Entries this day: Dude Skate Unicycle

Dude

4:19am CST Sunday 10 December 2000

I just got home from picking up Dude and Veronica. Though their flight was late taking off, they were early arriving. We drove home with no delay. Upon arrival, Dude and I started talking computer stuff. From our latest projects, to XML to future projects, to the super cool project Compaq is designing with Disney, to future of Internet access, to calculating the IP address coverage of IPv6.

Oh, they also told me a lot about Hurst (sp) Castle, near where they wanna live in California. Cool cool stuff.

Good night.

Skate

5:34pm CST Sunday 10 December 2000

On the way home from church, I took Montrose over Allen Parkway as hundreds of people jogged on Allen Parkway beneath me. Hmm. I think I need to put on sktes and see what that is all about.

Got home, ate a snack of some crackers and cheese, then put on my skates. It's been too long since I've skated before.

Out the garage and down to Allen Parkway, where I basically had just missed the truck acting as caboose. I caught up with it, passed it, eventually found the crowd of people collected in Sam Houston Park (the same park that I've referred to as Coyote Park in some of my Wild Skating Adventures).

I didn't know or care what they were supporting or doing, so I just greeted the streets of downtown. Instead of a play-by-play of every turn I made, I shall describe some of the differences that I noticed in downtown streets.

• Jones Plaza is conspicuously missing. The entire block where a large elevated flat surface used to be, a fence now encloses some kind of construction. A guy at Bayou Place said it will be an outdoor ampitheater. Fair enough; we'll be able to skate on that.

• Wide swaths of bricks now indicate crosswalks at the intersections. Instead of just white paint indicating where one should walk, smallish rectangular gray paving stones mark the path. When I first saw them, I had a concern that they may not be skate friendly, but they are relatively smooth.

• At some corners, large phallic concrete columns stand with a planter on top. They look kinda like palm trees. About waist level sticking out of the column as if a tree has been tapped, water leaps from a spout about 3 feet and into a hole in the sidewalk.

• Skaters across from Bayou Place skated through a water logged wonderland, with easily a quarter to half inch of water across the whole thing. Ewww. I was quite thankful to not be the kid who fell fully onto his front, soaked in near frozen wetness.

• The main lanes of I-45 are closed across Allen Parkway. They are being repaved as the Pierce Elevated was repaved some years ago. (I'm sure both sections of the freeway were poured around the same time, which means that this section of 45 was well past its planned lifespan, as was Pierce Elevated.) I clunked my way up from Allen Parkway to the new clean pavement with machinery still on it. I chose not to skate on it.. that would be a bit too conspicuous with hundreds of cars per minute passing on both sides.

Cool. Wende just called and is on her way home from work. I'm going to unicycle over to Kroger to meet her to shop for supper.

Unicycle

9:07pm CST Sunday 10 December 2000

I unicycled to Kroger, and only fell once when I was maneuvering between a car and the grass, plus a 90 degree turn at the same time. I didn't hit the car. Got to Kroger and walked the uni through the store. Not many people really looked/cared. That's cool to imagine Houston as a free thinking collective that doesn't give a second thought to modes of transportation. Or maybe everyone is just a bunch of snobs.

Wende was apparently not in the store, so I waited for her outside for about 5 minutes that seemed like forever.

At first I just rolled the uni through the store, but then I found that I could kinda hook the seat on the shopping cart handle, and it rode there pretty effectively. It did make the cart significantly heavier though.

After shopping I unied back and Wende intercepted me at the post office. "Look! That's the space station!" She pointed to a bright point in the sky that could have been a planet, though it was pretty bright. Hmmm. I think it would appear to be moving, as many artificial satellites do. The station is in relatively low orbit; the shuttle doesn't go that far out, so it can't be in geosynchronous orbit. Hmmm.

I unied the rest of the way home and recorded Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle while Wende cooked the best, most incredible cream corn chowder I've ever had!

My legs are sore.