Jacqueline Guerrero - Fitness and Food!

 

New Beginnings in the New Year

 

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

January is a time for new beginnings. With so much turmoil in the world, it's easy to forget all the positives and the people who are looking to the future to create better lives.  

With that in mind, SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel are excited to focus on someone close to home, Sunny's niece Jacqueline Guerrero, a twenty-something who is juggling the roles of wife, mother, and entrepreneur.   

 After Jacqueline and her husband Sean both completed service in the Navy recently, they moved back home to SoCAL to be close to family and to raise their two young children, Theo and Mila. 

Now, with a degree in health sciences and the can-do spirit that comes from her Navy training as a nuclear power technician, Jacqueline has launched not one, but two businesses:

JG Fit personal training and Lil J's empanadas.

 

When she's not lifting weights and helping people to get in shape, she's lifting 50 lb. bags of flour to make the tasty empanadas her family and customers keep asking for. 

 A competitive rower and water polo player in college, Jacqueline has always been interested in fitness and strength-building. So, her personal training business is a natural.

 

As for the empanadas, her Filipino recipe is just too good not to make it a business. SurfWriter Girls agree. And, she never has to worry about having too much inventory. Sean and the kids are always ready to gobble up any extras. 

 

It's often said that young people today aren't as hard working or motivated as previous generations. But, when you look at what Jacqueline Guerrero is doing and see how animated she gets talking about her businesses, it's clear that she's got her eyes on the prize. 

 

And husband Sean is on board, too, supporting her aspirations and following his own post-Navy career path. For this young couple in the New Year, it's "Full speed ahead!" 

 

Happy New Year to All

Anchors Aweigh!

 SurfWriter Girls

Surf’n Beach Scene Magazine

Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel hold the exclusive rights to this copyrighted material. Publications wishing to reprint it may contact them at surfwriter.girls@gmail.com Individuals and non-profit groups are welcome to post it on social media sites as long as credit is given.

 

Ho! Ho! Ho! The Day Before Christmas

 

A Surfrider Christmas Story

By SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

 It was the day before Christmas and all through the beach

The seagulls were flying and eating everything in reach.

The stockings and beach cleanup bags were hung by the recycler with care,

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

Photo by Ric Magdaug

The surfers were all up from their beds

While visions of waves danced in their heads.

Tony and Seth and Mike and Jeff were out at the shore gathering litter

And Gilbert was making sure the morning coffee didn’t taste bitter.

 When out past the breakers there arose such a clatter,

The Surfrider volunteers strained to see what was the matter.

Off down the pier they raced like a flash,

Fearful that the vision they saw might crash.

For there in the light of day what did appear,

But a surfing Santa without his reindeer.

Toes on the nose, he was lively and quick.

Shooting the curl, it really was St. Nick!

Decked out in his red hat and board shorts by Hurley,

He shouted, “Cowabunga, dudes! I got in early.”

Before anyone knew what to say,

Santa was well on his way.

His white beard flowing, he shifted his sack,

Leaving the surfers to stare at his back.

 Over the roar of the waves, they heard him chuckle with glee,

“Don’t worry. Tomorrow your presents will be under the tree.”

 Wishing you these gifts of the holiday season:

Family and friends, clean beaches and joy without reason.

 

Photo by Greg Kishel

SurfWriter Girls Sunny & Patti

Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel hold the exclusive rights to the following copyrighted material. For permission to reprint or excerpt it and/or link it to another website, contact them at surfwriter.girls@gmail.com

http://www.surfwritergirls.blogspot.com

Discovering A Sea of Gifts

 

Celebrating Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gifts

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

During the holidays when much of the focus is on gifts – what to give and what we’re hoping to receive – the best gifts of all may not be in stores, but waiting for us to discover on the beach.

“The beach is not the place to work, to read, to write or think,” begins Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her much-loved book, written in 1955 – Gift from the Sea.

“Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines…One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea, bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by the tides of all yesterday’s scribbling.”

With “patience,” Lindbergh writes, one will come to experience the “gifts from the sea.” Whether it’s a rare shell or a perfectly-rounded stone, a strong emotion or a new sense of awareness, the gifts will come.

Lindbergh, the wife of famed American aviator Charles Lindbergh, found solace by the sea and shared her musings in her books.  

In keeping with this, SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel wish you a Christmas stocking filled with your own gifts from the sea:

Simplicity.  Studying a sea shell found on a walk, Lindbergh observes how simple it is. “One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding, how little one can get along with, not how much.”

Solitude. “It is a difficult lesson to learn today…to practice the art of solitude,” writes Lindbergh. Yet, alone on the beach, she “watched the gulls…dip and wheel and dive for the scraps I threw them.” And, felt a kinship. “The beauty of earth and sea and air meant more to me. I was in harmony with it, melted into the universe.”

Friendship. Lindbergh savors the gifts of friendship exchanged on the beach, openly and freely. “The pure relationship, how beautiful it is!” she notes. “Strangers smile at you on the beach, come up and offer you a shell. Nothing is demanded of you in payment, no social rite expected.”  

Home. Gazing at the oyster beds, Lindbergh recognizes the importance of home and of “forming ties, roots, a firm base.” She sees each oyster “has its place on the rock to which it has fitted itself perfectly and to which it clings tenaciously.”

Balance. Lindbergh’s closeness to the sea with the ebb and flow of the tides gives her a “balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s love of the sea and her patient explorations of the beach environment enabled her to experience and share its gifts.

At this holiday season SurfWriter Girls Sunny and Patti wish you these “gifts from the sea”… and more.

Beach salvage mini-sculpture by OC artist Marty Naftel

Happy Holidays!

Patti and Sunny

SurfWriter Girls

Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel hold the exclusive rights to this copyrighted material. Publications wishing to reprint it may contact them at surfwriter.girls@gmail.com Individuals and non-profit groups are welcome to post it on social media sites as long as credit is given.

SurfWriter Girls Holiday Books 2023

 

A Gondola of Good Reads!

 

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

This holiday season SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel have a featured book to share that’s a heart-felt remembrance of California’s iconic Venice Beach. 

 

Also, three surfing books that will have you ready to paddle out and a spy novel to channel your inner Jason Bourne.

Growing Up Venice, by Donna Lewis Friess, Ph.D., is both the memoir of a person and a place. It paints a vivid picture of growing up in the seaside community that sprang from the dream of millionaire Abbot Kinney in 1905 to create a magical place of canals on the edge of the Pacific Ocean that would be the Venice of America. 

Kinney turned the Ballona Wetlands, a salt marsh south of Santa Monica, into his dreamscape village connected by canals and bridges, complete with Venetian-style gondolas, that became an artists' community and resort.

 

 

Friess, who moved with her family to Venice's Marina Peninsula when she was three, writes her "front gate opened onto a narrow, seashell filled beach." She remembers the sounds of "the rolling surf," catching grunions, the oil fields with their always-pumping derricks "lulling my little sister and me to dream-filled sleep," and horseback riding in the undeveloped marsh land. It was a time when a little girl could roam free and have endless adventures by the sea. 

 

Filled with personal photos dating to Friess’ great-grandparents in the 1880s, the book tells of a semi-wild place centered on oil drilling, fishing, and the beach, and its evolution throughout the 20th Century as land developers, movie stars, tech entrepreneurs, and more discovered Kinney's ocean paradise and made it their own. Along the way, Friess – with a front row seat on it all – did too.    

SurfWriter Girl Patti was excited to read this book because she grew up near Venice in adjacent Culver City. In fact, Patti's sister Eileen Ferris rode horses where Friess did – in a storied place that was and is continually reinventing itself. 

Mindfulness and Surfing: Reflections for Saltwater Souls, by Sam Bleakley, a longboard champion with multiple UK and European surfing titles, explores how riding the waves can be the ultimate meditation, becoming one with the ocean’s salty swells, flow, and peaks, and listening to what the ocean tells us about our place in nature.

 

100 Foot Wave: The Greatest Surfing Story Ever Told, by Milton B. Willis and Michael C. Willis, takes you into the world of extreme big wave surfing. Told by the Willis brothers, two of the few surfers who have ridden the100-foot waves in Hawaii’s Waimea Bay, the book captures the sights, sounds and thrills of these monster waves.    

 

Tombstoning, by PG Robertson, is the first book in an Australian surfing mystery trilogy that has become a sensation Down Under and beyond, blending awesome waves, bad guys, and danger in a writing style that’s been compared to author Don Winslow. The fast-pacing and plot twists will keep you turning the pages.     

The Blonde Identity, by Ally Carter, grabs you from the start when a woman wakes up on a Paris street with no memory, just the pain in her head, blood drops in the snow, and a hot guy yelling to her to run. SurfWriter Girls loved all the surprises as the woman, who’s been mistaken for a spy, goes on the run with the hot guy, tries to figure out what’s happening…and stay alive.  

 

SurfWriter Girls hope you enjoy this gondola of books and that they help to warm your holidays!  

 

SurfWriter Girls

Surf’n Beach Scene Magazine

Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel hold the exclusive rights to this copyrighted material. Publications wishing to reprint it may contact them at surfwriter.girls@gmail.com Individuals and non-profit groups are welcome to post it on social media sites as long as credit is given.