stand up for your rights

a beautiful left like that and he's not even riding it goofy foot!
i ask you, is that right ??
(and you'd say no! it's left !!)
sweet day at steamer lane, saturday 12 jan 08



making the most of a big easy right, steamer lane saturday at sunset 12 jan 08

mav's got all the attention this weekend- and i saw the photos, it was incredible. i'm
so glad i wasn't there though, not this year. it'll never be the quiet aficionados and locals
only event that it was just a few short years ago. now, if it's good at maverick's, it's great
everywhere else, and if it's great at maverick's, santa cruz is probably insane and
uncrowded. it was.

it was four straight days of unbelievable shape, incredible sets, ridiculously
beautiful surf everywhere i went from thursday to today, 70 miles of coast from
the presidio to the lane, from the golden gate bridge to natural bridges, everywhere
in between, and break after break, every one, going off perfectly. extraordinary.
here's just one picture of a thousand that i took of perfect waves- and there was
everything: rights, lefts, barrel after barrel, breakers, 2-3 foot fun stuff, double overheads,
and men riding mountains at maverick's- it was wicked.

i was bluffing

you can almost see these waves moving, right?

this is the bluffs at montara sunset 13 jan 08
there's 7 people in the photo, they're specks- this is grand, where the
continent tumbles into the ocean here with all this uplift and folding.

they're digging a tunnel right through that mountain, you know. no joke. that point you
see is Devil's Slide. when you head up hwy 1 north to pacifica from here, you
curve around and you're almost to the part where the road veers around the point
on the edge of about a thousand feet straight down, and your heart's beating a little
faster because you're used to the old days when you come around that tight curve
and just about get flung into the ocean because there's no shoulder, just a steep mountain
on one side, this gargantuan rock, that wicked cliff, and this teeeny little road and
a puny little ordinary guardrail. it's changed a bit. still awe-inspiring, but dynamited
and graded into something not quite so thrilling. but before you get there, now, you're
cruising up and all of a sudden there's this enormous hole in the side of the mountain,
a huge tunnel. i was not expecting that.

it's so surprising to see it, you want to look, but don't cause ah, that curve i just
mentioned, it's right there. pretty amazing, this tunnel. i'd surely still take the cliff road
though, if they'd leave it open for me.

epic surf

bliss on a board saturday 12 jan 08 santa cruz california

you don't even have to be a surfer to see that this is just as good as it gets,
right here, and it was four entire days like this! look at this set, count the
waves back from the shore to that beauty just breaking in the back.
four beautifully shaped waves in that set. mellow paddle out to the back-
not like ocean beach !! and the shape of the waves this day - look - when it
is so incredibly perfect you can go fairly big because it's easy when the waves are
so fine, even if you're just joe schmo surfer like me. i'm so joe schmo i didn't
even bring my board, but hey, my back really was out.

it was set after set after set rolling in like this, for four days straight!
and great weather, and no crowds. highly highly unusual, that, considering
this is perhaps the most consistently great break in northern california here,
but the locals were riding maverick's on this super, super saturday.

in my next life my job is going to be staff photographer for a surf mag.

it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

clouds over the carneros

wild, wild, wild weather, what a storm.

i'll take sonoma

i'm taking the valley of the moon from the top of mt veeder

from the top of the mayacamas range, you're giddy with the beauty of being high above sonoma as you look before you, look the other way and the napa valley is at your feet.
explore the roads of the mayacamas by any means possible. whether you're on foot afield or peregrinating in your particular ultimate driving machine, ranging about up here is highly recommended.

all we are saying is

all we are saying
is give peace a chance


snapshot of snap peas in my kitchen garden this morning

toward the fun

new year's night at home

i'm hoping for a light, bright, sane, happy new year.
however i am also thinking about being 'eccentric neighbor lady that keeps her lights up.'
okay, i'll move them to the backyard. maybe.

a spectacular start

dawn this morning, the sun rises on 2008
beginning for me nowhere else but bolinas

happy new year !


year's first dawn from the deck of a barge
on the mouth of the bolinas lagoon
miles away, atop twin peaks in san francisco,
our fair city's landmark, loved and loathed:
sutro tower materializes like an apparition on the horizon at daybreak
(click the picture to enlarge it and see)

celebrating new year's eve

sun goes down, another year's done, what are you doing to do. life's a beach.


headlights on shoreline highway, across the lagoon.

looking out to sea along this stretch of the coast,
you can not only see the curvature of the earth, you can feel it.


the year's last sunset was beautiful


as was the entire evening


the comraderie


and the celebration.

there were 17 of us; two of us having birthdays: the lovely nancy, born just before midnight on a new year's eve, the last baby born in lewis county* that year; and the beautiful tosca, the first baby born in the napa valley, last year. two women you'd be happy to celebrate with, new year's eve or any time. happy birthday tosca, happy new year to all!

*lewis county, tennessee; as in scenicruisers, schoolbusses, a teenage girl on a sojourn setting out for the rest of her life back in the seventies, drakes lane, summertown, saving the world one haight-ashbury band one tie dye pioneer one baby born one indigenous mayan one new yorker one mother theresa one midwife crew lots of mud and a whole ton of kids and mothers at time; i'm talking about that lewis county. i said to nancy, who i met on new year's eve- i realized i'd already met her once the minute i saw her, and we figured that out. it was a nurses retreat on mt veeder. but i really met her this night, on her birthday, on the ryans' old pole barge in bolinas. i said 'i'm hearing a twang.' and she said 'yes, i'm from tennessee,' with a big smile on her face. when i asked her where, i was pretty amazed when she said lawrenceburg. lawrenceburg's a pretty small place, or was when i passed through there lo' these many years ago; lewis county is in the middle of nowhere and sparsely populated: some good ole tennessean families, some good old amish- the plain kind, in their amish clothes and ways, and the technicolor kind, which is what the hippies ended up getting called, affectionately, when we moved there. it was a time when the young people were leaving the farms of the tennessee countryside, going to college and moving away. then in we came, a bunch of weird hippies from san francisco who thought they could just plop right down and survive. they would have starved from ignorance and exhaustion had not the locals decided these hippies weren't crazy, just over-educated and really idealistic, and so they helped us, we learned the basics and survived and went on to settle down and try and save the world. i told nancy of my connection to lewis county, having landed there a few years after the caravan did, and it turns out that nancy's uncle was one of a couple of locals who extended themselves to help when the caravan first got there, long before i hopped a bus and hitched a ride to summertown. nancy's from there,a tennessee girl, born right where i had my two kids too. isaac and avie were born on the farm, in lewis county, and now here we both are, nancy and me, nursing in the napa valley and celebrating with the house of ryan on new year's in the 21st c. it's a tiny surprising fantastic world we have.


barging out of 2007 and barging into 2008

that last number

29 dec 2007

that last number really brought the house down;
at polivy's in pacifica. end of the year, end of an era.