Older part, but damn.  Sorry for the lack of updates.  I got food poisoning.  Not fun.  Go Nuggets!

Belle & Sebastian is near the top of my bands I want to see live list. So good.

Very tired from being up late and lawn work Ollie and I went ot the school across the street.  I basically just skated the no setup curb the whole time.  Ollie almost did a front 50 on it first try.  I tried to skate coach him into trying it again, but he didn’t want to after it didn’t work in a few tries.  I went through the basic stalls the started trying the Jason trick.  Front 50, back 180 while on the ledge into a fakie grind.  Seeing as how you can’t grind without any setup speed I tried just stalling it.  Turning the back 180 is way easier than I thought it would be.  I landed a few of them.  But since I wasn’t moving who knows how easy it would be when grinding.

Brian, Neil, Rob, Greg, Jam and I headed up to the Fort to hit Northside and check out the contest.  It was crowded which it should be.  I didn’t even skate the park between runs like others did.  I basically only skated flatground which was fun.  There was a bunch of games of SKATE with Skelly and John too.  All were fun.  I hardly ever land anything.  Rob and I skated the little slanted ledge near the park.  It was really dry, but we still had a blast.  I got into a couple hurricanes, but didn’t commit to a land.  Tried front smiths and back feebles, but since it didn’t grind I never landed them.  Tried a bunch of tailslides but only got up on the top good a couple times.  Next up we went to the new pool which was also crowded.  It looks really fun, but the numbers were too much for me.  Rob and I just skated flatground and a plastic parking block which ended up being really fun.  Rob was doing really sick ‘slappy smith lapovers” and grinding really far.  I started trying it and managed to land one or two.  Fun.  Next up was a game of SKATE with John and Andy from MRKT.  What a fun game.  John has 360 flips every try and Andy was close to full cab flips.  I somehow won.  I think the tricks I landed were pop shove, kickflip, halfcab flip, fakie flip, 360 flip, fakie varial flip, frontside halfcab flip amd maybe something else.  I had T.  Even though I mostly skated flat all day it was a super fun day.  Ok wait, who am I kidding, skating flat all day is why the day was so fun.  Ha!

Didn’t have anything else going on and Nate wanted to skate.  We were both tired and he seemed extra bummed on becoming unemployed soon.  We met over by Silver Mine subs to skate the new ledge spot, but ended up not really skating it.  I guess you could just say we didn’t really skate much at all.  Nate had some really good and long back 50s on a curb near the wallride thing.  I tried to manual into a frontside wallride, but upon hitting the wall my back foot hot pocketed super bad.  Ugh.  Other than trying a few flippers and two mile an hour hurricanes on a curb it was a pretty unispired session.

One of my all time favorite things to do on a skateboard is just cruise around a city with a small crew and hit whatever we find (except for stairs and gaps of course).  Luckily Nate is pretty into it too.  We met up with Chris and his crew and started off at a little manual pad parking garage spot.  Rad, it was like driving to Denver and skating red curbs.  I almost got a no comply 270 tailslide out of the gates and almost got a manual to cali grind.  But we got kicked out pretty quickly by security which would turn out to be a pretty frequent occurance all night.  After dorking around on some stuff we ended up at a tall marble ledge.  Nate almost back 50’d it and I almost front boarded it.  3rd boot of the night.  Yes,  a 2nd boot had occurred between the first and 3rd.  After awhile we ended up at some weird planters that were basically 45 degree wallrides about a foot off the ground and only about 2 feet tall.  So you didn’t have much room to work with.  One dude was ripping it.  I think his name was Darin or Dylan or something.  Shit, sorry.  Nate and Chris put down a lot of tricks while I spent forever trying to get a backside wallride.  Ugh.  After finally getting it it took me only two tries to get a front 180 fakie wallride f/s cab out.  We pushed around for awhile and didn’t really skate anything for long before hitting the world trade center area which we skated for awhile.  I didn’t do anything noteworthy.  The other dudes left and Nate and I played a game of SKATE that kind of just fizzled out and we left.Oh but as we were leaving I noticed a hill and we hadn’t skated a hill yet.  It was two blocks of granite downhill.  Not even considered a warm up hill in SF, but it was granite so it was faster than it looked.  First time I just pointed the whole way which was scary and we had to time it so we went through the light when it was green.  It was so fun we hiked it twice more.  Each time getting better and I mixed in some ollies and powerslides.  Best part of the night!  Street skating!!  We didn’t get back to Boulder until midnight so if you can sense some exhaustion in this journal entry, thats where it’s coming from.

Dude is the best.

Then west coast skating.  Jerry Fowler and Jahmal Williams killing it.  Hopps seems like a rad company even if they have the same logo as Hype.  After watching that I then watched an old 411 Jerry Fowler part.  (Yes, I get most of these video links from the slap forums which i browse about once a day)

Brought India to ballet class at the North Boulder Rec center in the early evening and just skated around there for awhile.  I cruised around for a bit just looking for something fun then settled with a mellow downhill parking lot and bailed tricks for awhile.  I suck at doing tricks downhill and I only got a couple runs down the hill.  One came quick, back pop shove, kickflip, back 180, halfcab flip.  I wasn’t going fast but I never had to push.  One was fakie flip, halfcab flip, kickflip and then bailed a varial flip.  I couldn’t land a frontside halfcab flip to start one line and I just kept trying nollie heelflips going uphill and came remotely close to a few of them.  Gotta keep trying them!  The last run started with a first try sketchy fakie bigflip, kickflip, kickflip, kickflip.  Neat.  Then I skated an alley for a little bit and sucked, but landed a 360 flip to give it some sort of a fun feeling.  Then Jason and I went to the Louisville park really late.  We got there at 9:30 so only had 30 minutes before the lights shut off.  We started off pretty quick and were trying lines were we rolled into the flat bank, ollied the hip then went over the ledge backside.  The Louisville ledge is the only ledge I can crooks good these days.  I got a couple with pop outs, a couple to fakie and almost a crooks shove.  Someone waxed it a lot so it was scary fast.  Other tricks that went down were front 50 back 180 out and front 5-0 front shove out which I haven’t done in awhile.  Used to be a warm up trick for me.  Doh!  Fun quick session though.

Rating: The Thermals became one of my all time favorites after Fuckin A came out.  Two albums later they are even higher on my list and have yet to disappoint.   Each album has a different feel and there seems to be less punk in their rock with each album, but they are all awesome.  The new one “Now We Can See” is easily their poppiest and cleanest to date.  I was skeptical at first, but hearing it live and listening to the record over and over has sold me on it.  I’m not going to give this album a perfect rating.  I don’t think any of their albums have been a perfect 10, here’s my minor complaints about this one:* The album doesn’t start as strong as all other Thermals albums.  ‘When I Died’ seems like they forcefully toned it down.  Still a great song, but it’s lacking that Thermals album opener overdrive.  * The high pitched parts of “We Were Sick” are a little tough on the ears sometimes.  I’m all for Kathy helping on the vocals, but parts of that song don’t work so well.  Luckily the “We were high, we were alive, we were sick” makes up for it.  *  The order of the songs could be better.  “At The Bottom Of The Sea” could be a great ender.  Not sure, but listening to the record sounds better sometimes starting at side 2 which starts with “When We Were Alive”.  That being said don’t think for a second I don’t love this album.  There are some epic Thermals songs on here.  “I Let It Go”, “Now We Can See”, “At The Bottom Of The Sea”, “When We Were Alive”, “I Called Out Your Name”, “When I Was Afraid”, and “You Dissolve” are all amazing to me.  I think their song writing and structuring has improved on this album and Hutch seems to deliver the lyrics as good as ever.  I give this album an ‘A-‘.  Kudos Thermals, your one of my favorites.