Patterns

Its been a week or so since I posted something.....that is representational of me being back at work and not having time to document whats going on. But I did find this picture recently. There are some interesting patterns on the wall.

First day back for teachers tomorrow. Let the race begin!

Olas....Pura Vida

I've been surfing twice a day for the last couple of days.... there has been a south swell and its been good. The "Sarape" board is the best I've ever had...very fast. It was head high in Oceanside this morning.

But that is nothing compared to what the swell looks like in Costa Rica. Check out the surf report for northern Costa Rica. Double to triple overhead? Yikes!

It Was A Date...

Claude Lelouch made an eight minute film in 1976 that consisted of driving around Paris, France in a Ferrari 275 GTB. It is one continous shot of him driving VERY FAST through town. None of streets were closed...pretty crazy.

The name of the French film...."It Was A Date". If you like "in-car" footage and the sound of a Ferrari then you'll love this film.

Back Where We Started

Remember last month when I discovered my laptop crashed and I lost all of my files...including a ton of music?

I just spent the last week re-building my music collection. I was able to retrieve some of my music from my iPod, from Michelle's iPhone, and from a hard drive. I couldn't retrieve 100% of my files and I ended up loosing a bunch of reggae.

I rebuilt my music library on a different laptop using iTunes. The attached photo shows how many songs I have. Less than I did before the crash. This number represents the total AFTER I finished removing duplicates...that took awhile. It took me 20 minutes just to remove all duplicates starting with the letter "S".

The good news is most of the lost music wasn't ranked too high. The bad news....I had just finished ranking and categorizing each of my 6000+ songs before my laptop crashed. I'll have to replicate aprox 50% of that work and it will take months......

Next step is to implement a better back-up plan. My old plan involved a hard drive, but I wasn't disciplined enough to do it. My most recent backup was almost a year old.

I've decided to use JungleDisk...an automated backup strategy that uses an off-site server. Michelle uses JungleDisk and has had success with it. I like the off-site server idea...a few years ago one of my back-up hard drives failed.....that won't be a problem with JungleDisk.

Questions? Contact me and we can chat!

Laying Pipe

Michelle and I recently drove by a construction site in Old Town and took this photo. My Dad used to work for Ameron, where he would design control systems for machines that made concrete pipe. Keep the water flowing!

Fin-tastic

Yesterday I decided to purchase a blank center fin for the purpose of sanding it down and creating a center keel fin for my new fish. While at the surfshop I decided to go for "Plan B" and shape my own.

I used wood from our fence, planed it down using my neighbor Chad's planer, cut out the template with a jigsaw, sanded it, glassed it with three layers of cloth, sand it again, and sprayed it with laquor for a nice finish.

It took a day to create and I'll try it tomorrow. Lots of work but a lot of fun!

Flex It!

I picked up a new board from Steve Pendarvis today. I'm totally stoked on it and can't wait to ride it. I'm going to fix the lawn mower then ride down to the beach and paddle out for a couple small ones....its sunny and should be fun!


More about the board here...

Photos Are Up

Yesterday we unloaded and cleaned the camper, cleaned the house, ate fish tacos, and uploaded and put captions on 109 photos. Yikes! One of my favorites is below..

Check out some photos from our trip!

Home...

Just finished the marathon drive from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon through St. George, Utah, and back home. Going to sleep and will unload the truck later. Will post some photos soon. Saw some really pretty country and have stories to share.

Goodbye Fort Collins & Lory State Park

Michelle and I will be leaving Fort Collins tomorrow morning. We had a great time hanging out with Michelle's parents and exploring the Fort Collins area.

Michelle and I took our final trip up to Lory State Park today to ride the jumps. It took almost a week but I was able to get the main line working. It took me six days to fix the lips on all six jumps and tune up the berm. Below is a video of me jumping the line. Each jump is different but I like the 3rd because it pops you in the air and the 6th because you can carve off the top. I built the lip on the sixth jump into a semi-bowl which you can hit straight on or carve to the left.

We said goodbye to Linda, the caretaker at Lory State Park. She thanked us for the work and added us to the "Jump Builders" email list. Good times!

Down An Odell

Michelle and I stopped by Odell Brewery today to taste acouple of their beers. Odell is a local Fort Collins brewery that has a bunch of tastey beers including 5 Barrel Pale Ale and 90 Shilling. Yummy stuff!

WWV Can You Hear Me?

We stopped by the WWV antenna farm outside of Fort Collins, CO. today. The National Institute of Standards and Technology broadcasts Universal Coordinated Time information on five different frequencies from this area. All broadcasts are in shortwave. We are able to pick up the broadcasts throughout Southern California and Baja California. Want to know more about WWV? If so, follow this link.

It was a little cloudy today. I stopped by the jumps later on but was rained out. I almost fixed the last lip....just a little tune up and we should be good to go. I should be able to ride the entire "seven pack" by tomorrow.