Longboarding... Sometimes You Fall...

Oops.

So i fell. Gimme a break. The road around our new complex is awesome for longboarding. Very smooth. Not too busy. I was doing great, getting pointers from my friend Mark (it was one of his boards i was riding... I don't own a longboard and you can see why...) practicing my turns and just enjoying the fresh night air. I turned onto a street that had a slight decline... that got a bit steeper. I went a teeny bit faster... and then a lot faster. Many thoughts passed through my mind in a split second... should I bail? Am I going too fast to jump off safely? Should I try to turn or will that be a disaster? I didn't follow any of my thoughts. But I'm pretty sure that if I would've followed any of them, the results would've been the same. So from what I remember, the board rocked under me, I lost control and balance and went down. Mark told me later that I had too much weight on my back foot... he saw the whole thing happen from behind me and I'm sure I freaked him out. The result: Scraped elbow and knee. Bruised hip and leg and arm. And a whole lot of embarassment. But I was fine really. I got up pretty quick and walked away with adrenaline pumping high and very grateful that I escaped worse injuries.

If any of you remember my incident from 2002 where, at the suggestion of Emily, I naively rollerbladed down a steep hill and took a tumble, this was almost like a deja vu. Except that I was longboarding this time. And the hill wasn't nearly as steep, and I didn't yell, my pants stayed intact (the back of my jeans split way open in '02), and I was not even 100 feet from my front door. So this was like an improvement! And thank you to Eli for helping to patch up my wounds.

Well this little incident probably won't stop me from longboarding again. I'll just be sure to stay off the hills from now on. Apparently, me and them don't get along so well.

As a side note, I went to the Aquarium with RAH last week, and I think these jellyfish were some of the coolest things there. Partially because they were swimming under a black light.

Arizona in August

Alyssa and I decided to take a trip to Arizona to visit her mom and just get out of Provo for a few days before Alyssa had to start school. It worked out perfect because RAH had no scheduled activities for the last week of August so we bought cheap plane tickets and off we went!

We flew over the grand canyon.

While in Arizona we did a whole lot of nothing. It was great. I love vacations like that. Many told me that I would melt in the heat, but the weather was terrific. It was never over 95, it stormed every night, and it was just a little humid, nothing unbearable. We had no real plans, but we did have some things to accomplish on our list... and most of them involved food. Unfortunately on this trip, I was without my camera a lot so I only caught a few of our moments.

We ate at the cheesecake factory. MMMMMM.

We ate ice cream at the Sugar Bowl in Scottsdale.

We attended the beautiful Mesa Temple.

Our friend Mark from our ward up here was also in Gilbert when we were there and he came and hung out with us a couple of times. This night we stayed outside on the porch from about 10p-2a watching this amazing thunderstorm. It was so awesome!

And sadly, that's about all the pictures I have of my trip. The rest of the time we just watched movies, ate good Mexican food, played ping pong, swam, shopped for home decor stuff, and hung out with Alyssa's sweet mom, and her aunt Donna and uncle Ken. It was a really fun time and we were very sad to leave.

Here is the sun setting while we were on the airplane going home. And us on our nearly empty flight back. It's a little dark cuz I didn't want to freak anyone out with the flash...