November 22ish.

Some actual rain happened this week, and although I was feeling confident about fixing my leaking window, I still found an old t-shirt to soak up the water and keep it out of any crevasses and dripping into the cabin. In fact, the old shirt wasn’t hard to find. I keep a whole box of these sweat-stained white shirts (in the dock box) which I used to wear all the time during my valet-parking days just for the purpose of boat-rag supply. I probably have enough to weather the next five years of storms.

It’s a funny thing when there’s bad weather along the Southern California coast. It will be sunny and warm and feel like paradise before a storm - a storm, in Southern California, is any weather that isn’t bright sun - and then it might rain lightly for a day or two but it’s still too warm to bundle-up in any kind of warm clothing, and then it will be the clearest day you’ve ever seen. Probably not, actually, but clear for Los Angeles area standards. The wind and precipitation subdue the pollution and haze and what you get is views of things you just forget are there - like mountains with snow, just an hour drive away from LA, and Catalina Island (and even islands beyond that) which appear so close. This picture above is actually a screen-shot from my cell-phone while using Surfline’s (the company I work for) live streaming webcam. This is the camera in Manhattan Beach, looking south on Saturday. You see the Palos Verdes headland at the top left and Catalina Island in the Background hovering the horizon.

At work, we are given the privilege to park for free in a 2 story parking garage. Benefits include a sense of security, a cleaner car, and the location of walking upstairs and across the street to surf. Setbacks are that when it gets cold and rainy, a handful of bums sneak down there to sleep at night - and stay asleep as the garage fills up in the morning. One guy who screams at people and wears handkerchiefs as shoes was toting around this broken surfboard for a couple weeks. It seems that the building maintenance team took it as some form of overnight-stay rent-fee.