The family and I was in Omaha for Christmas and it just so happen’s that one of our favorite musicians Conor Oberst was playing a show while we were there.  Being the the cool cats we are we were put on the VIP list of course.  Or was it we spent $60 on ebay for tickets?  I can’t remember.  Anyways, we got there early through the freezing rain and proceeded to play the worst game of pool the bar has ever seen.  Finally some music came on so we could stop embarrassing ourselves.Up first was Renee Hoover.  Decent Omaha style music.  Mellow, grown up and talented.  Good opener.Up next was Simon Joyner.  Did I mention these photos were taken with my cell phone?  Well, they were.  I didn’t like this set at all.  BORING.  Put me in  bummer mode and made me tired.  From what I can remember Liz enjoyed it somewhat at least.Finally Conor and crew came on stage.  Here’s the setlist that I found on what is hopefully a reliable blog.North of the CityCape CanevralI Won’t Ever Be Happy AgainSomething VagueTrain Under WaterBowl of Oranges10 WomenScaleI Know You (new song)Poison OakMoabMilk ThistleEncore:New YearFreemenRoll OnI Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital)Pretty much the whole set was awesome.  Hearing some of the older Bright Eyes songs was awesome.  My favorites of the night were Something Vague and Train Under Water.  I didn’t really enjoy the encore when pretty much everyone from the previous two bands got on stage and joined them.  But I totally dig that about Conor Oberst.  He wanted to have a Christmas party type show and he did.  Fun times.

Jason and I both drove across the country earlier in the day.  Jason from Utah.  Me from Omaha.  We were both tired but wanted to skate so we met Nate at the Circuit City garage and brought my poorly built ledge.  Warming up was slow as usual for Jason and I.  Nate warmed up by slamming super hard on a back nosegrind attempt.  Ouch.  Jason ended up skating really well.  He rattled off a few basics for him like front and back 50s, front smith, front noseslide, back noseslide, halfcab noseslide before moving on to new tricks of back and front willy grinds.  Awesome!  He also did slappy front tails, crooks and halfcab back willy.  Pretty awesome.  Nate killed it as usual.  His basic warm up tricks aren’t fair.  He worked up to back smith, front smith front 180 out, switch front 5-0, probably more and came close to some crazy tricks like nollie front 180 to fakie bs nosegrind, fakie bigspin noseslide, fakie shove fakie nosegrind and who knows what else.  I got into a groove of trying a few runs.  Tried halfcab flip, back 5-0, nollie tre, but never go the nollie tre.  Got fakie flip, fakie nosegrind, but couldn’t end it with fakie tre.  Treid a bunch of front smiths, but couldn’t ride out, front nose grind, but the only ones I rode away from I bonked the back wheels on, kick back tails weren’t close.  It was fun though.

After spending a small fortune on new snow tires I figured it would be awesome to also spend money on something which I normally do for free, skateboard.  Joe, Zak and Dan picked me up and we went to the only indoor park around.  Opening the door we were greeted by loud corporate crap x-games music before a nice lady helped us get checked in.  They had a new 1031 video and Joe bought it up in a jiffy.  Turns out Greg and the rest of the 1031 dudes are hero’s there.  Cool.They got rid of the bowl which I thought was pretty fun and packed in some ok and some really bad street stuff.  Dan had hurt his ankle and it appeared to be worse than he thought.  We dorked around a bit, but it wasn’t long before he had to sit out the session.  To add insult to injury he had to sit and listen to that horrible manufactured X-games screamo crap music the whole time.  Sorry Dan, but thanks for letting us skate.Almost my entire session was spent dorking around.  I seriously can’t deal with skating in that type of environment.  Shitty loud music, tons of kids, bad skatepark.  Joe and Zak were ripping though.  They both skated the pyramid and hubba for awhile.  I saw Joe get a 5-0 and front smith down it.  Zak had the best ollie over the pyramid ever that he should have never committed to, but since he’s one of those naturally gifted dudes he rode out fine.  Dude rips.  My trick of the day would probably the the backside flip on the flat bank to slide down sideways and go to fakie at the very end.  Pretty funny.  I spent a long time skating this cool wedge spine kicker thing.  I tried a bunch of no comply to tail then transfer over, but never got one.  I got a kickflip blunt transfer and a blunt shove transfer, but couldn’t combine the too.  Then I tried a run for awhile where I would ollie the wedge, come back do a front 5-0 stall and try to 270 shove transfer, never got that either.Then I got bummed for awhile and sat next to Dan for awhile before heading out to do some flip tricks in a corner avoiding kids.  After awhile I skated the tiny mini ramp that’s pretty fun.  Joe and Zak joined for awhile and we all skated pretty well.  I got a couple of my harder tricks: fakie pivot fakie, front d, front 50 stall front d back smith.  We closed things out with a game of SKATE where Zak killed us.  He ended it with a double flip.  Argh!  Better then not skating, but seriously, that place could be a lot better with a few mellow obstacles and some better music.