I got a 3rd (my last one, I swear)  used lens on eBay for $35 and it's a wide angle 28mm. I couldn't wait to see how well it would turn out so I took a photo with my iPhone camera through the manual camera lens. This will make for better close up, realistic-view, and landscape photos. 

April 21-23: With the days getting longer I can sometimes leave work before it's dark. On Friday I left with enough time to sit through an hour of traffic to drive 10 miles. Sitting in long lines at red lights, windows down to feel the warm air cooling a bit, I realized there was almost no wind. Looking at palm trees lining the roads they proved my guess. I knew there was swell building, did some math in my head: how long until sunset? How long until I can make it to El Porto (the most reliable surf break in the south bay), I know I left my old wetsuit and board in my car, but do I have a towel?

I found a parking spot with about an hour of light left, the waves were overhead, slightly crumbly but the larger the size the more the shape of the wave overcomes the crumble that wind puts on the surface. I did not have a towel though, so a Mexican blanket that I keep in the back had to do the job. El Porto is right next to the Chevron refinery and the waste water treatment plant, so the water quality is grimy, smells like oil and cannot be trusted. Don't accidentally swallow it. Try not to step in oil tar on the sand.

The next morning I replaced the break light bulbs on Mia's car, took apart my passenger seat to check that the wiring was okay, did some random stuff and then visited my dad for the first time since he moved Planet to Cabrillo Way Marina in San Pedro. The marina was incredible - so nice and new, and really made me realize what a dump marina's with old wooden docks and rusty pilings are. They had a way to pumpout at every slip for free! All of the plumbing runs through the docks into the city pipes, they have people clean the docks, and the view around Cabrillo down the channel to Hell's Gates always offers something to watch thanks to how busy the harbor is.

On Sunday I woke up and times the shifting wind to bodysurf in Redondo and followed that up by running errands making a big breakfast and going sailing with Connor. There was a red flag warning for the high surf and predicted winds around 20, but it wasn't actually that bad. We Reefed the main in his boat and took a couple-hour sail, the best part was back inside the channel going as near upwind as possible and doing some quick and what I imagine looked like perfect tacks in front of KHYC. Overall a fun weekend enjoying the local offerings of water, boats and wind, however my own boat maintenance looms.

These sailors were the only ones out and were also jibing with a spinnaker up. 

I arrived home from work before dark one night and took advantage of the sunset to try a new used telephoto lens on my camera 

In the morning I wake up and I have the same consistent first-thought as I do every single morning no matter where I am or what time it is. It's the same thought that I've had for ten years, every morning. This thought provokes a sequence of memories that flash by and that tell me that I need to clench with my toes and shake my ankles to make sure I still have that connection from brain to feet. Next, engage my core for a second to rotate my waist thereby measuring how much pain I will be for the day. When I was 21 I was in a car accident that herniated a disc in my lower back. The lawyers mostly disagreed about the cause because of a million factors that kept me from seeing a doctor as soon as possible. Since then, other discs have worn down to compensate for the degenerative ones and it's a problem compiling on itself, crunching my spine, bulging into my spinal cord, pinching nerves. I usually dream at night and when I wake up during a dream I was just fully aware of the fact and that I felt no pain in my back or legs, my focus was on my environment and whatever my brain was creating for me. When I'm awake, my focus on my task at hand is always weighed down by variable constant pain and limits from my injury. On most days the think I look forward to most is being able to do something physically active to stretch and engage my affected parts because nine times out of ten I feel better afterwards. Last Saturday was a one out of ten result. I was able to wake up early, knowing full well that there would be good surf and that Mia had promised to come to the beach with me and support my hobbies. I woke up, checked the feeling and mobility of the lower half of my body, noting that just yesterday at the gym I was really feeling great, almost as good as I could feel since the injury. I shouldn't have ever acknowledged that, it will jinx me. It did.  We drove to the beach, walked down the steps, set up Mia's beach chair and a towel and I zipped up my wetsuit and started to do some light stretches. I squatted down, engaged my legs muscles, stood up and SNAP, or BOOM, or POP, or PLUCK, SCRATCH, TEAR, whatever it would translate to, it's a feeling like a bear trap the size of my body just closed on my back, a hundred sharp teeth locking into various parts of my back, neck, and legs, reducing my range of mobility without pain to around 1%. Every muscle movement feels abrasive. The waves were good, we carved out the time for me to do enjoy my hobby of bodysurfing and surfing. Maybe, I thought, the pain would subside after I got in the water and started to paddle and let my body weight float. I caught two head-high barreling, low-tide draining waves and if not for the adrenaline forcing my muscle-memory to stand up on the board, I would've just been tossed off the lip of the breaking wave from 6 feet in the air to really shallow water below. After the second wave, I floated to the beach only using my arms and when I got my feet on the sand I had enough range of motion to make six-inch steps and shuffle across the sand back to Mia. I didn't want to waste my opportunity to enjoy free time and good surfing conditions and I thought there was still a chance to get in the water and relax the muscles. So I put on my fins and paddles back out to bodysurf and stretch in the weightlessness of the ocean. A few minutes later I got out, we made our way back to my truck and it took about 5 painful minutes to contort myself out of my wetsuit. I fought with my reflexes, which were telling my body to stop moving, in order to sit in the drivers seat and operate the pedals. I decided a long time ago not to let this injury prevent me from doing what I like to do, and it still often does, but today there were already plans. 

We took the boat to pump it out, packed our bags and drove to Sierra Madre to visit Mia's family for Easter weekend. From then on, thankfully, I was able to roll around on their wide open floors (something the boat lacks) and stretch my legs and enjoy a few beers to ease my sensitivity to the pain. We hiked on Sunday morning and I think for the most part I was able to silently deal the creaking door and shooting pain from my back sufficiently enough that it didn't take away from enjoying everyone's company, the weather, the meals, and the fun. It's been 10 days since that occurrence and I've been doing what I can at the gym to nurse myself back to a more tolerable level of pain but I'm not going to peg a status on the improvements to re-jinx myself.

I was searching for any campsites that accepted reservations off and on for a couple weeks. There wasn't a single thing in Southern California that wasn't "first come first serve" - which we knew we'd have a low chance of getting because we were only going on Saturday and assume most campgrounds would be full.  Finally, on Thursday night, a single campsite was un-reserved and about a 2-hour drive away.

Up in the mountains at 6,300 feet? No Problem. Forecast to drop to 24 degrees at night? Fine, we'll have a roaring fire and sleeping bags. Frequented by bears often? Well, the truck shell seems safer than a nylon tent anyway. So we went for it.

We got there in the afternoon, hiked up to Jenk's lake, came back to start the fire and relaxed camping we were wanting. The temperatures dropped, neighbors got rowdy, the fire kept us warm, it was a mellow camping trip. I tried a used (new to me) lens for my film camera and had some thought-less mistakes with the light sensor for a few of the pictures here, which is why they're really dark. It's always fun to get to use my truck for activities like this and is fairly low setup/maintenance/cleanup when camping out of the shell. Mia's family let us borrow a fold-out table and 2-burner stove, too. We're almost self-sufficient except for the fire pit. Next I want to go into more drive-in deserted locations or a nice beach area.

Mia at the fruit stand  

We got out of LA as early as we could on Friday but the traffic was already building up. Luckily the app had us taking highway 126 through Piru, Fillmore, and fruit stands to 101, then on 154 up the Santa Barbara mountains past lake Cachuma. We played along and got fresh strawberries, huge Valencia oranges and trail mix, then pulled over at a vista point to view the lake that just months ago was almost dried up. 

We walked horses, tried to please cats, and enjoyed the weekend with Mia's family.  

Journey looking attentively at Maeve

Maeve, Journey, and Lincoln one of the ranch dogs  

Unsure whether the manual Pentax camera even still worked since my mom gave it to me for my high school photography class, I got a roll of film from CVS and began shooting. Turns out the camera works perfectly. 

Nowadays most place don't do photo development but there is a company in San Clemente that can develop you negatives and provide the digital downloads of photos for a base price, and then offers a variety of options for prints and higher resolution. The company is TheDarkRoom.com

Shot of 35mm  

I had a weekend filled with a brunch and afternoon stroll down the MB pier with Mia and her dad - whose birthday is about a week away. Then Mia and I headed up to Santa Monica and met with friends just before we all went to West Hollywood to celebrate a friend, Tim, who was turning another year older and also accepted a job and move to San Francisco.  

On Sunday Mia and I took a walk through the marina over to the Redondo breakwall to soak in the last of the weekends nice spring weather.  

 Recently I've been trying to check off some minimalist lifestyle boxes by doing small loads of laundry, hand washing it in my sink and hanging it to dry in the cockpit. I use Dr Bronners and cold water for the first soak, ring it out, then the trick is to use vinegar with water during the second soak and rinse it, ring it, hang it.  It's great for boardshorts, workout clothes and other stuff I wear frequently. 

Living near the beach in Los Angeles means decent trail hikes are tough to come by. Malibu has a lot of trails but it is about an hour drive away. Close to home is Rancho Palos Verdes which has a few designated trails, mostly short and crowded. There's a long trail with variations at the top of the headland that wraps all the way down to the beach, it gets packed on the weekends though. I wanted to try a new one which had reviews online saying it was narrow, steep and overgrown with vegetation. That sounds perfect. My friend Dante was passing through and we set off to hike Saturday morning and did the Lunada Canyon trail then walked to a second trail, going to the Shipwreck down on the beach.

A view from the top of Lunada canyon shows how foggy it was below,  the remains of the shipwreck.  

Dante took a picture of me taking a picture 

To me, this looks like it would be on a treacherous coastline, but in fact there's several multimillion dollar homes just above where I was standing. 

The first hike was about 75 degrees and sunny through tall bushes and grass, a few steep parts were a good workout. Then we went down to the shipwreck trail and were surrounded in refreshing fog. From our vantage point on the canyon trail we could see it wasn't just a fog bank, it was thick clouds that had to chance to burn off. In fact the weather at the coast all weekend was 20 degrees colder than a mile inland, overcast and foggy. It was actually welcomed by me because I just wanted to get some chores done without being tempted to enjoy a summer-like day.

So the shipwreck was pretty cool to see. A 400ft ship ran aground in the 60s and they spent a couple days trying to rescue it off the rocks but failed. Then there was an auction for all kinds of elements of the ship that was being bashed and demolished on the beach. Now all that remains are long scraps of metal, mostly graffitied, and what looks to be the bow and some shell of the hull as well as this tractor/tank/crane machinery. Whenever I sail past PV point I would look for the wreckage on shore but this was my first time seeing it on land and up close. There isn't a trail going to the wreck, people have to hop along rocks which form a beach until they get here.

Other than that I installed some solar powered lights in the shell of the truck to help when finding something at night or when we go camping and need light back there. The solar rope-light was about $30 and designed for peoples gardens and backyards so it's waterproof. I just used zip ties to fasten the rope to the punched-angle metal on the ceiling.

Camper shell lights  

It's February 28th and the air is 48, the sun isn't up yet, and I'm going to get in 58 degree water. By the time I get down to the water's edge the cold sand has numbed my toes and somehow 58 degree seawater feels like a warm bath. Not after the first duck-dive, though. Why do I do this? Because I'm smiling during every wave I catch. My hooting and hollering of happiness inside the barrels echo around me before it encloses me and crashes. That's a lot like a surf session. It's great at the moment, then it's gone. Just a memory. Now I'm sandy, and too numb to have the grip in my fingers to turn my car key. I'll spend the rest of the day tired and salty but it was totally worth it.

Connor letting autopilot steer the boat and using his GoPro and iPad to view dolphin videos. Technology has its advantages  

Arriving Saturday - couldn't believe how green the island was

You can see how it would be easy to lose a frisbee in this  

The next day I got a text message from Connor that was just a NOAA style weather forecast for the weekend.

"What does this mean?"

"Catalina this weekend"

I went along with him on his boat, Sea Casa. We left around 8am Saturday and it was a mellow crossing to Two Harbors. The ocean was filled with dolphins, traffic cones, and party balloons. We got there and were among only 6 other cruising boats, went to shore to play frisbee golf and meet up with his friend who does research on the island and lives there. There's a frisbee golf course sprawled out around two harbors but with all of the recent rain the growth on the island covered some of the baskets, so after losing our only two frisbees in the thick green grass and drinking all the beer packed in the backpack (legal there - private land), we returned to the boat, donned Connor's suits to try to fit in with a wedding going on that night - which was the only other reason people were there, plus it over-took the bar/restaurant. Our plan didn't really work and we didn't want to cause any kind of disturbance so we ended up just being overly-dressed and sitting at the quiet bar at Two Harbors, entertaining people who questioned our outfits coupled with our exclusion from the wedding group. 

Leaving Sunday, smacked by all the elements of a small craft advisory  

Connor works at Space-X and his enthusiasm for space travel was evident by this poster in the v berth where I slept. 

On Sunday a small craft advisory was setting to be in effect so we cancelled our plans to go diving and rock jumping at Parson's Landing, and set off in the building wind to cross the channel. When we started we could see clear across the channel to Palos Verdes and it was visibly raining there. About an hour out from the island, the last of the "nice patch" of weather was gone and we had fast moving walls of rain all around us. The winds gusted up to around 25 mph, the boat rounded up a couple times despite our reefed mainsail. Then the rain caught up to us, or we caught up to it, that's a difficult thing to tell when you have no landmark in sight or sense of how quickly your boat is travelling (7.2 knots at one point). Either way the waves were spraying over the bow, the wind was stinging us sideways, and I ran out of layers to put on to stay warm. By the time we got to the harbor entrance, the rain was gone and the wind was steadily around 25 mph, forcing waves to crash crumble and churn everywhere. It was quite a trip and I'm thankful that I was a passenger on someone else's boat in that ugly weather. As luck would have it, it was about 80 degrees and with calm winds the day before we left and the day after we got back, so the wild weather and sailing was meant to be. Connor is planning a trip to Panama and beyond on this boat and looked at it as good practice in case he gets stuck in bad weather.

From Connor's instagram account. I wasn't able to move my fingers enough to operate my phones camera.  

I know I'm not the only person with wanderlust when I sit at my cubicle and stare at three monitors for 5 days in a row. By Wednesdays I am already thinking about sailing or driving as far away as manageable and going for hikes, breathing fresh air, and feeling self-sufficient again. Added to that feeling is the sad fact that my company laid off about 200 people throughout the week. With a couple potential plans up in the air, I couldn't just disappear this weekend, but Mia told me about how her cousin and friends were going on a hike Sunday afternoon before settling in to watch the Oscars. We had to do it. We met at their house in Sierra Madre which is walking distance to the Mt Wilson trailhead. Just a few switchbacks up the trail and you could hear water rushing past rocks down the stream down below, there was bright green growing everywhere it could and good conversation catching up with friends.

Views from the Mt Wilson trail, Mia looking out at our friend Connor who climbed up a mast on Sunday. 

Andrew really happy for me that everyone got together for scotts and my birthday

Up highway 5 near Fort Tejon on a Friday nightbetween a sequence of the biggest storms so far this winter and we found ourselves stopped dead in a 2 hour traffic delay. The reason was apparently a mud slide, but after shifting from park to drive every 10 minutes for two hours, and filing into narrower lanes, we never even got to see it. We arrived to my moms house around 2:30am. Fortunately Mia was able to sleep for most of the drive and regain energy after a busy three weeks of late-night and early-morning work. When we woke up on Saturday we already felt like the previous nights extended drive was totally worth it. In a few hours Scott and Nicole came over with newborn Sophie and I finally got to meet my niece. A while later Matt and Julia came over with Andrew and it was awesome to be with everyone again. My mom made delicious pies for Scott and my birthday, Matt gave me three bottles of good whiskey to basically host my own personal tasting whenever I want, and it was special to see my twin brother as a dad for the first time.

Another storm was blowing in on Sunday with forecasters claiming it to bring the most rain that California has seen in a single storm for years. So Mia and I decided to leave Sunday night and drive to San Luis Obispo to see her family for a day. Be both took a day off of work, in combination with President's Day, meant we had a 4-day weekend to cover as much ground and family time as possible. In SLO, we enjoyed trips to the horses, the lush green hills everywhere, and homemade lasagna, cupcakes and pie (so much pie) for my birthday. I was so lucky, and I received a birthday gift of a Catchsurf foam surfboard - a super fun, durable, and much-less-harmless-than-fiberglass-surfboard 5'6" quad.  These boards are soft and can also be ridden finless, which I've been wanting to try for years. I can also leave this at the boat or in my truck without worrying about sun or heat damage like a normal surfboard. I've secretly (or apparently not so secretly) been wanting a Catchsurf board since I was working at Surfline 3 years ago and realized that I had a growing fear of getting hurt by the hard edges and sharp fins of my surfboards the more often I surfed. An injury felt inevitable. With these boards, they float better so you can surf almost any kind of waves, and they're foam padded so if you take a tumble you're a lot less likely to get hurt from the board. It lightens the entire mood of a surf session to be more fun and silly, which is what surfing is supposed to be about anyway.

Sophie Skinner's expressive stages of being a baby  

Journey, cleaning the v berth, George on a walk in the rain, a new fun foam surfboard birthday present to me from Mia's family