined that graphic design isn’t given a fair shake at fame, but a new game by Design Observer—kind of a separated at birth for graphic designers—aimed to change all that. Not only are they putting faces with names, they’re elevating these people to celeb status. And they managed to piss some people off in the process. Awesome!

Not one to Dwell: I got an inboxful for what I wrote about Dwell earlier this week, but the best criticism came from editor Sam Grawe and design director Kyle Blue themselves at a party they had here in LA. They were extremely nice but basically, I got schooled, and rightly so. And now I see why. On BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh gives the backstory on his contributions for the new issue, and says it was the first time he’s had an impact on content. So with this March issue, I’d say Dwell’s evolution is much more evident. I still wanted to know what was up with the tie-dye cover but that was answered when I saw Kyle’s shiny gold sneakers. They’re breaking the rules on purpose, and that’s very cool.

Via Lenny Mesina, flavorpill, UnBeige, Keith Scharwath, Andrew Blum and Khoi Vinh.

Yesterday was the press preview of LA’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which they have already condensed into a proper nickname for us: BCAM. The building has three floors of some of the most famous contemporary art in the world, mostly owned by local philanthropist Eli Broad, but of course I was there to see the building, which is decked out in the “Renzo red” that’s become a signature touch for Italian architect Renzo Piano (who also used it on the new New York Times Building). I decided BCAM can also be spelled BCAMHS, for Big Cafeteria At My High School, because that’s actually what it looks like. Not in a bad way.

My editor for the California Architect’s Newspaper, Sam Lubell, and I staked out a table with easy access to the buffet (attended to by Patina’s Joachim Splichal himself). Among those dipping into tapioca parfaits were Gonzo-dressed journalist (and architecture critic for Los Angeles Magazine) Greg Goldin, talk show host Val Zavala (whose new show for KCET will premiere this summer), and Off-Ramp host John Rabe, who was interviewing architectural raconteur Sam Hall Kaplan for his show. Frances Anderton was recording interviews for a special early edition of DnA, which will be on Tuesday, February 12 and include some special design-related tips for Valentine’s Day, so be sure to tune in. I also finally got to meet my very popular councilman Tom LaBonge, who shook everyone’s hands at the table, answered some questions about stalled projects, fired off his five favorite public buildings in Los Angeles, asked everyone else at the table what their five favorite buildings were, and somehow managed to devour an entire plate of beef shanks before he took off again. The man is a machine.

But my absolute favorite part of the museum (and my day) was Chris Burden’s installation Urban Light, which lines up 202 vintage streetlamps like an electrical army on Wilshire. There’s something both striking and soothing about these graceful forms planted in this symmetrical forest (a row of palm trees behind gives a nice sense of scale). It will be hard for people to walk by this at any time of day without feeling that same sense of wonderment, and I can’t wait to see it all lit up at night. However, later that night I just happened to find myself at the corner of Vermont and Santa Monica where there’s a similar installation of old streetlamps. Anyone know if this is Burden, too? More shots of both installations here.