rawk

managed to get my ass up relatively early on a saturday morning today, very nice. i installed the camry's old stereo cassette deck into the even older van, which really had a piece of shit for a radio....and also put in two more speakers in the van, so it's pretty nice sounding at the moment. not very clean, and the boxes i built for the rear speakers (about six years ago) are...bad. they were my first speaker boxes, infact....i've learned a lot since then. they're very boomy...meaning they're too small and shallow. it catches a lot of resonance frequences because of it...when usually there should just be one. what that means is it sounds kind of boomy and you get these tones in the mid-bass that seem to just rattle your brain. good speaker enclosures (like my subwoofer box in the camry) don't do that....nuff'a that shit.

after installing all that i went surfing. went to a real beach today :) i felt like i was ready. i went to kewalo's in town. the forecast in the newspaper said 4-7ft., which was a gross overestimate. there were some solid chest high sets...i didn't touch those though. i took one HUGE drop that imprinted one of those 'images that i'll remember for the rest of my life' kind of thing. looking straight down a wall of water through the clear blue water onto the reef with the white water closing in from the right....and i landed it. of course after that i kind of have troubles. i can cut back (you go down the wave, and then 'cut back' into it) but then i can't cut back down. i either stall too far in front of the wave or i overshoot it and go over the wave....lot harder than bodyboarding 'cause you can use your fins to be more maneuverable. either way, kewalo's is a MUCH more powerful break than both queens and diamond head, previously the only two breaks i'd really surfed regularly. much more frequent sets too....so in two and a half hours of surfing i couldn't lift my arms anymore. i kept telling myself i'd catch "one more wave in" (that always takes a half hour for some reason) but a nice swell would come in and i'd convince myself to stay...funny how that happens. there were some waves i definately could've gotten hurt on, though, if i'd tried to catch them. i can handle myself dodging and ducking the waves, but i won't catch those monsters yet, i still suck ass :)

after that, came home with food for the parents, ate, and went back out to chill with some old friends. we just hung out at moani's apartment, drank some (vicky came over), caught up, it was nice. i haven't seen vicky in like, two years. she was one of my older friends, candace's year ('98) who was one of my close friends in high school. she hasn't changed much...same quirks and humors :) more mature though, takes herself less seriously. always good to take yoruself less seriously, heh heh.

get home at 3:30am, and i'm gonna try and get up by eleven, do some chores, and then head back out to watch a movie with vicky and her boyfriend of one year who i just met briefly tonight. it's interesting to see the kind of people these friends of mine who i've known for YEARS end up with.

sierra nevada and vh1