My last day of being 35.  I’m feeling pretty old these days, but Jason is older than me so I have no excuses.  We went to the long metal ledge that is really good frontside.  Warming up sucked as usual and I was pretty frustrated at times, but kept skating.  I got front 50 shove in a crappy run, a few back crooks and came close but never landed a bunch more like front 50 kickflip out which I haven’t done in forever.  Nate and Jason did front lips all good.  Next we went to the US Bank brick bank spot.  It’s kinda like LA High, but steeper, taller and not as good.  Either way it was still a blast.  Nate and Jason killed that place.  They both got super long back boardslides.  Jason did a pivot to fakie for crying out loud as well as back tailslides over a hip.  So ridiculous.  I started slow but managed to start having a blast and got a few tricks.  Back boardslide (only a few inches compared to the multiple feet Nate and Jason were doing them), back feeble over the edge, back nosepick, back axle to fakie, ollie to frontside wallride trying to be all Grant Taylor but it wasn’t at all, and ended with back smith stall.  Super fun session.  Jason and Nate killed it.

Met Nate on a nice Friday aftern0on and we decided to hit campus.  We parked over by Silvermine subs since we don’t normally skate that part of campus.  We ended up hitting the curved ledge thing that is insanely hard to skate.  No setup, downhill runway, uphill ledge.  We ended up getting noseslides and crooks and Nate added back 50s to the mix.  Then we went under the tunnel and were surprised to find a whole section of new ledges just waiting to be waxed and skated which we did.  Not the best ledges, but we couldn’t believe they weren’t skated yet.  I was full on sucking and that’s how my whole session went.  I can’t ever seem to skate right after work and downhill runways bug the hell out of me.  We got three different sections to grind really good and I put together a horrible looking slow run.  Front 50, back board, front 50 front 180.  Yippee.  We played a pretty bad game of SKATE where I lost on a switch front shove then decided to kickflip into the bikepath hill.  I ended up slamming multiple times on the kickflip then focused my board.  Such a horrible way to end an ok session.  At least my board was dead.

 My uncle Frank’s album Two Headed Fly is available on the internet now.  There are samples and you can buy it here.  This cd has one of my favorite tunes of his, ‘Tough Times’, on it which is pretty appropriate these days.  He sent me this info on it:

First single off the new Thermals album Now We Can See.  Love it.  Seeing as how this is one of the best looking years for music in awihle I’m gonna start doing a lot more music stuff on this site.  Album reviews, concert reviews and of course non-stop Dinosaur Jr hype.  Seriously though, new albums from so many of my favorites this year: The Thermals, Conor Oberst, Sonic Youth, Superchunk, Belle & Sebastian and of course the greatest band ever, Dinosaur Jr.

Eric and Matt were the guys behind Pat Hickey’s intro as well as some other clips and animations in Null And Void. Go check out their new independent film and support the underground!ps – The Rynull Sheckert update was clearly an attempt at an April Fools Day joke.

Jason and I hit up Valmont for about an hour and we were both pretty tired.   At first I couldn’t even ollie worth a crap.  I was pretty sore from jumping over that ash tray a ton the night before.  The ledge was pretty wrecked too.  Looks like it got hit by a truck and a chunk is missing from the lower part.  Ugh.  After awhile I was almost skating decent.  It helped that I had “When We Were Alive” stuck in my head.  That song hyped me up so much that I would sometimes push too fast to hit the ledge.  This is me we’re talking about, so it was probably 7 miles an hour instead of 5, but it was fast for me.  I didn’t land much but I ollied up onto the ledge at the last set of cracks which is almost a board length tall and I did some fast front 50s.  Fun night, wish I had more energy.

Pretty nice evening and I went out for what I thought would be a solo session at the Steelyards.  I had the new Thermals album loaded on my mp3 player and I was playing it pretty loud.  I thought it would be a mostly flip trick day, but my legs weren’t performing well and I kind 0f just tried to do difficult tricks like ollieing up a curb at speed.  After awhile I put an ash tray after the curb and tried to ollie it about 100 times.  I was just about to finally commit when the wind kicked in and messed with the speed.  Ugh.  I was at my car getting water and Nate called and showed up quickly.  I finally ollied it after a few more tries.  Yippee.  I should be able to ollie stuff like that quicker.  Either way though I’ve been working on my ollies and it felt good to get over something.  I was working on switch front 180 manuals and fakie bigspins up the curb when the fuzz rolled up and gave us the boot.  Doh.

All that’s left is to repaint some area and some other stuff.  But the shower is usable!!The kids were the first to test it out.  Well, the bathtub anyways.Me next.   And once the mirror gets hanged up that means I can finally shave again.Saving the best the Mighty LZA hides her anger at me taking a photo by laughing.

Can you tell I’m sick of the cold? Early April is always the worst time of the year for me as it seems March is always warmer. And well, my birthday is almost here and I’m almost another year older. 36. That’s now “upper 30s”. I think I’ve been pretty bummed on how I’ve been skating lately, but my foot is feeling better and I finally have no excuses. Anways, enough bitchng. Best session I’ve had since I hurt my foot. Nate and I went straight to business and we were landing tricks we don’t normally do right out of the gates and trying new tricks. Nate was doing really good switch front boards on the ledge and put together an all switch run: switch front board, switch heel, switch front 5-0 the curb. SO SICK! I didn’t put any runs together but managed a few weaksauce fakie nosegrinds on the ledge and grinded a few fakie 5-0s on the curb. Oh and I did the two best front tailslides I’ve ever done. After awhile we went to the heated Circuit City parking garage where we had a slow starting game of SKATE that ended as the cops rolled up. We didn’t get kicked out, but it was our cue to leave. Finally, I skated better than horrible.

On another cold and snowy day everyone went to SOL, but I was feeling really lame and tired so went back to sleep. We went and got Ollie some new skate shoes (DC) and he wanted to use them so we went to Red Curbs. Ollie rules. He has the biggest smile on his face of anyone ever when he skates. He had a few ollies up small curbs and pushed really fast and had a blast. I took awhile to get warmed up but started having a good time. Still trying to skate faster and pop more, but when it’s cold it’s tough. I tried a few fakie 5-0s and didn’t get close. I did get into them though and I’m not sure if I’ve ever done that before. A pretty fun session considering the cold and how unmotivated and tired I felt.