Just for Fun, Feb. 5, 2009

Who likes a stale blog?

Eastside Surfblog past entries

02/05/09

I’m not really sure how I have survived more than 50 winters now. One of nature’s more merciful designs is that we are wired to forget excruciating pain. We remember being in pain but, thankfully, cannot re-create the actual sensation. So I remember getting through all those winters, but not exactly how it felt or what I did. I guess I made it somehow. One thing I know for sure is that I’m slowly going insane. Or maybe it’s that I’ve got cabin fever and don’t live in a cabin. With no surf and temperatures approaching the Ice Age, I’m running out of things to do for amusement. At least the Cro-Magnons could run around waving sticks at woolly mammoths until they fell off the cliff. I tried waving a stick at Blogdog — he’s not woolly but he smells like a mammoth — and he just stood there shivering in the cold with that look on his face. When my behavior is held in contempt by Blogdog, you know it’s getting critical. Plus, I wouldn’t make a very good Cro-Magnon anyway: I’m too wimpy and my hair is all wrong. I look more like the guy they invite to dinner who’s dangling over the fire on a spit.

In the past, my garage has always provided a reasonable source of diversions. After all, there’s power tools and scraps of this and that. But I’ve already covered all the walls in the house with bamboo and leopard skins. Come to think of it, there’s half a tube of Liquid Nails and a pop-rivet kit; wonder what the Oldsmobile station wagon would look like with corrugated tin on the sides and white shag carpet on the hood? There’s a roll of zebra fur in the closet, and Blogdog’s water bowls would make killer hubcaps. Didn’t Mrs. Blog say recently that she wanted an exotic car? She’d be so fly with zebra upholstery and shag carpet on the hood. I know, I spoil her terribly, but she’s worth it.

In an act of desperation, I mentioned to Mrs. Blog that, if you drive down to Central Florida, you can get a little hop over to Eleuthera Island, where they have drinks with umbrellas in them and warm overhead barrels. Now, Mrs. Blog keeps the family checkbook because, well, because if you’ve been following my blog, you know by now I’m not to be trusted with anything resembling disposable income. And if I had enough money to go surfing, I’d be surfing right now and not writing this blog — unless I lived in a parallel universe, but that would probably cost money, too, so I don’t. And if I did, Blogdog still wouldn’t chase a dumb stick. So anyway, Mrs. Blog played the starvation card and I was reduced to sniffing the cap on the sunscreen bottle out in the garage with my stupid pile of tin and bamboo pieces.

But the human spirit is not something easily held down, so, after the coconut fumes from the sunblock wore off, I found my dry erase board and markers and began work on my next masterpiece. I have developed the SURFBLOGGER VALUE INDEX, which I will share with you. I could probably keep this to myself and make millions in consulting fees, but my conscience won’t allow it. It’s a brilliant formula, cunning yet simple.

WAVE HEIGHT x WATER TEMP = SURFBLOGGER VALUE INDEX
TRAVEL COST

I only used travel costs because that is the constant for all of us, and where you stay is up to you. If I go with Mrs. Blog, it’s a four-star hotel, whereas me and Vinnie would just lie where we passed out under Bomba’s shack until the tide came in and woke us up. So being your full-service Surfblogger, I have looked at the most recent swell forecasts and travel costs (airfare only, since transfers are a variable — you could thumb or hire a palanquin), divided the two, multiplied by the water temperature, et voila! For local spots, I figured gas at $1.89, 15 mpg for the Oldsmobile and the distance to each from Mount Pleasant.

• IOP Pier: 1.5-foot waves, divided by $.50 in gas, times 48-degree water = 144
• Washout: 2-foot waves, $1.50 in gas, 48-degree water = 63
• Eleuthera, Bahamas: 9-foot waves, $609 airfare, 74-degree water = 1.09
• Uluwatu, Java: 8-foot waves, $1,745 airfare, 76-degree water = 0.35

So you see, dear reader, the IOP pier delivers more than 100 times the surfing value this weekend than Eleuthera. And you can forget Java. Those 8- and 9-foot barrels in that warm turquoise water, pink sand beaches and tasty drinks with little umbrellas in them are all just a scam to get your money. Whew! That was a close one. You can thank me later.

Who likes a stale blog?

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Eastside Surfblog past entries

02/05/09

I’m not really sure how I have survived more than 50 winters now. One of nature’s more merciful designs is that we are wired to forget excruciating pain. We remember being in pain but, thankfully, cannot re-create the actual sensation. So I remember getting through all those winters, but not exactly how it felt or what I did. I guess I made it somehow. One thing I know for sure is that I’m slowly going insane. Or maybe it’s that I’ve got cabin fever and don’t live in a cabin. With no surf and temperatures approaching the Ice Age, I’m running out of things to do for amusement. At least the Cro-Magnons could run around waving sticks at woolly mammoths until they fell off the cliff. I tried waving a stick at Blogdog — he’s not woolly but he smells like a mammoth — and he just stood there shivering in the cold with that look on his face. When my behavior is held in contempt by Blogdog, you know it’s getting critical. Plus, I wouldn’t make a very good Cro-Magnon anyway: I’m too wimpy and my hair is all wrong. I look more like the guy they invite to dinner who’s dangling over the fire on a spit.

In the past, my garage has always provided a reasonable source of diversions. After all, there’s power tools and scraps of this and that. But I’ve already covered all the walls in the house with bamboo and leopard skins. Come to think of it, there’s half a tube of Liquid Nails and a pop-rivet kit; wonder what the Oldsmobile station wagon would look like with corrugated tin on the sides and white shag carpet on the hood? There’s a roll of zebra fur in the closet, and Blogdog’s water bowls would make killer hubcaps. Didn’t Mrs. Blog say recently that she wanted an exotic car? She’d be so fly with zebra upholstery and shag carpet on the hood. I know, I spoil her terribly, but she’s worth it.

In an act of desperation, I mentioned to Mrs. Blog that, if you drive down to Central Florida, you can get a little hop over to Eleuthera Island, where they have drinks with umbrellas in them and warm overhead barrels. Now, Mrs. Blog keeps the family checkbook because, well, because if you’ve been following my blog, you know by now I’m not to be trusted with anything resembling disposable income. And if I had enough money to go surfing, I’d be surfing right now and not writing this blog — unless I lived in a parallel universe, but that would probably cost money, too, so I don’t. And if I did, Blogdog still wouldn’t chase a dumb stick. So anyway, Mrs. Blog played the starvation card and I was reduced to sniffing the cap on the sunscreen bottle out in the garage with my stupid pile of tin and bamboo pieces.

But the human spirit is not something easily held down, so, after the coconut fumes from the sunblock wore off, I found my dry erase board and markers and began work on my next masterpiece. I have developed the SURFBLOGGER VALUE INDEX, which I will share with you. I could probably keep this to myself and make millions in consulting fees, but my conscience won’t allow it. It’s a brilliant formula, cunning yet simple.

WAVE HEIGHT x WATER TEMP = SURFBLOGGER VALUE INDEX
TRAVEL COST

I only used travel costs because that is the constant for all of us, and where you stay is up to you. If I go with Mrs. Blog, it’s a four-star hotel, whereas me and Vinnie would just lie where we passed out under Bomba’s shack until the tide came in and woke us up. So being your full-service Surfblogger, I have looked at the most recent swell forecasts and travel costs (airfare only, since transfers are a variable — you could thumb or hire a palanquin), divided the two, multiplied by the water temperature, et voila! For local spots, I figured gas at $1.89, 15 mpg for the Oldsmobile and the distance to each from Mount Pleasant.

• IOP Pier: 1.5-foot waves, divided by $.50 in gas, times 48-degree water = 144
• Washout: 2-foot waves, $1.50 in gas, 48-degree water = 63
• Eleuthera, Bahamas: 9-foot waves, $609 airfare, 74-degree water = 1.09
• Uluwatu, Java: 8-foot waves, $1,745 airfare, 76-degree water = 0.35

So you see, dear reader, the IOP pier delivers more than 100 times the surfing value this weekend than Eleuthera. And you can forget Java. Those 8- and 9-foot barrels in that warm turquoise water, pink sand beaches and tasty drinks with little umbrellas in them are all just a scam to get your money. Whew! That was a close one. You can thank me later.