Guaranteed to Have the Time of your Life!

     This board survived the Great Storm, literally. When my shop flooded I ran out to find it floating around on the in a foot of water. It was a board I shaped a while ago, didn't like how the rails came out, left it half forgotten and abandoned leaning against the wall of the shop, then, after sitting on the blank rack covered in dust and cobwebs, and on its way to mouldering like John Brown's Body, after I finished what will be SF012 (I think), I decided to allow more than this board's soul to go marching on, and fix the rails and finish it. I'm excited to surf it, as it will be quite a bit lighter than the garbology experiment that was SF007, which measures 5'2 or something and weighs as much as some longboards.

Stack o' keels waiting to be foiled...

 ...and a pair that has been glassed and ready for a trim. I've realized I need to be in the right mood to go out and foil fins. I tried a couple when I just wasn't feeling it, and they came out awful (not saying the fins above are perfect, but you should've seen the previous attempts).

 This one's for all my librarian friends!

      Scalloped Early White Summer Squash from the garden. Last yeah, this variety of summer squash all developed blossom end rot and I didn't get one strange fruit at all, while the other squashes and zucchinis did well. This year, while the others are still doing well, the Scalloped White bush grew like gangbusters, and has really been producing. I think this is the fifth one that we'll get so far, and it shows no sign of stopping. The only foreseeable thing that could happen is the dreaded Squash Vine Borer, which has already taken a toll on one of the other plants

Fair is Fowl and Fowl is Fair

You know it's a good morning when you get to work and a Mallard immediately comes up to you and eats from your hand.

This Blog Isn't the Only Strange Flora I've Resurrected

Well, it seemed to me that waiting around for some kind of divine inspiration wasn't doing the trick, so on Friday I made myself go out and shape the fish pictured above. It felt really good to get out there, break out the ol' Skil 100 and get covered in foam again. And the AC in the shop definitely helped with the "feeling good" part. The board came out not bad, just needs some fine tuning, then for me to make a set of keels for it, then it'll be ready to glass.

Here's a sneak peak at my new film called Henry Beats the Heat. It will be a full shot done in one long take of my dog, wearing a woman's gardening hat, lying on the grass in 90 degree sunshine, panting. It will be a hit among the art cinema crowd. It'll be five minutes long, but shot on my one roll of Super 8 film I have lying around. "It can't be done!" you are probably shouting. "Five minutes on one Super 8 roll?! IMPOSSIBLE!" Well, that will be the secret to the film's success. It'll be like a loaves and fishes thing.

OK, I'll shut up now. Time to go get sushi anyway.

Bardo Pond, "A Tune," off of the collection Batholith. I really enjoy shaping boards to music like this, at least I did on Friday. It really allows my mind to focus on what I'm doing and I find everything, the tools, the blank, the music, and me, flows together. It's a really nice feeling.

Blog Defibrillation

 Alright, so let's see...It has been a while since my last post, and some may have thought this blog to have entered the realm of "things Chris does with zeal but then stops doing forever," but alas, this is not the case. I have been meaning to restart this blog for months, but for some reason or another I haven't. A combination of doing a lot and relaxing a lot.

On the surfboard front, I have not been making boards as much as I have in the past, but I did finish this one, which is technically 012 but officially 011. If memory serves correctly, it is a combination of the templates of 008 and 010. I have surfed it a bunch, and really like it. I was surprised to find that it wasn't as difficult backside as I thought it may be, as sometimes quads are little tricky backside. It's definitely not my best board, either form or function, but it's a fun board that surfs well. It's also the first board I have made for myself out of the block of EPS I bought a long, long time ago.

I have also been riding my bicycle a lot. Above is a picture of my second annual semi-official Blueberry Run. This year I loaded 36 pints of blueberries on the ol' Nishiki and hauled them home. Well, it actually turned into 35. And a little further down the road, 34 pints. I find New Jersey blueberries irresistible. (On a related side note, someone please fund my idea for a sappy romantic comedy set on a NJ blueberry farm called "Jersey Blues." General premise: daughter of blueberry farmer falls in love with worker, all the while farm is failing and they need to find a way to save it. Happy endings for all, except for the huge meth ring bust and the father dying. I would like this movie to have been filmed in the late '90s and star someone like Drew Barrymore, Sandra Bullock, or maybe J. Lo as the daughter. She will have to have all of her fingertips stained blue (from sorting millions of blueberries, of course) for the duration of the film.)

 Cool dudes.

A bunch of friends and I also rode the "1st Annual Longest Day Dogfish Head Brew Pub Bicycle Tour," in which we rode down to Cape May, took the ferry to Delaware, camped and terrorized Rehoboth Beach on our bicycles. It ended up being about 180 mile total over a couple days, and that includes the amazing ~4 mile trail that lead from our campsite to Rehoboth Beach proper, and, at the end of the rainbow, Dogfish Brewpub, which had great food and, obviously, amazing beers. Also: white chocolate cherry bread pudding, which still blows my mind just thinking about it. Great trip, can't wait to do it again. 

 So here's to the revival of the Strange Flora blog, and all that is contained herein!

Not surprisingly, with all the time that has passed since my last post, Henry has stayed cute, so here's the obligatory picture of him.

Sometimes I feel like if this album were the only album I was allowed to listen to for the rest of my life, that would be alright.