Monthly Archives: December 2011

Dominic the donkey

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A few days before Christmas, Chip and I were driving home and the song below came on the radio. I had never heard it before… thought it was just some crazy Rhode Island radio station joke, but everyone I’ve mentioned it to around here seems pretty familiar. And supposedly it’s the most requested “Christmas” song on some local stations. Besides the fact it’s a “Christmas donkey”, I don’t have the faintest clue how this is a Christmas song.

Home in Rhode Island.

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Rhode Island. Defined by rude (yet truly nice and wonderful) people with awful accents, terrible drivers, delicious authentic food, ridiculous traditions and customs, the ocean. the beach. friends, family. home. home in all senses and associations of the word… home.

I kept telling people I wasn’t mentally prepared for this trip. And I really wasn’t – whether anyone (including myself) even knows what that means. But it’s all rushing back now. So wonderful and perhaps bittersweet when I realize how much I love this place. Everything about it.

All day long it’s been raining. The sky has been solid gray and everything is wet. And yet I love it. I usually can’t stand the rain, but this is just so perfect. I have no board with me, sitting and reminding me how the weather needs to be perfect to roll around, no desire for anything other than a slightly stormy feel. The air feels magical and welcoming; the humidity envelops me in a comforting way… a soothing break from the dry Colorado winter that’s been making the skin around my knuckles ache.

Today began on a somber note – a memorial service for a friend’s mother. A friend who has shown relentless strength, generosity, and composure for as long as I’ve known her – and even more recently. From there the day snowballed in to a epic journey of consuming amazing Rhode Island restaurant/bar food and drinks all day long. And night. An eventual journey to the Ocean Mist led me to the back deck over the raging, stormy sea. Waves were breaking just up to the back deck. The wind was explosive, and yet the air was so thick and humid you could almost taste it.

I made it back home for a night’s sleep in my bed from childhood. I have no photos to show… not even a single one. So strange. More to come… more to come.

Last Weekend in Boulder for 2011

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Tomorrow I’m heading home to RI… can’t wait to see family and friends. and ocean. and stuff like that. But at least life here in Colorado still rules. Even in the cold.

On Saturday there was a purpose for our trip to Denver… but it turned into a super relaxed cruiser session through downtown.

Starting at this fountain/pool spot…


And now to this grated spot…

some weirdo photos…

Sunday was the White Elephant gift party. Delicious food, awesome crew of people. In fact, the party actually was a lot more fun, lively, upbeat than these photos would indicate. But seriously.

Seriously. Aah. well after a short day of work, longer day of cleaning, making pom poms and drinking wine… that’s all I got. I’ll be back in Colorado in the new year.

Just another Sunday. Camera and a board.

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I got home super late Saturday night after a fun Black Dots show in Denver… and an equally entertaining performance by Glen. Ahh, good times. Either way, it made it pretty difficult to wake up Sunday morning. So, as usual, I was late to meet up. In fact, I was a little curious about what would happen when I arrived at Crisis, since I had told both the Crisis team and the Trick Factory I would meet up at the same time at Crisis for different skate adventures. In the end, I was anxious to take some photos and the Crisis kids were all ready to roll when I got there… so that was that. Off to the first spot.

This ol’ manny spot. I was so proud of myself for getting the guy that was working to move the truck out of the way that was blocking the spot… until I learned that he does that for other people that ask as well. Blah. ha.

manny photos aren’t terribly exciting… so why not just get super up close?

So… there was an awkward moment in this sequence… and I figured if I just sped it up super obnoxiously fast, nobody would notice! ha.

A photo for Fuzz…Team Curb Waxing. Such a close knit team in so many wonderful ways.

More photos for Fuzz…

On to the powerslides……starting with this lovely out of focus shot.

Now a few driving photos by Will…

And onto a new spot. Some of it was still covered in snow. There were gaps and little weird rails all over the place, but we mostly stuck to one little spot…

Kyle did a wallie off the brick ledge down the “gap”. Here’s a terrible angle of the trick…… and a super unnecessarily close up shot as well.

I’m pretty sure that every single time I have gone skating with Will, he has always found something to climb…
… this day was no exception.

Both Kyle and Justin manned up and jumped on the rail. Two angles of Justin’s 50…

Time for some lurking…

After a little lurking, Kyle decided to slick his hair back…

Chris was stoked for him…… really. He was.

Enough for the day. Back to Crisis…

Fuzz, Neil and Brian arrived at the same time we did. Then we rolled out to get some delicious BBQ, as well as a stop by Target and some time for admiring the moon…

Adorable. Sorry about the orange-ness.

Wallace and the Bug

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Recently, a bug decided to move into my bedroom. This bug is a particularly social bug, and likes to crawl all over my desk and laptop when I’m working in my room. I’m pretty sure it even tried to crawl on me when I was falling asleep last night, which did not go over well.

My cat Wallace used to eat bugs. He used to love to catch them and chomp away on them. Even though most of the time I’m a complete pacifist and am usually down to let most creatures live their lives out to the fullest, I would appreciate if Wallace would go ahead and eat this bug. In fact, there is very little that I ask of Wallace – mostly just to not flip the lid up and down on my printer every single day at 4am and to stop aggressively chasing his sister around the apartment. And will he ever actually do any of these things that I desire? Absolutely not. He’s (very frankly) a fucking asshole to Grommit and does in fact wake me up every single morning at 4am…. and most recently, he has decided to befriend this bug as opposed to eating it. When I left home at 9am this morning, he was just hanging out, staring at the bug. When I got home today around 5pm, guess what? He was laying on my bed, hanging with the bug. Ugh. What a freakin’ weird cat I have.

TEAMS women – photos at work

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Yesterday was a rare work day in the fact that all us TEAMS fellows (except for Jonah) worked on campus to provide an engineering activity and gps scavenger hunts to students visiting from Skyline high school. We got Mike to take some photos of the “women of engineering” amongst our group…