Five Easy Pieces

Bloganuary writing prompt

List five things you do for fun.

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I retired a few years ago and now enjoy a week of “Six Saturdays and a Sunday.” It’s awesome. I spend my days doing some mixture of the following:

Surfing: I picked this up in my 50s. Always wanted to try it, but I was never in the “Jeff Spicoli clique” in high school and had no one to teach me. Took a few lessons, gradually got better, now I’m hooked and everything revolves around the tides and wave conditions. There’s something profoundly calming in sitting on my board and gently rising and dropping with the incoming sets. The thrill of riding a wave is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. If you live near a beach, I can’t overstate how it will get under your skin.

Guitar: This takes practice, practice and more practice. Your fingers need to develop callouses to depress the strings and until they do, it hurts. But once you get a few basic chords down, you’ll be amazed by how many songs you can play. Singing while playing is different; its like rubbing your stomach and patting your head (helpful: sing karaoke versions of songs as you drive). No wonder rock stars make it look easy 🙂 But nothing better strumming my guitar around a campfire or on a dock at sunset. Ultimate Guitar provides chords for 1000s of songs for $2/month.

Photography: It’s really hard to beat phonecameras when it comes to getting a great pic. But there are still two areas where the DSLR shines: Telephoto and high-speed. I take high-speed telephoto pics of other surfers to check their popup style, feet placement, and riding to see how I can improve. I’ve always loved taking pix, that feeling of capturing a moment of time. My family complains, but I get nothing but “Awwwws” when I show them pix of them selling scout cookies or riding their kid bikes 20 years ago.

Writing: I’ve always been a voracious reader and I suppose writing is a logical bookend to that. It’s cathartic, fulfilling, and fun. Being in this community of writers, reading their content, getting ideas for stories, is wonderful. “Steel sharpens steel” and I learn much from reading entries here and picking up on the style of some particularly well-written blog.

Travel: I’ve always had wanderlust, an itch to see what’s over the next hill. Last summer, we went on a three-week trip to Ireland, England and Norway. Unreal. The dialects, food, sights, history, meeting family…it was so insane. I’ve been to Hawaii, Canada, much of the Caribbean. On my bucket list are Costa Rica (surfing, nature), New Zealand (set for “Lord of the Rings”), and the Patagonia area of South America.