Blissful Evening in the Woods

     As long as I live, I will cherish all of these cold mid-winter night rides with Henry in the woods. They get me out in the cold when I might be more inclined to stay inside after working all day out in the cold, and they give the little man a workout he would never otherwise get. But on top of that, there is something pretty magical about the woods at night, especially the hour after the sun sets and and darkness seeps in and engulfs the fading light in the West. It is generally an exceptionally still time, and I sometimes stop and just listen and look at the silhouettes of the trees, dark against the dying light. That is, I stop for just as long as Henry will allow.

    I got out in the water last Tuesday for the swell the mighty blizzard Juno kicked up for us. Some really fun chest-head speedy lefts down at WJ. Basically, my favorite kind of swell at my favorite place. It felt really good to get in the water again, it felt like it had been forever since I had caught a real wave.

By the time I got out, the swell had faded a little bit, but there were still some really fun waves coming through. I had to get out because my leash broke and I had a pretty long swim, so that combined with surfing for the first time in a while pretty much killed my arms. That, and I didn't have another leash with me. Really beautiful evening though.

Selfies while riding in the snow aren't the easiest thing, but at least I got Henry in the picture too.

"Moonshine," by Bardo Pond, off of their exquisite album Ticket Crystals.

Snow!

     Well, a little anyway. Enough for Henry to love it, and for it to look nice, at least for a little while. Once again, haven't been keeping up with this blog. For the few people who check read this, and for myself, I'll try to keep up on it more.
     I have been slowly making my way through 009, which can be seen in the photo above standing in our dining room lammed, hotcoated, and awaiting sanding, which maybe I'll get to this weekend. It's funny, I find it takes me so much time to begin the next step on a board, and that it sits for a while, but then when I actually start I enjoy it so much I wonder why it took me so long. There's always something going on, I guess. That's just how it goes.
     This is the first board I've done with epoxy, and I have to say I love it. It wets out on the cloth so much easier, especially when you microwave the resin first to heat it up, and as a result it uses less, so weighs less the kind I used (Resin Research Fast) allows plenty of time to work with it. The mixing ratio is always 2:1, no matter what temperature, so it does away with the charts and figuring that comes with traditional poly resin. It has no odor, which means no ventilator, and I can bring it inside to let it cure so I don't have to keep the shop heated. Also, the lack of odor, along with a carefully placed tarp, would allow me to glass in the house, thus saving the money of heating the shop at all, if only I could convince the Missus. It cleans up with vinegar and gojo citrus handcleaner, which puts an end to harmful-for-me solvents. All in all, it's great stuff, and I can't wait to use more of it.

The Mighty Nauga!

     I like the Feelies alot. I first got into them after reading Rick Moody's 1992 novel Garden State, and have since been a fan. However, I often find myself listening to their first album, Crazy Rhythms, and eschewing their sophomore album The Good Earth. I found that record at a thrift store a couple weeks ago (in a lucky record haul that also included the Beatles' Help! soundtrack, Pet Sounds, Led Zeppelin I, Kinks Kronikles, some Mitch Ryder records, and a bunch of other good stuff), and after listening to it I wondered why I haven't more. Also, their new album is pretty good. 

ON A FINAL NOTE, in trying to catch up with all the movies we didn't get to see this past year, we watched Another Earth last night. It was an interesting and well-done science fiction film, but sci-fi in a way that uses the sci-fi element as a backdrop and instigator, a MacGuffin type thing, that drives the very human drama that plays out between the very human characters. More psychological sci-fi than aliens-and-rayguns sci-fi. I would definitely recommend it.

Puerto Rico was nice but...

...this is home. I got the first role of b/w film shot with my OM-4 developed, and found some nice pictures in there. Just take a minute and look at the above wave. It's beautiful. And no one was one was out. This picture to me sums up wintertime surfing in NJ: cold, hollow, big, and empty. I don't remember when this was from, but it's within the last couple weeks.

The above two pictures are from I think three Wednesdays ago. It snowed hard while Don and I were surfing beautiful lefts with no one out. I had to go to work, but I got a couple pictures of Don out there. The top one is Don waiting, and the bottom one is of him dropping in. It's kind of hard to see on this scanned picture, but he's there.