below the coping: rained out...

Yesterday Matt, James, and myself went on a skate mission. The idea was to start at Gabriel Park and go from there. When we were a few minutes away it started raining, hard. So we tried to race the storm back to Portland to skate Glenhaven but it was also soaked. Endless bummer. (I'm not going to bore you with rain soaked skatepark photos. If you must, google the aforementioned parks and imagine them totally rained out.) We started to head south and realized that it hadn't rained just a few blocks from the park so we grabbed some coffee and headed back to Glenhaven, which by that time was totally dry. Weird beard. The scene was pretty awkward. There was a professional razor scooter team there. Yeah, I had no idea that existed either. Matt and James did some righteous stuff, I rolled around and we split. Fun. End of story.

Sweet signage = fun times.

Today didn't seem much more promising on the weather front. (Yes, I am aware that it is the middle of July, apparently, Oregon isn't.) I wasn't going to let the rain bum another session so I decided to play it safe and head to the indoor concrete park that is so conveniently nestled four blocks from my house. I hit up my buddy Friendly Dave and he agreed to meet me there. I skated down the hill from my house and as I turned the corner I was met by some other people skating down the hill toward the park. The session was mellow. High fives and positive vibes were flowing. There were skaters of all skill levels doing their thing, pushing themselves, and having a lot of fun, all thanks to the dedicated efforts of the fine folks at Commonwealth Skatepark.

The main point of all of this is that I've decided to relearn how to skate. My goal is to improve upon what I know and fill in any gaps I had in my learning process, thus, maximizing my fun potential. So I skated the quarter pipe below for the majority of the time I was there. I learned how to properly do axle stalls, rock & rolls, and relearned feeble to fakies. I was pretty hyped. Today was a really awesome and encouraging skate session. I tried a couple frontside feebles (a.k.a prayers) on a whim but that definitely wasn't in the cards. It did however spark the idea that I could learn frontside 50-50 stalls and pivots. Both of which I'm totally stoked on and after today doesn't seem like such a pipe dream.

3 hours well spent. Note the sweet shark lurkage.

Friendly Dave does generally awesome stuff usually at warp speed. He is a stellar dude and good motivator. He learned fakie ollie backside nosegrinds and fakie ollie over the flat rail to front board with relative ease. He did some cool transfers from the mini ramp into the bowl, a bunch of effortless quarter pipe tricks, and some burly frontside nosegrinds on the grind box. The picture below is the gouge made by an exposed screw head that he would carelessly grind straight over/through at mach ten.