Whats left

here's whats left of the beavis board- two fins, a beaten up stomp pad, a leash plug, and beavis' angry shadow...

alley finds!

the bottom tail end is beyond repair, and alot of the cloth is showing in the rails and randomly on the bottom, so i'll find something to do with the foam core i think... maybe some foam handplanes are on their way out!!!
my brother suggested whatever i do, try to keep the beavis picture intact. i'll try....

been comign up on some good stuff lately in the alleys! found this when riding home from work yesterday, ha!

built a garden/work area bench this weekend!

these scribbles turned into this below!


came home friday and mel said she had an idea: build a work bench for teh backyard instead of this crappy scrap wooded, slanted square table i'd slapped together so many weekend ago. well, this plan included using most power tools so i was sold immediately! also last week, i noticed someone replaced their fence and had all the old wood in the alley a few streets down from us, so we got most of hte wood from that! only had to buy a 12' 4x4 and an 8' 2x4 (14 bucks) the rest was free! psyched. the old (free) wood was much more weathered than the 4x4 and 2x4 we bought so we stained it all to try to get it a bit more similar looking. we're both pretty psyched on teh final product:

Noserider fin is done!

backwards order. start from the bottom if you want to read in progression

final set up: new removable wooden fin and i used the dremel to cut off the side fins, and then sanded the areas down, and hot-coated those areas
so i went from this set up: removal middle fin, and two glassed on side bites.

6th step: after hotcoating both side, putting in the pin up front, and drilling the hole down the back section, it's done! psyched! now i just have to hope it's strong and the two fiberglass sections dont separate from the wood. it fits almost a bit too snug into the fin box so i think it'll be good! if it breaks off, i hope it floats so i can get it back...
5th step: done with building up the missing sections, and then i put on a couple layers of cloth over the whole fin on each side, and then a couple wrapping up from the bottom to seal the bottom
4th step: here's me after building up the fiberglass cloth in the missing sections. it's a mess, but it got it done!


2nd step: foiled it down to give it the widest point at about 1/3 the length from the fin. the rest was eyeballed really. just try to make the plywood lines look good and reasonable basically. i wish i had more layers to play with and give it more of a dramatic look, but oh well. free wood is free wood. i cue off the bottom front and back because there will be a pin through it in the front and a hole in the back. these would be points that i'd have trouble sealing to be waterproof, so i figured i'd just build up fiberglass cloth, with lots of layers, in these areas and then just deal with that to put the pin through and hole and it'd still be waterproof. this toook a while- i have no idea how many layers of cloth it took to build it up.
1st step: rough cut of the outline

finally! this took much longer than i thought, but it's all done. here's a few pics of it along the way:

Allanson-Hughes!

Tony and i got in a sunrise session at the santa barbara park on the beach! so good! a little bit of resemblance to major taylor. that tattoo is still on my arm by the way-it gets better every day.
conquistadors!
pretty badass!
walked 242 steps down to this awesome beach in santa barbara, tony handled it with ease even with Story on his back!
Story!


Tony, Taylor and Story came out last weekend for a four day blast! it was pretty awesome, not too many pics, but that's cuz we were having too much fun!

Some other stuff going on lately

went and saw michael pollan and eric schlosser do a public discussion at USC a few weeks ago. it was pretty much insane. as galen put it "it's one of those things that leaves you feeling really good when you leave it". it was actually really awesome, we got books signed, which i thought was cheesy, but then was actually kinda badass talking to them for a sec. mel was a mess-she didn't know what to say or do, it was awesome to watch! she did end up handling herself alright though. and then there was a ton of free food catered by some good restaurant, and it was pretty awesome. oh yea, it was all FREE!
we went snowboarding a couple weeks ago too. a little view from the mountain-that's the ocean out there!


this girl handled herself! "we got a first timer here!" she did well, although i think she was a bit sore afterwards.
so nervous....
surfed in the morning before snowboarding - pretty insane that thats possible


mel got a pot-maker recently also. i think she's pretty pumped on it. it's pretty cool
it's gotten windy a couple of times recently, adn this resulted. tragedy. mel didn't know i took this of her. she's pretty bummed here, so maybe don't laugh.

been working on a fin for my noserider. this isn't the one i went with. there'll be more on this to come! it's getting close to being done.

been lackign on posts, but whatever. here's some other stuff we've been doing lately!

Bolinas, Fairfax, Bicentennial

After leaving Stinson Beach, we drove north to Bolinas. On our camping trip this summer we fell in love with Bolinas' small hippie town charm. Once there went to the People's Market and we got overpriced ice cream from an awkward pretentious man, which put a sour note on the visit. The ice cream was good, but the atmosphere wasn't too welcoming. With ice cream in hand we walked down toward the beach, and got conned into buying lemonade from some young entrepreneurs. Though Bolinas is still a wonderful place in my eyes, it loss some of it charm. The best part of our Bolinas experience came during a stroll around town when we stumble on a poster discretely hung outside the Bolinas Market. The poster was for a Blank Tapes show, along with other performers, that night.

The show wasn't until 7, so we had plenty of time to kill. My need for coffee, internet, and a place to plug in my phone led us to Fairfax. The drive was longer than we had expected but we had never been before and are suckers for a new experiences. Fairfax tuned out to be a pretty cool town, the streets lined with restaurants and shops and a good atmosphere. We got coffee at the Coffee Roastary, which turned out to have the best coffee I've had in a while. Afterward we walked around the town and ended up at Good Earth Organic and Natural Foods for dinner. Good Earth is a grocery store that seemed to offer better food than the restaurants we passed by. Matt got a veggie burger and I got a spinach and mushroom pizza, and we were both pretty satisfied with our choices. Good Earth's prepared foods are 99% organic and they are working on going all the way. Something that I really liked about the place was that in their produce section they included the distance their products traveled to get there. It really makes you think twice about that banana that came from 3,000 miles away. After eating we were done eating we walked across the street to Fairfax Ice Cream, a little hole in the wall joint. This is by far the best ice cream I've ever had! All ice cream is organic and homemade, and if you're ever in the area you'd be a fool not to stop.


The drive back to Bolinas for the show was beautiful. The windy roads of Mt. Tamalpais matched with a view of a setting sun in the distance only made our trip better. The show was put on a the Bolinas Community Center and for the first hour we were the only people there who weren't playing that night. Once others began to arrive the awkwardness began to fade. We were there for the Blank Tapes and they put on a great show, they only performed a few songs but it was free and small venue. No complaints here. The other performers were Obo Martin, Indiaana Hale, and Michael Musika. Once the show was over we drove south to Golden Gate National Recreational Area for the night.

We stayed at the Bicentennial campground, which is easy to access being only 100 yards from the parking lot. It was dark and extremely cold when we arrived and no fires are allowed, so we set up the tent quickly and went to bed. I wasn't expecting this spot to be much more than a place to crash for free, but in the morning the scenery was a pleasant surprise.

On the long drive home we stopped by Swanton Strawberry Farm to pick up some jam. Last time we were there we didn't come prepare with enough cash but this time we didn't walk away empty handed.

The best jam, ever, I promise.

Cooking from the back of the car.