Entries this day: Skating

Skating

7:39pm CDT Tuesday 13 August 2002

Today was spent almost entirely inside, working on my photo albums and watching The Simpsons (watched last 10 episodes of Season 2), listening to Nine Inch Nails, and munching cereal. What a perfectly lazy-ass vacation this has been!

9:37pm

Ah, but now I have gone skating around the lake near Marta's apartment. It's about a mile around, with a middle school on one end and a playground on the other. I skated twice around the lake, once around the playground, and once around the school.

I didn't have my helmet on (first time I have significantly skated without my helmet since my accident in September 1994) because I left it with my bike at the Bibby's house in Dallas, so I didn't do a lot of dangerous jumping type stuff, but skated pretty fast through the dark, trusting that I would see any walkers on the sidewalk (there were several) even though none of us bore lights of any variety and the slim moon behind clouded sky doesn't help illuminate the terrain effectively.

I did jump down about 4 steps at a time at the school, and had no problem with that. On the way down the hill from the school to the loop around the lake, I had to make a sharp turn on the sidewalk so I jumped a bit of grass, indicated by the arrow below

\  s   \            /      /  
 \  i   \  grass   /      /   
  \  d   \        /      /    
   \  e   \      /      /     
    \  w <------+-     /      
     \  a   \  /      /       
      \  l   \/      /        
       \  k         /  
 	\          /   
 	 \        /    
 	  |      /     
 	 /      /      
 	/      /       
       /      /        
      /      /
     /      / 
    /      /  
   /      /   
  /      /    
 /      /     

I barely hit the grass where the arrow is located on my jump, so the landing was a bit tilted forward, but I recovered nicely.