ChanomiTalk

いつもは、真っ赤な色で目立つことを遠慮してか、夜明けか夕方しか出てこないカーディナルが、今日は日なたにお目見え。新年らしくていいですね。

Ever since I was a child all I wanted to do was to learn to surf.  Growing up in California, this would seem to most people an easy task to have accomplished.  However, I grew up in in a small town located in North Central California.  It was four hours to a surfable beach and an hour to the nearest surf shop (don’t ask me how that place stayed in business).  As a substitution for surfing I picked up skateboarding.  It quickly became an obsession.  It was all I did and all I thought about.  I spent the vast majority of my free from the ages of fourteen to nineteen skating.  I would wake up early, head downtown and skate.  My friends hated my early morning phone calls telling them it was time to get up and go skate.  We would skate all day and well into the night.  People are suspicious of teenages in general and all the more of those riding skateboards around in the middle of the night.  This in turn meant we had to explain ourselves to the police on more than a couple of occasions.  As much as I loved skateboarding I eventually gave it up when I joined the military.  Since then I had never really found anything to be that passionate about until a year and a half ago when, at the request of a friend visting from the mainland, I went surfing first time.  I was immediately hooked.  It was like I was fourteen again.  But God giveth and God taketh away; I was deployed to an oceanless country for 12 months.  In the end it was a great deployment and one that I will never forget.  Even still it was a long 12 months, made worse by the fact I dreamt about surfing most nights.  But I’m finally back.  I think all in all that time away was good in that it fueled my passion for surfing all the more.  Now my biggest challenge in life is finding a way to never again be more than a short drive from the beach.