I got filmed in the park this morning for KGO Channel 7 TV. Mike Shumann, ex-49er wide receiver, the nightly news sports anchor, is doing the story. Abe Mendoza was the cameraman. After we finished shooting, I got this little girl, Maya Rose Wayman, age 8, onto my skateboard for her first standup ride (holding on to my arm, me walking alongside). Her dad, Wayman Lew, took the photo. More on Sunday’s adventures later.

There’s a 1.3-mile stretch of curvy downhill road on our mountain that’s closed to cars from dawn to dusk. There’s been a local tradition dating back to the ’70s of kids skating it on full-moon nights. Since I can’t skate as well as the kids (can’t slow down enough on steep parts to avoid getting out of control), I use a Carveboard, a very large skateboard with pneumatic tires and a deck that tilts way over so that you can carve deep corners and slow down. I’ve done it before, but not for a few years.

Fall seemed to arrive yesterday, after months of fog, and skies were clear all day long. I got up at 4:30 and drove to the bottom of the hill. I tied a rope around the Carveboard and towed it up like a dog on a leash. The moon was one day past full (left of center in pic above), and going down over the ocean, as dawn lit up the hills. There was a cottony blanket of fog over the ocean and San Francisco. At one place the side of the road looked like it was painted a vivid yellow. I took off and immediately wondered why I don’t do this more often. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s just right here and available all the time, like the mountain trails and waterfalls and the beach.  Towards the bottom, a car was coming up and I was, um, on the wrong side of the road, but all was well.

I may get my GoPro camera more securely attached to my helmet and do it again tomorrow. Fun!

Things are poppin around here now. We’re approaching the finish line with the tiny homes book. pieces falling into place. It’s been a long haul, and still 6 months to go (Feb 2012) until books are in stores. This sure ain’t no instant book. Every day here is exciting right now. From our little recycled wood studio in the middle of a vegetable garden we’re in touch with the world via our many Macs and the web. Yesterday for example:

I did about a dozen emails preparatory to going to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. It’s a huge event, been going on since the 1500s, the super bowl of the publishing world. I stay in a small hotel in the elegant spa town of Bad Homburg, about 20 miles north of Frankfurt,and usually use my 3-wheel K4 scooter to go the mile or so to the train station from the hotel; thinking of taking my new Bhangra long skateboard this year. So far I have appointments with publishers or agents from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and South Africa.

We’ve been having repeated problems with our DSL connection, and may have, knock on the pine desk here, solved it yesterday when we talked AT&T into replacing the fiber optic card down the road. We’re really crippled when off-line. Thanks to Steve, our tech guy…

I feel like a juggler each day. Sometimes it feels as if things are skidding out of control. Permissions requests (mostly to reproduce drawings from Stretching), reprinting books when inventories get low, marketing, watching sales, trying to get the $$ to update our stretching software for Lion, and the big one: trying to figure out how to use the web to maximize publicity and sales.

Someone once said, at a publishing conference, that no one was in this business for the money. It’s true, and my publishing brothers and sisters know this: we’re doing this because we love books. We’re readers! And communicators. For some 40 years, Shelter has been tiptoeing through the publishing game, trying to get the money from bookstores in time enough to pay printers. We’ve always seemed to squeak by. In the old days, Random House would advance us money, Lately we’ve been making it on our own, but we’re approaching a very lean period, with sales down and the tiny homes book taking forever. We’re betting the farm on this new book.

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You’re watching You’ve Got Lloyd Kahn. See the Web’s top videos on AOL Video

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by AOL in New York. They wanted to do a 1½ min video on me skateboarding. I met the producer and camera man in Golden Gate Park on a hot Sunday (when the park is closed to traffic). We spent almost 6 hours, filming, talking, setting things up. Jon mounted a GoPro Helmet Hero HD video camera on my board, and at one point a microphone on the board to pick up wheel noise, and he shot tons of footage with a big Sony video camera. Above is the result.

Here’s the direct link to AOL Video: https://aol.it/oz2Fkp

I just got one of these sails and tried it out for the first time skating late yesterday afternoon. It’s mainly used to slow down when skateboarding downhill. Fun! I’m still getting the hang of it, but I was able to go down some hills where I’d normally get going too fast and have to jump off.

Two women came around the corner when I had the sail deployed and one said, “Oooh that looks like fun!”

I also tried it out last week on my paddleboard, sailing with the wind.

https://www.sporting-sails.com/