I am so bummed to hear the news about Sole Tech pulling the plug on Es. Es has been my favorite shoe company forever. Thank you Nike for ruining skate shoes.

Had a few emotional days watching the race my dad was training for, burying ashes and some other not fun activities that prevented me from being able to skate for a few days. After all that I was wanting to skate really bad. I was bringing my brother to the airport early and at the last moment decided to bring my board to hit the Aurora park since it’s way out there. I asked Ollie if he wanted to join and he was in. Sick! We aren’t as cool as JP, but we did get to the park pretty early. There was only a few other people there throughout the two hours we skated.

I started off not doing much more than cruising as it felt really early (9:30 or so). Ollie did lots of flyout back 180s everywhere and some backside ollies on mellow banks. He loved that park. I started getting it going and did some stuff I haven’t done there before. I did a frontside ollie over the little handrail that hyped me up. It was just a frontside ollie on the bank, but it felt cool to go over the rail. Later on I tried about one million kickflips over it going backside. I never quite got it, but had several that were close. That would have been a gillinghammer for me. Ollie and I skated the bowl for a bit. He dropped in the shallow and carved the deep end good enough to make it back up the shallow. Sick! I almost had a good run with a front slash going from the shallow into the deep, but I bailed. Typical

I managed to crooks the straight ledge going off the bank and pop into the bank. I did it pretty bad though. The front 50 was somehow harder for me. Toward the end I tried b/s flips over the hip for awhile and got close to a million before finally landing one with Ollie getting my back with a back 180. Father/son combo! I’m sure it wont be long before the tricks are reversed. After that I did a kickflip back 50 stall on the bank to ledge first try and we left. Hyped.

To make you hyped up to go skate street at night. Thanks Rob.

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.