Returning to the Heartland

Winter in Pacific Beach

Winter in Nebraska

We spend the winters in San Diego. When we called Arizona home, San Diego served as our summer retreat. (There are only two seasons in Arizona, winter and hell.) Now our legal residence is Omaha, Nebraska. To escape snow, we switched to using our condo mostly in the winter, except part of our itinerary is traveling to Nevada in search of snow at Heavenly. Life’s confusing.

We discovered we prefer San Diego in the winter. No summer crowds at the beach, breakfast seating at cafés is less than forty-five minutes, and you can go to a movie without standing in line. In truth, the weather’s better as well. In the winter, you don’t need air conditioning, which is convenient because we don’t have air conditioning. We just open a slider and let the sea breeze in.

Since Christmas, I surfed regularly, got a little snow skiing in, saw a lot of my family, and took many looong walks around my neighborhood. I had to take these walks because Pacific Beach has too many great places to eat, and I don’t want to look like the Michelin Man.

It’s time to go home. We miss the grandkids and we want to enjoy spring in Nebraska. We had some fun, but this has not been one of our better sojourns to San Diego due to some tough personal issues. Despite difficulties and distractions, I still got some writing done.

A lot of stuff is coming. Soon. I promise.

Idle Away!

Okay, this is what I do while waiting for other people to put the finishing touches on Jenny's Revenge. The new Steve Dancy is coming soon, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy my amateur filmmaking.

Honest Westerns ... filled with dishonest characters.

Working Vacation?

Yours Truly on an overhead wave.(Who're ya gonna believe, me or yer lyin' eyes.)

Writing and surfing and sun and good food and better friends. How could I have a better vacation? (Is it a vacation if you're already retired?) Jenny's Revenge is going well, the surfing so so. All the rest of it is perfect. The peacefulness of our getaway is about to expire. My daughter and her grandkids arrive tonight. Then it will be kinetic, noisy, and loads more fun. The energy level in our condo will leap 200%. Okay, that's a gross understatement. Anyway, I better get to writing, because starting tomorrow I'll only have snatches of time for the following week. Then we'll return home to Omaha, where I have vowed to focus on the next Steve Dancy Tale.

  

Three novels for $9.99

Westward Ho!

My granddaughter catching her first wave

Tonight, I head west. At least until I hit the Pacific Ocean. My plan is two weeks of surf, sun, and debauchery. Okay, the debauchery part was hyperbole. At my age, an hour in the water exhausts me. I’ve come to associate an afternoon sea breeze with naps. Surfline says the waves are tiny, but the weather is warm, the winds calm, and the surf glassy. I can’t wait to get my TSA/airplane ordeal completed and slide my key into the door lock of my condo. Tomorrow morning I'll take a walk to the bakery for twice-baked almond croissants and check out the waves from my balcony as I eat breakfast and sip coffee.

Since I’ll also be working on Jenny’s Revenge, I may get into some debauchery after all. Jenny’s shenanigans have surprised me, and I don’t think she is up to any good. I can’t wait to see what she’s up to next. Whatever it is, it won’t be good for Steve or Virginia.

Surfers, Cowboys, and Manifest Destiny

The March issue of Vanity Fair has a great article on the iconic movie poster for Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer, titled “One Summer, Forever” By Lili Anolik. I often blog about surfing and my Westerns, but I always thought the only connection was my interest in both. Anolik set me straight. In the article, she wrote,

“And the image’s hero, the surfer, was a new kind of hero. Well, he was old and new. If he’d been born a hundred years earlier, he’d have been a cowboy. He had the cowboy’s instinctive loathing of fences, love of the great wide-open. And what was standing at the farthest edge of America, surveying the Pacific, but the next logical phase of Manifest Destiny and lighting out for the territory and Westward ho.”

Why I never saw that before is beyond me. At least Anolik has given me an excuse to intersperse an occasional reference to surfing on this blog.  By the way, this is a fun article if you have any interest in surfing, film, design, nostalgia, sports, world travel, or tan lines.

San Diego to New York City

On Friday, my wife and I flew from San Diego to New York City. What a difference. Of course the weather went from balmy to nippy, but that was the least the change. We actually left Pacific Beach for Manhattan. Pacific Beach may be the most laid-back community in laid-back California, and Manhattan the most intense district in the country. Over the weekend we rushed from one venue to another to watch our grandchildren play sports, dance ballet, attend professional sporting events, and shuffle between birthday parties and sleep-overs. Several scheduled activities were cancelled because the nerds at MIT haven’t yet figured out a way to be in two places at once. This was a long way from a long yawn as I checked out the waves trying to decide if I wanted to go surfing now or in an hour when the tide would be better. Perhaps all the clichés about Southern California and New York are true.

Manhattan

Pacific Beach

I did some googling to see what others thought.

The Urban Dictionary defines laid-back as: “Repressive, apathetic, does not care enough, brain dead, has no pulse, unlively, passive or passive aggressive, not caring enough, slow paced, follower mind set, compatable, middle american, lack of passion, lack of drive, bland, boring, white bread american.” (sic)

The Free Dictionary defines laid-back as: “Having a relaxed or casual atmosphere or character; easygoing.”

I’m guessing the first definition was written by a New Yorker on an iPhone while racing on foot to an appointment, while the second was written by a beach bum drinking a Stone IPA at a strand-side bar. 

Whoops, maybe I just reinforced those clichés.