perfect hair

A little samoa

Download samoa.mov

Here are some Samoa images. It's a bit choppy. Wanted to see if I remembered how to do this after six months or so. Fire Dancing at a fiafia (party) is pretty traditional samoa. Afa or Sanga not sure which, and I'm sure I've got the spelling of their names wrong is climbing the coconut tree to get coconuts. Pretty ballsy, just a piece of cloth on his feet in a figure 8 to help him grip the tree. And then there's Tongaloa coming back from fishing out in the lagoon. I stayed 20 feet from that lagoon. Tongaloa was the guy I rented my fale from. He'd go fishing pretty much every day and we'd eat the fish for lunch or dinner. Huge servings of all sorts of food would be at meals and they'd all watch me eat and then when I was done they'd eat what I hadn't. That's their custom, super hospitable people. All the food was fresh either from the sea or the farm, unless it was corned beef or canned spaghetti or mackerel which I wasn't a big fan of.

The Ocean State

I'm in the ocean state. Been back from Samoa for a couple months. Now living in a shack next to a fast food place called Iggy's that serves up fried dough and clam chowdah. Working on a lobster boat, which is nice but tired a lot, physically demanding. Hasn't been much surfing. Had a head high swell last week. Working on getting some Samoa video up soon. Also coming soon, life at Iggy's, home improvement in your shack, how to pick your nose, and more. Hopefully i'll have it running soon. Got my own computer. Thought i got a deal on a mac powerbook, 750 on ebay, but i'm having some problems. had to get an airport card, the cd drive eats cd's, it worked a month ago but not any more, it doesn't burn cd's or dvd's which is a bit of a bummer. Discovered my camera is a bit faulty in the firewire connection so down loading video onto my computer is a gymnastic act of twisting wires just right so the computer is reading them. So it's been a rollercoaster ride of emotions here with this little computer. It's from 2001. Maybe when i make my first million i'll get another. Think it'll do for now. So look for the latest from the ocean state update.

Download put_me_in_the_zoo.mov

Some light reading for a relaxing day.

A little bit of audio

Download a_ski_day_in_leysin.mov

Messing around to see if I completely screwed the audio up or not. Seems to have come out on this one. I've been using a manual light or dark control on the video camera. It looks so much brighter when you're filming it because of the snow, but it came out awfully dark on the screen. My apologies. Hopefully get some better shots in the next three days. It's been sunny and cold here, cold being minus six celcius (not sure of the spelling on that). So beautiful days to ski, super fast snow. Really fun. Fell down yesterday and wrenched my left knee a little, sore but didn't swell, so i think it was a minor sprain or something like that. Can walk on it, just a little stiff. So just spending the day in front of the computer.

The photo of the ski instructor Bill Goodman, is the extremely generous person who has made my visit to Leysin possible. The two women in the ski school are Sandrine, in the black sweater, director of ski school, and Fabianne, the assistant director. For anyone who's worked at a ski area before you'll see that the ski room for employees is pretty small. But the up side is a season's pass only costs about two hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars. But, you've got to pay to rent your uniform.

Little Clips of Leysin

Download tommys_film.mov

New Blog

Right, I'm now set up on type pad, so hopefully the videos will be coming soon. we'll see.