Tag me, I got my shots

Little Miss N, with whom I'm going to Costa Rica, said I don't need these vaccines:

Tetanus/Diptheria
Hep A
Typhoid Fever
Malaria

"It's Costa Rica!" she said, as if it was supposed to invoke an image of a sort of paradise.

I'm sure it was paradise, before Adam and Eve came. I envision the same sorts of problems that a high concentration of human poop in the L.A. river basin causes. Honestly, I probably shoulda gotten the Hep A shot long before this upcoming trip.

Anyway, my arm is killing me. The right arm, shot up with Hep A, is just a tiny bit sore. The left arm, with the tetanus/diptheria shot feels like it's been hammered with a brick fifty times. I had planned on surfing this morning, too.

Flatness

I was actually on true dawn patrol this morning. Full moon out over the Santa Monica mountains, gorgeous colors of sky meeting water in a haze of a horizon... and no one in the water. No one was in the water because it was flat. Flat on the one day I try to get back to my old DP schedule. I turned on my heel, got in my car, and drove away.

Spicy surf

Saturday: short(er)board, decent-sized waves, crowded as all get out

Sunday: Doc 9'0", waist-high waves, remembering that I knew how to turn a longboard

So, Saturday night I went to have spicy Korean stew. And I mean SPICY. Like bacteria disintegrating spicy. The first time my Korean friends took me to this place, tears came rushing out of my eyes and gushing out of my nose as I had a naso-vascular reaction to the heat. Sweat poured off my brow. IT WAS GREAT! (Feeling it on the other end the next morning was not... too much information?)

Since then, though, I developed a red tide allergy this year which pretty much wiped out my sense of taste and smell. Not all taste, but the stuff I like best -- salty, savory, smoky. Recently, this has expanded to include my inability to taste some spicy food. I recently tried Killer Shrimp and their moderately spicy broth... absolutely nothin'. After telling my friend this info, Saturday night's excursion to K-town was thought-up in part as an experiment to see what would happen to me. Happy to say my nose was running and I was sweating. I don't think it was actually as spicy as the first time, but I'm glad to know I haven't completely lost the spicy buds.

Wine, however, has completely gone out of the picture. I opened a bottle on Friday and couldn't smell a thing. It just tasted like warm water with tannins. I had no idea if it was a good bottle or a bad bottle of wine. My guy came over and he took a glass. Immediately he said, "This is GOOD." Yeah, whatever, buddy. Drink up.

I'm not completely sure what to do. I like surfing and I like eating. Hard for me to give up one for the other. Right now, I'm being all Vulcan and being fascinated by what I can and can't taste... brunch at Joe's on Abbot Kinney last week was a really bad call on my part because I couldn't taste much of the pretty food on my plate. I fed the boy my food in addition to his own brunch and made him tell me what he was tasting in order to live vicariously. After one particularly loud moan of pleasure on his part, I warned him not to fake it.

In that meal, though, I could taste the fresh tomatoes smothered in a shrimp sauce. The acidity and sweetness of the tomatoes were actually bright on my tongue. I'm intrigued by this whole mechanism of what I can and can't taste and how foods might taste different to me, but this is gonna get old pretty quickly.

What's a foodie surfer to do?

Need more yoga

I was wondering when it would start happening. Since I've been back in the water more consistently and since I'm not on the heavy Cooperfish, and since I've been sitting in front of this computer all day again, I was wondering when my back would start freaking out on me. The answer: today. I was in the water for about 20 minutes and every pop-up got this little hitch in it. I had a decent right that I took all the way in and decided that was enough. It's time to start contorting my body again to build strength in all the muscles that aren't worked by paddling.

Also, I had serious longboard envy this morning. In the parking lot as I was pulling on my wetsuit, I spied a tiny woman barely carrying a huge single-fin. I looked at my un-longboard with some distaste. I do have good days on my un-longboard, but I never have the same joy as I do on the big board.

Cheating

I read the swell energy was going to be down until the latter part of the week, so I thought I'd take it easy on myself and break out a longboard. But then I thought how that would not help my short(er)board training, so I compromised and took out a board I hadn't surfed in over a year. It was dusty when I got it down from the wall. It's a 1970s single fin -- my Disco board --with a diamond tail and wings. It's 7'0" and three inches thick all the way to the rail with a beak nose. The last time I was on it, I was coming off riding a 9'0" almost exclusively and, frankly, I sucked. This time, everything about it was easy. Paddling, taking off, turning. It's kinda like cheating now because it's so much like surfing a longboard (but without the longboard sexiness): turn from the tail, step forward for speed.