May I present the first project to come out of the newly redone Strange Flora surfboard manufacturing facility: a bookshelf. After I finished 007, I told myself I wouldn't do another board until I finished this thing, so I did. Put it up about a week ago, at which point my life was plunged into disarray. Putting the records away was relatively easy: they get sorted alphabetically, with the only genre categorization being hardcore/punk records (which I can never bring to mix into the fray), V/A collections, soundtracks, and Christmas records. The biggest challenge is not spending so much time looking at the sleeves as I realize, yet again, that the record is the be-all end-all of music formats, not only for audio quality but sleeve art. So that part was easy.
Putting the books away presented a problem. My first inclination is to sort alphabetically, but then I run into problems. Sometimes I feel like putting authors' influences near next to them (Pynchon with Wallace, Thomas Wolfe with Kerouac, Ballard with Palahniuk, etc.), or sometimes I want to put books that I discovered at a certain time in my life next to each other. What to do if an author who wrote predominantly fiction also has some collections of poetry, or perhaps a play? Can I bring myself to cross-pollinate genres? And something in me just doesn't feel right putting a lesser author next to a great one.
But don't worry, in the end, I figured it out, and I actually got rid of some books along the way. And to reward me Oceanus sent that amazing swell on Monday with a head-high-plus south-end solo session to kick off the day, before the maddening crowd got wind that it was amazing down there, and promptly swooped in. It was a magnificent day, one of the best swells in a while and it lasted all day, and when I say that I mean after sundown it was still amazing. Truly a blessing. And more on the way.
On the board front, picked up this board the other day: It's a 6'8" Hansen Superlight Mini with 3/4 length stringer and some cool pinlines. It's in rough shape, but I'm going to give restoring it a go, and see what happens. Cheaper than a blank, anyway, and it looks like a really fun shape.
This blog was started as a way to chronicle my adventures into surfboard shaping and just surfing in general. Since its inception, it has evolved into a log of whatever I feel like rambling about and sharing with the world, including, but not limited to: photographs, bicycles and bicycling, film, music, gardening, cute pictures of Henry, and more.
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