I'm back from vacation, and I LOVE surfing! →[More:]Hi again, everyone, and happy birthday to the many birthday people I missed! August is definitely the coolest month to be born.

For the past week, I have been enjoying the kind of vacation I rarely afford myself - the kind where you do very little but sit on the beach. My family rented a beach house on the Jersey Shore, as they often do in the summer, and I spent 8 whole, glorious days doing nearly nothing. The routine was ideal: waking up in the morning and tooling up and down the island on long, quiet bike rides; stopping on the way back to pick up pastry at the shop or tomatoes at the farmstand or what-have-you. Having some coffee and breakfast, then throwing together the beach bag and setting up camp at the beach, 2 blocks away. Reading, sunning, and people-watching for a few hours, interspersed with energetic bouts with the Atlantic Ocean. Then back to the house, a half-hour run around town, then put together some sort of big beach-house dinner. The proper day's wrap-up was an amble down the boardwalk for ice cream, soft-serve, gelato, or the like, and more people-watching.

After such a stressful year, this was absolute bliss. I actually have a tan, and for fair-skinned me, that's unusual. And the most exciting part was that I took surfing lessons! I had always wanted to learn, and thought I'd probably like it since I like everything to do with salt water. But I knew it was pretty physically demanding so I wasn't sure if I'd be any good at it. I was happy to find out that I LOVE it. After getting the hang of the beginner basics, one-on-one, I had the rest of the day to play with the board, and I found that it brought out every avid, aggressive, determined, fun-loving, high-energy tendency in me. I loved the whole thing, from charging back into the surf wrestling a giant, awkward longboard after a nice wipeout to paddling like hell to reach the break to feeling the wave lift the back of my board and push me toward the beach. I worked and worked at it until my little arms turned to jelly and wouldn't let me pop up any more. But let me tell you, a wahine is born. So awesome!

Now here we are at Labor Day, the "official end of summer," though it's really not the end of summer. It's just the official end of the tourist season. Now, we get days of chardonnay-honey light, rich leafy fruity abundance of the late-summer harvest, plenty of warm days, warm water at the beach, and the last and perhaps most heartachingly beautiful month of my favorite season. After such a nice, long, toes-in-sand break, I'm ready.