Today Bryan and Cat and I headed to the somewhat nearby city of Hammond. Cat was meeting a friend from grad school, and Bryan and I passed the time at the public skate park in town. We wowed everyone with our daring feats of bravery. Most of the kids there were in the 12- to 16-year-old range (and a lot better than me). Even this awesome little eight-year-old kid attacked the ramps like he was born on them (which might well be true). There were even four or five girls out there skating, and none too shabbily, either. Little skater kids today must have it great — when I was that age, skater chicks were way harder to find.

There were at least 50 or 60 skaters at the park, and pretty much every section had regular traffic passing through it, so I didn't feel comfortable getting in there and making everybody wait while I timidly try to work up the courage to roll down a slope. But Bryan and I agreed that we need to come back on a weekday evening, when it will hopefully be less crowded. I really want to get comfortable skating again and get back to learning more advanced tricks. I started skating when I was 15, kind of plateaued really early and then just stagnated at that point. Eleven years later, I still can't do anything better than a really crappy ollie. Hopefully now that I've got another skater 100 feet away from my house and a free public skate park half an hour away, I can finally change that. It's frustrating that I left my board in PR when I moved up here (the board didn't feel like a priority at the time). I guess I'll have to wait until I fly down for Christmas to ship it up here.

There's a 30-mile bike trail near here that also sounds like a great place to go. I plan to get a set of inline skates (and, eventually, a bike) and make it a weekly habit to head out to that trail and just spend some time outdoors enjoying the sights and getting some exercise. It's probably also a good place to take some pictures — I can keep track of the scenes I like as I'm skating or biking, and then come back with a large format camera and capture them.