Was feeling really tired after a kind of late night at Bright Eyes the night before. Actually made a couple of calls to see if anyone wanted to skate Lafayette park, but no one was down. I was gonna go solo, but as soon as I stepped outside of my house I realized it was too nice out to waste my time driving to a skatepark to wait in line. So I went to downtown Boulder and parked near St Julien. I cruised around for awhile just kinda mixing regular pushes with some switch pushes and doing some slow ollies up curbs. I ended up at flat bar / manny pad / parking block area and ended up having a blast. For some reason I’ve never thought to roll down the handicap ramp to have speed to do a manual uphill then hit the flatbar backside. I got a manual then noseslide real quick. I’ve crook’ed it once and thought it was hard at the time, but for some reason it seemed really easy now. I’ll give the bigger setup some credit, it feels easier to get on taller stuff. Anyways I got the crooks quick then tried it a few times in a line. Manual then crooks. Done. nose manual then an even better crooks. Awesome. I went across to the parking blocks for a bit. Tried to do ollie up curb then lipslide on a parking block all quick. I got it, but it was after I cracked my board pretty good. I do the really heavy footed lipslides because I am horrible at that trick. Next I ended up at my favorite downtown spot, the white ledge in the parking garage entrance. As I was in the process of relearning backside 50s (which I have to do everytime I go skating) Jack’s little brother Bob stopped by and said hi. Rad. I eventually was able to convince my body that it had done back 50s before and moved on to crooks and trying both in lines. I got the back 50 line with a horrible ollie off the curb cut first try I think. I got the crooks like first try too. Whoa! I tried to add treflip to the line, but ended up getting kicked out by a security guard that said “I could care less if your here, but I have to ask you to leave”. Lovely. That was pretty much the end of my skating. As I got near to my car I realized that the tour buses by St Julien were the same busss we saw last night at the Boulder Theater and yeap, saw a couple of the Bright Eyes dudes. As I skated by I was really surprised they didn’t recognize me as the guy in the 18th row at the show the night before. Stupid musicians.

Liz and I are fully on the bike program these days so of course we biked to the Bright Eyes show. It’s the first show we’ve ever biked to.

Which comes in pretty handy when they are putting Pabst in glass and Fat Tire in plastic. Not that we had very many of those though. We did learn a new trick which is to go into the external bar through the door near the restrooms and save a few bucks on a beer. Hyped!

The first band was Omaha’s Conduits. They proved that they were from Omaha by being almost amazing, but trying to hard to hold back rocking out and therefore being pretty boring. This is such a typical characteristic of smaller bands from Omaha. Haven’t you learned anything from the likes of Bright Eyes, Cursive and The Faint? It’s just fine to rock out sometimes! Anyways, they were decent for sure, but there is so much more potential.

Next up was Bright Eyes and the theater had gotten pretty crowded. They came out sounding good and played a lot off I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash. They were great. For awhile. The crowd wasn’t helping. People yelling cat calls and “I Love You Conor” during quiet songs suck. Seriously, you jerks took the show down several levels.

Although I have to admit the mixed signals from the man in charge didn’t help. Conor was clearly wasted by the end of the set, talking about how he wants to be a party band, wearing a funny hat he picked up that day and went on a 10+ minute drunken rap about the members of the band. Yes, I said “rap”. I think it’s great how much Conor values the members of this band, but this was overkill. No one else on stage was partying. Liz and I have seen Bright Eyes so many times and most of those shows he’s so wasted it kind of bums us out.

So I don’t know. I love the music of Bright Eyes. They played a great set. The sound was great. I think Conor Oberst is probably normally a great guy. But I left that show very confused about what I saw and heard. I hope he gets it figured out soon.

Carleigh took lots of awesome photos at the RVCA demo we went to. Click here to go to her blog and check them out!

Don’t forget to ask her about the full story behind this photo!

Was feeling really tired from an exhausting, but super fun weekend. In the midst of cleaning and watering the lawn I went out front and skated flatground for awhile. I wasn’t in the mood to bail tricks I normally land so I just hucked for awhile. Nollie f/s flips one way, sw f/s flips the other. Only got close to the nollie f/s flips, but not that close. After awhile Ollie came out and wanted to skate so we went across the street to the school.

This is the new long two across the street at the school. It’s got that new rough finish on it so it’s not as good as it should be. But either way we normally just do drop down to manuals and stuff. Ollie was skating way faster than normal and tried to ollie the gap a few times. He doesn’t seem to have the bail syndrome that I have, but he didn’t make it. Instead of slamming he would just manual the last foot or so. So sick. He also did back 180 the first, halfcab off the second. I was tired and tried to do drop down to manual or kickflip off the second, but it didn’t work.

We also checked out the new freshly painted curb. Some spots are gonna be perfection and are even kind of tall. Stoked! Ollie did his first back 180 up a curb and we called it a night.

Sick!

Totally feeling it

I have to admit I wasn’t expecting much with this clip, but wow, what a ripper.

Jason is the first in our crew to turn 40 and some celebrating was in order! First was dinner at Sherpas and Kathy came out from SF and made Jason a cake! Yum!

Next up was 40s since it was a 40th birthday party! Ok, so maybe Jason and Fuzz were the only ones drinking 40s. And maybe Fuzz is the only one that finished his. So yeah, maybe we’re all getting old.

Next night was an impromptu get together at Fuzz’s with pizza, beer and endless games of Cornhole. Neil and Fuzz were the undisputed champions winning something like 10 games in a row. Neil had his patented one leg in the air throw in effect.

I may have destroyed a couple cigarettes.

Anyways, happy birthday to Jason.

Carleigh and Jack picked me up and we showed up at a crowded Broomfield park that was anticipating a demo from the RVCA team. We skated a bit before they showed up which signaled it was time to sit down for me. It was a short demo, but those dudes killed it. Cory Kennedy, Leo and Donovan Piscopo especially. Brian, Neil and Fuzz had shown up and we put on what some would call another demo (and by some I mean nobody). I carved around the bowl a little with Jamie and was surprised at how different the wider trucks carved. Then we went and played on the mellow bank where most of TF joined, but not much went down. The park was super crowded. We were mostly doing tricks on the black ledge and brick qp. I started trying kickflips into the starting bank and landed most of them. A few I was actually moving going into it. It took awhile, but I got a line of kickflip into the bank, 5-0 to fakie on the brick qp then fakie bigflip on flat. I was hyped. Carleigh was doing lots of good pop shoves into the bank. Fuzz did 270 nosepick on the brick qp. wtf. Brian did a million tricks but was struggling with blunt to fakie on the quarta potty extension. Neil was cruising all over and falling a lot on lipslides. Jack was killing it as usual. The blunstlide late front shove out attempts down the double set hubba were crazy. At the end I played a game of SKATE with Jack which he won pretty solidly. Fun times.

My dad was an avid biker and had a few expensive bikes. My mom decided to buy our family new bikes with the money from selling my dad’s bikes as a memory of him. So here we go. My new bike for cruising around the town. It’s a 21 speed and I love it. Already made a few grocery store runs and a beer store run.

Got the full on rally fun pack with this one.

India’s new cruiser 3 speed. Ollie and Liz already had relatively new bikes so they didn’t need new ones too. Liz got some new accessories like fenders and basket though. Now we’re an official Boulder family biking around everywhere.