My First Blog Entry

Hello everybody, my name is Jacob David Barker and this is my first blog entry.

Silver Strand Beach, Oxnard, Ca. Sunrise. View from the ship.

My 8.0' Clyde/ Towers
Longboard 

Around six A.M. on the 15th of February, 1990 in Community Memorial Hospital, Ventura, California after a very strenuous, or so I'm told by my mother, twenty four hour ordeal I was born cesarean. To this day my mom is still mad at the doctor for not telling her I was stuck twenty hours earlier. I have lived in Oxnard ever since all the way at the end of Victoria Avenue near the ocean on Silver Strand Beach. I could swim and surf before I could walk and have spent a considerable portion of my existence in the sand or the cold and salty water of the Pacific. For elementary I attended Hollywood Beach School where I won first in both my fifth and sixth grade science fairs and excelled at kickball. From there I continued to E.O Green middle school where I was awarded student of the year in eighth grade; which to my dismay, does not look as cool on a college application as I thought it would at the time. I graduated from Oxnard High school in 2008 having swam, dove, played water polo, and soccer for four years. Around that time I was hired as an ocean lifeguard and junior lifeguard instructor by the city of Port Hueneme where I have worked every summer since saving lives and playing in the sun with junior lifeguards.

City of Port Hueneme Ocean Lifeguards.
     I'm the blonde one in front.

These days around dawn you will find me driving a forklift on base where I have worked full time the past three and a half years as a receiving warehouseman and forklift operator for the Navy Exchange. I enjoy my dead end job; though not very fulfilling, fork lifting pallets in the early hours of the morning, imagining my warm bed and dealing with angry truck drivers. When not working I stay extremely active surfing, running soft sand, open ocean paddle boarding, or walking my two dogs Rosebud, a Boxer/Pitbull mix, and Punky, a miniature full breed Jack Russell. Also, I enjoy sailing to the various Channel Islands to dive, hike, and surf some more.  As you probably already know I am attending Oxnard college where I am working on earniung my associates degree. I currently live with my younger brother Adam attempting to pay off our childhood home while taking care of my mother Sherri; as you already know, on Silver Strand Beach.

 

Rosebud & Punky

In the near future I plan to have the mortgage to my family home and current residence totally paid off. After that is taken care of I hope to transfer to CSUCI to earn my bachelors degree. Once successful I will return to Oxnard College and enter the fire academy with aspirations of getting hired as a firefighter here in Oxnard after graduating like my dad and grandfather before me. In the distant future I hope to own a beach home, maybe get married and have kids to teach to surf and love the ocean like I've been taught to do. In conclusion I have lived an extremely happy life. Present financial problems and weird family issues have done their best to bring me down but I am a firm believer that there is no success without hardship.

Thank you for reading! I hope you have a great one.