Well, not exactly, which brings me to the story of the weekend.  I was originally planning a different blog for today, but that one will have to wait for tomorrow.  Jamie, Clinton, and I spent the weekend at the Siebers, and, as per usual, we took our skateboards with us to have some fun in their driveway.  On Friday, I decided that I wanted to try an 'Ollie', because Pro Skater 4 has inspired me.  Now, I should mention that I don't know how to do an 'Ollie', but I thought I'd guess.  So, I slammed down one end of the board and did some kind of jumping motion, and before I knew it, I was reeling backwards and landing hard on my back side, narrowly avoiding the side of my car with my head.  The most serious part of this injury was a little bit of skin scraped off of my elbow, but not enough to even be red.  Not too bad, but I showed it off for the rest of the day as my first skating injury.  I also decided to wait until I get pads and a helmet before I go down the road of really trying to learn to trick.

Then, comes today.  Clinton comes in and mentions that he had just gone down the street, venturing out of the normal bounds of the driveway.  He mentions that it seemed like it wasn't even as steep as the driveway, but that it was longer, so you build up some speed.  He took Jamie's deck down, but suggested that he thought my Sector 9 would probably have been smoother.  Well, I was ready to do my first run of the day.  I was even wearing my new skate shoes.  So, I grabbed my board and thought I'd try the street as well.  So, I hop on and start to go down.  Very quickly, the board starts to wobble pretty seriously.  This was not a foreign experience for me, because when I was new to the driveway, this happened a fair amount as well.  I don't care for the wobbliness, so when I realized that I wasn't going to be able to rein it in, I figured I should go ahead and bail before matters got worse and I wouldn't be able to choose the manner of my bailing.  So, the plan was to jump off and immediately start running to match by current speed and let the board fly down the hill all by its lonesome.  However, during all of this, I hadn't recognized just how much speed I had built up.  In fact, I soon found out that I was going faster on the board than I am capable of running.  So, after I hit about three strides running, I started to go down.  I'm pretty sure my elbow hit first, as it took the most damage, but I also caught my knee, hip, side of my stomach and shoulder before I completed my roll on to my back.  I remember being surprised that I continued to fall for so long.  Afterwards, we could see that the red in my shirt had actually rubbed off onto the pavement leaving a red stripe 10 feet long.  I got up and kind of checked to make sure that I wasn't so badly injured that I should sit back down or something, and Clinton zooms past me on Jamie's deck.  He thought that he could get down to check on me faster if he rode down, but then realized that if he tried to stop, he was going to be in the same predicament I was, so he continued on to the bottom of the hill.

I'm proud to say that now I have my real first skating injury, considering I bled from six different places.  The good news is that the injury hasn't scared me off from skating, though I am planning on investing in a helmet and some pads before I try too many new things.  One other ironic thing, the shirt that I was wearing is the shirt that I got from Jamie's cousins a year and a half ago that has some skate brand logo on it.  I wore it to ubc one Sunday morning while giving announcements, and mentioned then that I felt like a real poser for wearing a skate shirt, having never skateboarded before.  Perhaps, today was payback, although the shirt bore a fair amount of injury as well.