Black and white live footage of Otis at the Monterey Pop Festival

Skated and filmed in — where else? — L.A.

These bamboo boards are absolutely unique. Check out Loaded Boards website.

I’ve just been catching up with printing out thumbnails of my photos from the last 6 months or so. I print contact sheets of 20 pix on an 8-½ x 11″ piece of paper and store them in binders. It’s a lot quicker to find something this way, or to browse, than it is to do it on a computer. Hey, hard copy beats digital for a change!

Anyway, I’ve been discovering a bunch of photos and I’ll post them a few at a time.

Here’s a tidy little yurt greenhouse I discovered in a sunny garden in Big Sur in June. You can see how it’s built.

Here’s a solution to the real estate bust as described in an article on CNN.com

Utilities of $15/month. Movable. With what’s going on in the housing/rental market, for many people, smaller is better:

Bliss at the Beach

I was walking back from the beach last night when my neighbor Andrew pulled alongside in his car.’ Hey Lloyd I love that book (Builders of the Pacific Coast). I gave mine away so can I buy another copy?” “I’ll give you one,” I said, so he came by the house and I handed him a copy. “I just caught a halibut,” he said, and so last night we had halibut about an hour old, cooked in butter and garlic and you know, there’s is nothing like FRESH fish. It’s really different. Fresh in the markets is going to be a day or two old at best.

I’ve been spending more and more time at the beach, usually at the end of the day. You can never tell whet it will be like at the shore. Sometimes it will be windy or cold or the combination of tides and light will not be anything special. But sometimes you’ll hit it when all the elements are working. Last Friday night was one of those seashore moments. It was exquisite. I’d had the flu and was just starting to feel the spark of life again. I waded in the shallow water to reconnect with life on the planet. It was a pleasant night, and the water was relatively warm. There were maybe 40 people scattered out along the beach. It occurred to me we were all feeling the same thing, experiencing this harmonious blending of the elements. It raised the spirits and soothed the soul.

A couple of recent beach graffiti:

Korean Translation of Home Work

Our book Home Work has just been translated into Korean. They completely redesigned the book, and it’s a delight. Some of the photos we had used small, they used large. They cut out about 75% of the text. It’s a playful job of page design. Of course, our contract says they will not alter or change anything from the original, but who cares? I wrote and told them we loved it and we’re trying to buy 15 copies to give out to the builders.

Stanford Tailgate Party

Last week I went to a tailgate party before a Stanford football game. It was thrown by John Brodie, the great Stanford (and 49er) quarterback and his friends. Brodie had a stroke a few years ago, but is making a steady comeback. There were maybe 50 guys there, most of them jocks. I’m surprised any of them remember me, because the last 2 years of college I spent more time surfing in Santa Cruz than I did hanging around the campus. Plus I’m also the only guy I can think of from Stanford who has long hair (not to mention the earring). I definitely inhabit a different universe from these guys, having left the security of the business world in 1965 for the lifestyle and interests of the next-younger generation. But even though we’ve taken different paths, I still feel affection for many of these guys. It’s fascinating to see how life (and time) has treated us all. It’s like time travel.

Misc. notes:

Baja and Mexico: Next year I’m going to take some time off. I thought I was going to do a book on Baja, but things have changed (degraded) so much down there that this project is on hold. My current plan is to explore the coast of mainland Mexico, rather than spend more time in Baja

New Camera: I just got a dynamite little camera, a 14+ megapixel Canon Powershot G-10. Lens is 28-140 mm (about 35-200 mm in old lense terms). If I’m traveling on an airplane and don’t want to lug around my huge and heavy Canon EOS 20D, this is a great alternative. It shoots RAW. This has just been out for a few weeks. Check it out on DPReview

GPS for the Truck I finally got a GPS, a Garmin Nuvi 660. Wow! Easy to use, it’s phenomenal. I didn’t realize that these things show your car tracking along and the street you’re on as well as the cross street you’re approaching. You watch your car moving along the screen. Think of the satellites continually tracking hundreds of millions of cars with pinpoint accuracy. A voice guides you. If you deviate from the route, it announces: “Recalculating,” and gives you an amended route. Kevin Kelly just did a writeup of the cheaper Nuvi 350 on CoolTools