Southern California

Southern California has seen its biggest ever one-month rise in gasoline prices, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California's weekend gas watch. The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in the varying regions of Southern California has now climbed 57 to 59 cents since last month. "We looked at all of the one-month spikes that could have been bigger since the year 2000 and this was bigger than any of those," said Marie Montgomery, a spokeswoman for the Automobile Club.

SOMEWHERE between a dorm-room poster of Monet's waterlilies and the Robert Rauschenberg painting owned by Eli Broad is another level -- the beginnings of an art collection that can be built by anyone with a few grand to spend.

Beneath the massive trees of the Malibu mountains, four small groups of people clad head-to-toe in red, green, yellow or blue stand around several long tables playing a heated game of flip cup. "Get it, blue!" a young woman shouts into a bullhorn. "You got this, green!" hollers another. It looks a little like a frat house basement dragged into the light of day, but this competition is much more innocent. It's part of Adult Color Wars, a weekend designed to give adults a chance to relive their days at camp.

To your grocery list, add electricity. Kroger Co., the country's largest grocery store owner, with chains including Ralphs and Food 4 Less, plans to install a total of 225 vehicle charging stations at 125 supermarkets in California and Arizona. San Francisco-based Ecotality Inc., which operates the nation's second-largest network of public electric charging stations for vehicles, announced Monday that it would handle the installation. Kroger, based in Cincinnati, said it would invest about $1.5 million to install Ecotality's Blink charging stations and DC Fast Chargers.

As he piloted his new, $1.4-million helicopter from his Apple Valley home to Orange County one recent morning, Dr. Prem Reddy enjoyed a cloudless view of his growing empire. Today, the five-seat Eurocopter EC120 whisks him to Anaheim, where he recently agreed to buy two hospitals. On other days, he sweeps over endless miles of gridlock to his facilities in Sherman Oaks, Huntington Beach and San Diego.

You can grow anything in Southern California, right? Laurie Olin, the Philadelphia landscape architect for the Getty Center and downtown's Pershing Square, told me that one of his biggest problems with those gardens was deciding how to narrow the planting field. "You can grow just about anything out there," he said.

There are more than 200 established campsites within a couple hours' drive of the Greater Los Angeles area. Here are a few destination suggestions. VENTURA COUNTY INLAND: Forest Service: The Santa Ynez Mountains, once home to the last wild condors, still offer a measure of freedom to families fleeing civilization. Dozens of camps are scattered through the Los Padres National Forest east of Santa Barbara.

On the fourth floor of a vacant wing of St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles, some 150 crew members crowded the hallways, joining actors Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson as they prepared to film a scene for "Captain America: The Winter Soldier. " The hospital wing is often used for filming television crime dramas such as "CSI" and "Private Practice," but Tuesday's shoot was among the largest St. Vincent has accommodated in 20 years of renting out its facilities to Hollywood.

To grab a beer, Israel Arrieta doesn't just stroll to the fridge; he has to walk out his back door to the side of the house, where he pries a chicken-wire screen off a basement window and scrambles, crab position, down a wooden ladder. Several minutes later, he emerges cradling half a dozen cool, dusty bottles of beer. Arrieta, 27, keeps his beer in the closest thing to a cave: the crawl space under his parents' North Pasadena house. To test it out years ago, he crawled down on a 100-degree afternoon holding a thermometer.

Southern California property values have sunk below historic norms, various indexes show, but ongoing foreclosures and economic woes mean that the market bottom may not yet have been reached. The forecasting firm IHS Global Insight reported this week that Los Angeles County home prices are now 6% undervalued. Its calculations are based on home prices, interest rates, area incomes, population density, and historic premiums and discounts in given markets.