Waves Crashing in Hermosa Beach, CA

As I came in to work early today, I got to leave early as well. Often times on my drive home I get to watch the sunset, but rarely have enough time to make it home and hop on my bike to make it down to the beach to snap some shots. I guess I was a little lucky, as today’s sunset was more impressive than normal due to the rainstorm that’s rolling in.

I actually ended up snapping 159 photos of the sunset and 1 of some random building I thought looked cool (though turned out to be not as cool in the picture, which is why there was only one shot taken).

Even though I took a lot of shots, many were just me screwing around. I did a couple different series in continuous shoot mode, one turned out pretty cool. I’ll update this post with that if I can figure out how to animate it (for free) in an easy manner. I also realize the alignment of the upcoming photos are a bit messed up, but I haven’t quite fixed this yet.

This was one of the first photos I took. As I’m sure you can see from the colors, I’m glad I made it down there to snap a few shots.

Hermosa Beach Sunset 2009.01.20

A helicopter was flying by and looked kinda cool in the clouds.

Chopper Repair Man To the Rescue!

Breaker-Breaker-1-9

Where there's waves, there's surfers...

Someone actually got on a wave (a lot of sitting around)

This spot in the sky is the origin of all sunsets (according to me)

Pretty colors

Getting darker

Me & my messy mop

1. want a high speed train (this sounds good, but i somehow imagine tickets will initially be so expensive that hardly anyone will use it, plus i can also imagine it will take forever for any of this to become a reality)
2. don’t like confining farm animals (i can see the price of veal, pork, and eggs going up once this goes into effect)
3. want to improve children’s hospitals (they’re our future, better make sure they’re healthy)
4. don’t want to force minors to wait to get an abortion until 2 days after the Dr told their parents (the fact a minor is having a kid so young probably means they need more involvement from their parents, but the parents voted and said they don’t care if their kids have kids so young)
5. think nonviolent drug possession criminals already have enough (if it went the other way, there’d be less potheads in state prison)
6. think police & law enforcement don’t need more money (if it went the other way, bad criminals would stay in prison longer)
7. don’t really care about switching over to renewable energy (this just benefited privately owned utilities companies, awesome)
8. don’t want same sex marriages (so much that they’re gonna change the state constitution, which is even more awesome than #7)
9. think victim safety should be consideration for bail or parole (once you’re in CA state prison, it’s gonna be harder to get out)
10. don’t care about alternative fuel vehicles or renewable energy (this is in direct conflict with #1, especially since CA claims 50% of the top 10 smoggiest cities list)
11. think the state needs to be re-districted (yeah, this seems real important, but i guess they do it every 10 years)
12. think Cali veterans should get farm and home aid (will provide state-backed loans for veterans’ farm and home purchases)

I didn’t vote, so I can’t complain. But I did find it interesting on the things people believe in and how some of them are conflicting. What it comes down to is this, Californians care more about farm animals and the private lives of gays & lesbians than they do about underage abortions and forcing businesses to be a part of the energy/pollution crisis (vs deterring the crisis with something that is destined for failure).

CA State Propositions: http://www.smartvoter.org/2008/11/04/ca/state/prop/

Now that I have the most basic part of my life in order (roof over my head and someone to give me green in exchange for services rendered), it’s time to start meeting people. I can count the number of friends I have here on one hand. Of those friends, most of them live about an hour drive from where I live, which is obviously inconvenient when it comes to hanging out. It’s actually a lot harder to meet people than I expected. I think if I get back into the salsa scene, I’ll be able to meet people a lot easier. At the moment I don’t really go out. I don’t want to be that guy at the bar by himself. That’s just lame. I’d rather have no friends than be that guy.

About the only thing I can think of that’s a bit of a hindrance is the time difference. Being the world traveller that I am, I don’t normally care about the time difference, I’ve always been able to manage. Living on the West Coast, I’ve found that the time difference makes it rather difficult to keep in touch with friends and family. Two hours difference to my mom & bro, three hours to my dad, nine hours to mainland Europe, and fourteen hours to Japan. I think that covers all the bases of where I normally call. I guess it’ll just take some getting used to in order to call people at the right times.

In an attempt to cutoff all ties to Ohio (and allow myself to try and forget that I ever lived there) I changed my Ohio mobile number to a much cooler Southern California number. If anyone actually reads this, feel free to gimme a call anytime.