Exhausted exhausts, knackered shoulders...

The second draft is coming on nicely.  This is obviously good, but is even better because I hadn't even planned to start on it until yesterday - I just couldn't wait.  Hopefully, that's a good sign.  I'm still building a list of things to revisit - it's feeling more refined, more polished, more unified - but it's still a way from being a finished article.

I've been buzzing around a bit in the bus this last fortnight - it being the back end of the school holidays.  The weather here has been predictably unpredictable, and there's really been nothing you'd want to go camping in.  But there's been a few good day trips around and about, plenty of ice-cream being eaten - that kind of thing.  When I got back from one the other day, though, a new noise  accompanied the roll up the drive, and that's never good.  The tailpipe end of my muffler had decided it had had enough, and the rattle I was hearing was the tailpipe bidding for freedom.

Which is fine - you expect that kind of thing on a forty-year old car.  But replacement exhausts are
a) shit, and
b) stupidly expensive.
For reasonable money I could always put an EMPI muffler on, but the internet is awash with tales of how something more durable can be easily constructed from a latticework of melted gruyere and dried-on weetabix, in which case the reasonable money suddenly becomes very unreasonable indeed.

So after a quick phone around for prices, I did what any sensible person would do - I got it welded up.  It doesn't matter that it now looks a little - well, used.  It's serviceable enough for now, and it's going to be better than anything I can acquire this side of five hundred bucks, and right now, with daughter number one starting high school...that much just ain't an option.  Plus, of course, I kind of like my bus being - well, my bus.  Part of my jag about bus ownership is seeing just how far along the road I can persuade this old girl - as much in her entirety as possible - to go.

There's been a few waves on offer this week.  I've just come back from a - not exactly a slab, more a slabette - down the coast.  Shifty, kelpy and a few good beatings, one of which left me wondering if I still had a full complement of teeth. I snagged one good set wave and surfed it as well as I ever do - joined the turns, snapped the snaps, kept the speed, and it all felt easy and right in the way one only dreams of when it's all too hard (which it was for the rest of the session).  Might have only been the one, but once I've played it through in my mind a few times it'll keep me going until the next time.

Not today.  Or even where I surfed.  Same colour, though...