Sunday Drive

Lino

The old wooden house I grew up in had this really loud, multi-coloured, checkered lino in the kitchen.
Years later I discovered lino printing.
Easy to carve. Hard to carve something worth showing the world. (My fine motor skills were never quite developed.)

Booger

It's not what you ride
It's how much fun you are having out there.

Song without a name

Body surf

Surf board

or

air matt

 

 Have a great weekend in your loggerhood.

Extract (Bus)

Some half thought out, quickly scribbled diary notes from this week's travels and travails. Have a bus-free weekend. (Unless your "bus" is a kombi)

"This is not my bus. 
No mine is missing in action, a phantom on some mythical schedule where transportation runs on time.
The electronic notice board said mine was 29 minutes away - enough time for me to almost walk home.
So I hop the first bus that comes along that will drop me near my home."

"But the passengers on this Other Bus are a different demographic from way out on the perimeter of the city where young people still get Southern Cross tattoos and sport Bad Girl and We're Full stickers on their cars with pride .

No this is not my normal ride, where everybody vaguely knows each others faces but doesn't talk, preferring to stay immersed in mobile phone apps. Or in my case mobile mantras.

No this is not my bus alright. It's more like some surrealistic Dylan ballad where cowboys, tarot readers and gypsy women mingle in the shared goal of Getting Home."

"The highlight was seeing something I've never seen in all my years of travelling here or overseas - a young bearded bloke making origami sculptures, oblivious to the eclectic mix of passengers swaying as the bus hits its stride. Origami is definitely a handy skill for a twenty something in today's depressed job market. One must have a point of differentiation ."

Monochrome Monday (scorcher)

My Dad was born in Summer but loved Winter.
My Mum was born in Summer and loves Summer.
My Mum actually gets excited about the approaching hot season.
She will happily sit in the sun without a hat or sunglasses, weeding her garden.

I've never seen her wear sunscreen.
And though she lives at the beach, she's never had a skin cancer to zap or cut out and wait for that best word in the English language - "benign".

She'll be calling today "glorious" while the media will use words like "scorcher" and most folk hunker down under the melodic thrum of their air conditioners muttering about "global warming"or"bloody northerlies".

I don't understand the weather.
I mean I know it's hot because the wind is from the north and I know the surf is lousy because the wind is from the north.
But. its early Spring.
The magpies are attacking pedestrians and cyclists with egalitarian gusto.
The jacaranda trees are flaming purple.
The air is redolent of blooms.
It's not Summer for another 50+ days.

Dean Brady at his local Point

And yet it's going to be something like 35 degrees Celsius of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, where I'm sitting, wearing a fleecy vest three hours after dawn. 

Glorious.

Moonset

If you saw the full moon setting this morning in our arid western skies you'd agree it was a pretty awesome experience, difficult to describe. If you didn't see it, then I can't really explain the magnetic hypnotism of a glowing heavenly blob edging towards the rim of our planet through a screen of silhouetted branches. The feeling is somewhere between a thrilling barrel and finding a green oasis after traversing a monotonous, barren lunar desert for hours.

 Have a thrilling weekend.

Short on short (backdoor backhand)

Considering the last brilliant surf I had a few weeks ago was backhand on my shortie quad, it's about time I posted up a few short shots of shacks and shaded shorties.

Spring 87

I was cleaning up the brine cave the other day when I spied my old diary from 1987. The hand writing was terrible (nothing has changed) and the fluoro felt tip ink had faded, but I could make out a series of scratchie entries:August 2 "Surf's back. Small glass. Letter from Loz!" and September 7"No swell. Warm. Spring blooms everywhere"

But the one that caught my eye was 9 September 1987, "New surfboard. $450 Freefluid. No surf."

And that's it above, shot the arvo I picked it up.

Have a great weekend and bust out a short board.

Winter Beachie Left Barrel

"music washes away from the soul

The dust of everyday life"

Berthold  Auerbach 

(I might add

surfing

to that equation)

"In with the old, out with the new"

 Today's post needs a bit of old skool film imagery from last century.

Steamfest 2013 - Americanos Abney Park were the headliners. We had no idea what to expect as this was the first Steampunk festival in our shire. My phone has a diary note taken while they were playing their song, Steampunk Revolution, "in with the old, out with the new" which is kinda how the Steampunks approach the creative process. It reminds me of the daDaists revolutionary penchant for whacking together a few  "found objects" and voila aRt.
I forsee a surfing spinnoff - broken bits of fibreglass, fins, tattered wetties, Gath hats with propellers and brass stuff hanging off it. Hmmm, note to self, revisit other folks' reject piles in the local kerbside cleanup.

1 - 2 - 3

This was one of the smaller but cleaner ones on a crowded morning in the middle of the Indian Ocean. (We had all swallowed the advertorial of uncrowded tropical bliss)

The spot was Jails in the Maldives -  shooting from a tinny on the shoulder. Suddenly a rogue set sweeps in and nearly cleans us up. As the tinny skipper shouts "Is safe. Is safe" I'm shouting back "Go go go!!"

Later that morning the tinny's outboard motor broke down. Luckily I had put the camera away by then.

Monochrome Monday (Seapunk)

 Todays post 

is for all the wrecks, 

relics and 

sea punks.

The Great Curve

"Sometimes the world has a load of questions 

Seems like the world knows nothing at all 

The world is near but it's out of reach 

Some people touch it...but they can't hold on."

from The Great Curve by Talking Heads

Deep Winter Six