"I was built for recreation."

So I got out and surfed for the first time in nearly two months last weekend. It's funny, really, how little I've surfed recently. When I moved to Santa Cruz three years ago I would go out in any conditions - it didn't matter how cold or dirty the water was, how cold the air was, or how crappy the surf was. I was just stoked to be out in it. So stoked that a couple of times, strangers would comment on the smile on my face as I was paddling out, and people I knew would give me shit for being so smiley in the lineup. My sessions would last up to three or four hours, and I would get out of the water *stoked*, no regrets. Get on my bike and ride, soaking wet in a wetsuit, the mile-and-half back to my apartment. That's changed in the last few months, and it kinda makes me sad. Now, instead of living a mile-and-a-half from the ocean, I live 109 steps from the ocean, and I've gotten so picky about conditions - I can make a handful of excuses about why I shouldn't go out. "There's too many people out." "The tide isn't working." "It's too windy." "The water's too dirty." I know that I hit a plateau a while back, because for a few months it felt like every wave was the same (impossible!) and that I was doing the same thing on every wave. So I had a shorter board custom-made for me to mix things up. And that's what I took out this past weekend. It's a 7'6" fish - hardly a shortboard - but I still call it that because it rides so much differently than the boards that I normally ride (a 9'6" single-fin pintail, and a 9'11" single-fin noserider). I figured I was going to suffer no matter what I was on, since I hadn't surfed in nearly two months, so why not suffer on something that I want to get better on? I paddled out in 50 degree water, a 4/3 wetsuit with booties, did a good job of keeping my head dry for the first 20 minutes or so, and caught eight waves during my 45 minute session. And I was bored about 30 minutes into it. Don't know what's up with that. Could it be that I'm over surfing?? On Sunday afternoon, Adria and I were walking along East Cliff and we ran into Chris. He had just harvested some broccoli from his community garden plot. He shared a bit of his harvest with me. I'm going to juice it tomorrow morning. Yumm.

After the East Cliff stroll, we made our way to the West Side. Along the way, Adria and I were talking about her previous jobs. I commented that I bet she was really, really good at this one job she had before her current job and her response was immediate and confident: "I was built for recreation." I loved that answer.

We were walking along West Cliff and we looked down to the beach and saw this cool piece of temporary art. It was gone a few hours later when the tide came in.

A bit further down West Cliff, there was a BMX bike lying on the pavement and I jokingly turned to Adria and said, "I'll give you fifty bucks if you jump on that bike and ride off on it." Without hesitating, she pulled away from me, ran to the bike, picked it up, hollered to the guys that it belonged to "hey is this your bike can I ride it?" When she came back to me, she didn't ask for the fifty bucks. "Put it towards our round-the-world bike trip", she said. Yeah, more on that later...