AWOL: Part II.

In light of all the skateboarding I had been doing, I decided that I wanted to try another board sport that I said I would never do again. Snowboarding. Back when we lived in Albany, NY… I fell snowboarding and broke my left arm REALLY bad. I can still feel the bone-scarring through my skin. I swore I would never snowboard again. Well… I guess I swore wrong. Back in January, Erin, Cody, and Chris were headed up to Cataloochee… so I decided to join them. I was never any good at snowboarding. I couldn’t get my edges down and always got hurt, so I was apprehensive about how I would take to it this time around. Miraculously, it clicked, and before I knew it I was shredding pretty well, and having a BLAST.So I decided to buy the most METAL looking snowboard I could. And started going every two weeks all the way through March until the mountains closed. This particular trip up to Sugar, it rained on us the ENTIRE DAY. Soaking wet from head-to-toe is an understatementSOAKED. But that smile on my face is pretty much priceless. Snowboarding gives me that same feeling skating does, which is totally indescribable and absolutely badicalIn fact, we were so soaking wet, that we had to take a break and drive to the laundromat to dry everything off. Lieze snapped this cool photo during my laudro-nap. Once our clothes were dry, we suited up and hit the mountain again. Good good timesIn January I was also lucky enough to be able to attend the ASD Mob Seminar up in Charlotte. What an AMAZING amazing experience. Ian, Dave, and the crew as ASD know their stuff like no other team in Formula Drift. There. I said it. The fact that they wanted to give back to the grassroots community with a program like this is really too phenomenal for words. The things they taught us totally made me re-think everything in regard to car-setup for drifting. I seriously can never thank these guys enoughIn May, I ran in the Warrior Dash with (left to right) my brother Jonathan, Dad, Mom, Tom Hanks from Castaway, and parent’s friend JoelEveryone HAS to do one of these races. It is REALLY fun, and a very wild race! The obstacles are actually a nice way to break up the distance. I won’t lie – you get filthy dirty in ways you can’t really imagine until you do it. But it is an absolute RIOTAlso, in May… I picked up another guitar I’ve always wanted. Definitely a staple for both heavy metal and rock and roll. An Epiphone Flying V. I also snagged a sweet li’l mini-stack by Marshall. Needless to say my office is a thrash-zone!rnIn June, Alex let me borrow his Honda Camino, and I went with he, Eugene, and the rest of the Swoop Jockeys on a 50+ mile moped ride from Cabbagetown all the way to Northpoint Mall for the Cars and Coffee meet. I don’t know what it was about these crappy old neglected things… but I kinda fell in love with them. As fate would have it, Chad wanted to get rid of his old Tomos A35… so I bought hisI started sanding the paint off, put new bars, seat, controls, taillight, and made a super-sweet headlight cover with a broken Hella cover from the truck. I also made a nice chain guard out of an old ’71 Georgia license plate. I still need to get the rest of the teal off the bike – but it is definitely starting to feel more-and-more like minernEvery Sunday morning, I’ve been riding around Atlanta with these guys… having a blast. We rode through the historic Pullman Yard, and I happened to have my Contour on me. This was a really fun ride!rnIn light of riding basically mini-motorcycles, I decided to take an MSF class with Cody, Wes, and Alex. It is something I would recommend to anyone who wants to ride a motorcycle of any kind. We learned a lot, and I feel a lot safer when I ride now as a result. We all passed both the riding and written tests… so at the end of the weekend, we all got our motorcycle licenses! After we passed our riding tests, we were allowed to swap motorcycles for a lap or two. I put a quick iPhone video together. I’ll warn you though – if you aren’t one of the people in this video – you won’t find it super-exciting hahahaI’ve been working a bit on tidying up the garage as well. I plan on putting up pegboard on the left-side wall to help free up some space. There isn’t a lot of room to move around in there, and I want to try and help it breathe a bit. The BMW has been sitting for a while, with the rear-end still broken. I’ve been too busy with work to really mess with it, but in the next month-or-so, plan to have it back up and running again!rn