Laguna Beach

YOUR WEEKEND FRIDAY: The Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce presents its Winner Circle Breakfast at 7:15 a.m. at SeaCliff Country Club, 6501 Palm Ave., Huntington Beach. Cost for members is $27 and $30 for non-members. For more information, call (714) 536-8888. SATURDAY: Etchings by French artist Louis Icart will be on display Saturday and Sunday at Absolutely Fabulous Unique Gifts & Décor, 6024 Warner Ave., Huntington Beach. The store is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days and there will be an opening reception at 6 p.m. Saturday.

The Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa just started a wine cork recycling program with ReCORK By Amorim, which reprocesses wine corks into shoes. The resort is collecting its own corks for the cause, and you can help, too. Just bring in a cork as a donation, and you'll receive $1 off select bottles of wine (up to $25). The goal of the program is also to raise awareness of the crucial role cork forests play in curbing climate change. Instead of ending up as garbage, recycled cork can be used in items such as flooring tiles, building insulation, craft materials, soil conditioner and much more.

Surfing has always meant something more to me. That, the beach and the ocean has always been the one constant path in my life, a best friend, teacher and so much more. Surfing has the power to change people. Our beaches and waves can serve as playgrounds for every generation of children, as they always have been for me. When I was a kid growing up in Laguna Beach, I had two best friends. One still is today, and the other went down the wrong path: drugs. Though I had great parents who taught me right from wrong, sometimes you need more, and for me, I always had surfing to come back to. My life has always been about surfing, and now it's all about giving back to the sport, our beaches and our oceans.

Celebrate the man of the house at Sapphire Laguna, which is offering a prix-fixe brunch for Father's Day. Chef Azmin Ghahreman's three-course menu features international tastes for every palate. (And if your dad likes gourmet food, there's a great selection of gift ideas at Sapphire Pantry. You can put together a picnic basket to take down to the beach.) Azmin's first course offers Indonesian chilled shrimp with green papaya, hot peanut sauce and curried shallots. For the main course, there are several choices, including a study of eggs Benedict, featuring fried green tomato, shaved tasso ham and country gravy; spicy halibut and Andouille sausage on grits with fried egg, hot pepper cream sauce and crispy okra; and an Aussie lamb burger on soft brioche bun with fried egg, pickled beets, chile mayonnaise and sweet potato fries.

Huntington Beach Water Polo Club sent its 18-and-under girls' team to UC Davis for the California Cup State Championship Tournament held over Memorial Day weekend. Huntington Beach faced an early challenge as their first game pitted the team against Diablo, a program from Northern California that finished second at last summer's Junior Olympics national tournament. The girls from HB upset the favored Diablo team, 5-3 and continued their winning ways by defeating the other teams in their bracket.

I 'm in love. Well, that's what I keep telling people when they ask how work is going. As some of you have probably noticed, we here at Times Community News launched a redesign of our six websites last week. The new Independent site is sleeker and cleaner. The modules, or groupings of stories, are better organized. No more clicking through drop-down menus just to find the section you want. We also have better slideshow and video capabilities, just in time for graduation.

If you’re in Laguna Beach on Saturday, stop by Thalia Street beach between 2 and 4:30 p.m., when I will be hosting a surf-a-thon along with pro surfer Jon Rose and other celebrity guests. While the general public is encouraged to join us in the water or just hang out on the beach and enjoy the action, this annual event will be raising money for Costa Verde International School, located in Sayulita, Mexico, and revered as Mexico’s first green and sustainable school. After the surfing event, there will be a fundraiser from 5 to 8 p.m. at Mozambique in Laguna Beach.

Those of you who follow us on Facebook may have noticed some inconsistencies in how frequently we update our pages. Some days we update them, some days we don’t. That changes now. We are making social media a priority for the Huntington Beach Independent, the Daily Pilot, the Coastline Pilot and O.C. Now — a site that aggregates news and sports from those three newspapers, as well as from the Los Angeles Times and our media partner, OCLNN.Com . Thanks to our talented Web editor, Jamie Wetherbe, each of the Times Community Newspapers in Orange County has a new Facebook page.