I’m starting a new category here called ’sick days’.  In other words, days where I didn’t skate.  Yesterday was my 3rd sick day of the year.  The last time I did a day without skating was Feb 4th and I have no idea why I didn’t skate that day.

Anyways, I took advantage of my sick day by going to the Nuggets game with my visiting Romanian coworkers.  It was awesome.  The Nuggets killed the Thunder and we had a couple beers.  Great time!

Got home from work and it was nice out.  Ollie and his friend were skating in front of the house so I joined them.  They push up the driveway, ride up a sheet of wood and try grinds across Ledgey.  I rolled around in the street for awhile and landed most my tricks and felt good.  Kickflips, shoves, no complys.  Then I posed a few kickflip front board attempts on the ledge and Cooper had to leave.  After that Ollie tried showing off and dropped in off the deck of the ramp onto the driveway (the garage door was open).  He said he had dropped that far before, but he basically went straight to his stomach.  It was really bad.  He fully ate shit.  Skinned up his elbow real bad, but didn’t cry at all and didn’t scrape his face.  Whew.  He did call it a day though.  So I went in too.

This part is incredible.  To me this is the best “first” part from anyone since PJ.  On top of the amazing skating the music, editing and filming are great.  The spots are not blown out So Cal spots and there is some filler in there which I like.  Kudos.  I’m buying this video.

First day of March was another winter day where the snow had to melt off and it got cold at night.  So Jake and I went to Circuit City to skate flatground in the somewhat heated parking garage.  Things started out slow for me, but I’ve become accustomed to this when I skate so much.  My new board was feeling good and after a few warm up laps of 180s, kickflips and whatnot we settled in on a 360 flip battle.  First one to land one gets a beer.  Jake won!  Stoked on this actually.  First time Jake beat me to a 3 flip challenge.  After this we each worked on lines for awhile.  I was trying halfcab flip then 360 flip then nollie 360 flip.  Didn’t get the nollie 3 flip in this line, but the halfcab flip and treflips were feeling great.  Jake ended up getting a banger of a line.  No comply 180, halfcab flip, f/s flip, fakie flip.  So sick.  Shortly after that I put down my best flatground line ever.  Fakie bigflip, front shove, nollie treflip, treflip.  Finally got treflip and nollie treflip in the same line!  I don’t think the tre was too clean, but whatevs, the rest of the tricks were ok and the nollie tre and fakie big flip felt super good.  Another challenge went down.  Gummy bears for the first frontside halfcab flip.  It took a bit, but I got it.  Then I tried a run of heelflip, varial flip, frontside halfcab flip.  Never got the fs halfcab flip.  Had a blast though.  Near the end I had slammed on some trick and was laying on the ground laughing with Jake.  I love skateboarding.  I love when you have as much energy as I did tonight and I love being a grown ass man that laughs when he falls down in a dirty parking garage on a cold night.

For those of you that have met my wife Liz you already know that she is the greatest woman of all time.  Ok, well, she’s my wife and I love her dearly.  She’s been playing the guitar for awhile now and started piecing together a song.  A few weeks later here we are with her first song called ‘Oh My Bones’.  Click HERE for the link to the mp3.  I dig it.

The kids were staying over at a friends so Liz and I decided to go to this show.  After eating some good BBQ with TF and watching the Nuggets win we headed to Denver with Carleigh.  We got into the show about the time the opening band Cannon started.  They ended up being really good.  They were pretty heavy indie rock at times, somewhat metal at other times.  Next up was Lion Sized which was the only band I had seen before.  I liked them a lot the first time I saw them, but this time they kinda let me down.  The music is a lot like Hot Snakes, but it just didn’t do it for any of us this time.

The headlining band was called Tauntaun.  We had never heard of them. We figured if they sucked or were even just mediocre we’d leave so we could get to sleep early.   They started the show by cranking the fog machine up so much that Liz left the front room.  Ha.  Within the first song it was pretty clear that they were awesome.  Really awesome.  I don’t like much metal, but this was incredible.  It reminded me of classic metal.  Sabbath, Maiden, Priest and Motorhead with a bit of grunge thrown in to make it completely incredible.  It was so good that Liz liked it, and she hates most metal.  It was also so good that I bought a Tauntaun t-shirt and record.  Check them out, they rule.

I took a few runs on Rampy while waiting around to see what was developing for the day.  Luckily it hadn’t start snowing yet.  I didn’t do anything too great, but I was having fun.  After meeting Jack and Carleigh at Meta we went to Willville.  We messed around on the bank with the grate.  Well, but mess around I mean Jack did all kinds of ollies into it and Caleigh and I just dropped in on it.  While Jack was warming up on the six stair ledge I a run of front 50 on the ledge, kickflip on flat then ollie onto the ledge and roll into the bank.  I kept being totally lame on the roll in into the bank, but eventually got it when we got the boot.

Next up we went to a big gap where Jack not only broke his board trying to back 3 the gap, but broke mine too.  I was kinda hyped though because I wanted to setup a new board before SF and I didn’t have to make up no silly excuses.  The board was broke!  After a board setup party Jack, Carleigh and I skated Rampy.  It was a fun session for awhile, but then it seemed everyone got tired at the same time.  Carleigh was getting front D’s everytime, Jack was doing 5-0’s to fake fakie revert, I landed the majority of my tricks except front feeble and hurricane.  The session ended when Jack did a front 5-0 shove out.  Sick.  It’s snowing again.  SUCK!

Tired from a fun show the night before and being a dad of a girl in 4H club I met up with Nate and Carleigh at the Mikes Camera manny pad.  I started off pretty good with some mannys and nose mannys first try.  But I wasn’t feeling too on my game and I was solo for awhile.  I did a few ollies over snow and whatnot and started feeling better.  Nate showed up right as I gapped over some snow to manny.  I looked cool for a second.  Ha.  It was rad, Nate was hungover.  He said he drank a ton of beers the night before.  That a boy Nate!  Carleigh showed up after awhile too.  Nate quickly proved that he is younger and did some neat tricks.  Front 180 nose manual.  Nollie front 180 nose manny.  He’s good.  Carleigh hasn’t spent much time trying mannys before.  She never quite got one, but she definitely seemed to get the hang of how to manual by the end of the session.  She was also landing kickflips pretty much every try.  Good ones too.  We skated for about an hour total.  Nate did some pretty crazy stuff like fakie manual, half cab nose manual, and quite a bit more that I can’t remember right now.  He came close to fakie manual fakie 3 shove out.  Ridiculous.  He also got most of his flippers back on the bigger board.  I saw perfect tres and nollie b/s heels go down.  Sick.  I didn’t really skate all that hot, but I did a few things I was proud of.  Kickflip manny which took a ton of tries and my first ever fakie bigspin manual.  I’d be more hyped, but I did it so bad.  I landed at 90 and lost all my speed, but somehow managed to manny all the way to the end.  Argh.  I also did a 360 flip up the curb (easier then varial flip up) and a line with a fast nose manual followed by a nollie treflip on flat.  All in all a pretty fun session.

Had a horrible week at work and Friday was the worst day yet.  Got home from work early feeling very cranky, tired and sore.  I took a short nap and woke up feeling slightly better.  I put on PJ Ladd’s part in WHL (best part ever) then ran out of my house with my board, pushed as fast as I could to the bikepath down the street.  When I got there I pushed as fast as I could down it.  It’s not steep or anything, but if you push fast enough the last couple corners before it ends can be scary.  The feeling of flying down a hill rules.  I need to do it more.  My flatspotted wheels were making so much noise, my trucks were wobbling, I was scared and man, it was fun.  After the first one I felt sooooo much better about life.  I skated back slow doing a couple kickflips/shove its and talking on the phone.  I got back to the top and did the same thing again, except even faster.  I walked back and did it a final time somehow going even faster.  Fast enough that I barely made the corner under Moorhead.  I came so close to jumping into the creek.  That would have been so cold!  To finish the run I did a kickflip going kinda fast and laughed for awhile about how fun something as simple as pushing down a hill can be.  Yeah skateboarding!

John’s band was awesome.