Hopes were raised, then dashed. Last week we decided to get a realtor for the house and a couple of days ago we had our first significantly interested visitors. They even came back for a second visit with family. No dice though. In the end they decided our house was just too small and unexpandable for their tastes. During those couple of days I really realized how badly I want to bail on this city and head out on an adventure.

Surf Report # 14

Location: Grand Haven, MI – North Pier
Time: 8:00 am – 10:30 am
Air Temp: 46° F
Water Temp: 45° F
Wind: From NNW 16 mph
Waves: 3-6 feet
Gear: 5/3 wetsuit, 5 mm boots, 3 mm gloves, .5 mm hood

Skipped out on a couple of hours of work to sneak this session in. Too nice of a day to pass up. Sunny and plenty of wind. Second time I tried to popup I felt a shooting pain erupt along the top of my hurt foot. Just kind of lay back in the water for a couple of minutes after this, catching my breath. Hobbled around for the next fifteen minutes until the shooting pain just sort of turned into throb. One of those throbs that really hurts if you stop and focus on it, but doesn’t if you’re hootin’ and hollerin’ while crashing through messy surf. Waves were a total mess. Lots of pier bounce. Plenty big though too and if you caught them right they’d send you a ways. For the first time out in months it was definitely a blast.

Is there anything in the world that could put you in a better mood than getting your jerk of a boss potentially fired? No, there isn’t. Thank you Mary, karma is lovely. I was in fine spirits all afternoon/evening. I have nothing to elaborate on at this point. Either way I win though. Either I have one less integrity-lacking human being to deal with or I’m outtie 5000 in a blaze of self-righteous glory.

Good grief, my little photo stockpiling project is clogging up my photo page in a hurry. Slapped up a set of pictures from last summer’s out-West adventure with Dan and Burgers. Archiving is looking like a necessity, particularly given the deluge of pictures that should be coming in a few months.

Videos are live! Not much to see yet. Just a couple of pooches having a friendly discussion about dog matters. Take a look.

Given that I’m currently monopedal (if that’s a word) and it’s raining and I have the day off from work I really have no excuse not to be pecking away at this keyboard.

If you happen to read this in the next couple of hours, check out the beach cams. Lake is going crazy and should be getting crazier early this afternoon. Waves are already topping the pier as I Internet watch Grand Haven North. Forecast is calling for 12 -16 foot waves, which realistically will translate into probably 8 or 9 footers around shore. Still awfully impressive.

Fifty plus degree water, air temps in the fifties. If I hadn’t kicked that cement wall a couple of days ago I’d be out there on my board in a heartbeat. By far the best conditions we’ve seen in the GH area in the past five months. As it were, my foot is still as swollen as it was on Monday. I’ve been hopping or crutching my way everywhere the past couple of days. I’m told my scrambled tendons and foot muscles will take as long to heal as if I’d broken the bones. Sucks.

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OK, maybe not the best conditions in five months, given that temperatures dropped into the forties and we had a wind gust recorded at 69 mph out at Holland State Park this afternoon.

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In the process now of migrating photo viewing sort of onto this site. Flickr is a great resource, probably still the best photo storing/sharing site I’ve bumped into yet, but the problem I recently discovered is that even though you can store unlimited photos, you really only have access to the last 200 (short of paying a couple bucks a month). I.e. only your most recent 200 pictures are included in your photo stream, for slide shows, favorites, sets, etc. You can still link directly to the old static image of older pictures, but only if you’ve copied and pasted the link somewhere ahead of the time the photo was bumped (I did not). This is a shame as I now have a couple hundred pictures that were bumped before I realized this.

Anyway, being the cheapo that I am, I have no intention of paying for something I can grunt out myself, so here’s the new work-in-progress photo page. Right now it’s just something like 150 pictures from my Peru trip this spring. If I’m going to include other big photo sets I’ll probably have to take the thumbnailing process a step further. We’ll see, the thumbnails I have up right now are running about 5 or 6 k each, though I suppose that’ll add up fairly quickly. Most people are on some sort of high speed connection these days, right?