Grass Skiing

Now that finals are over, you can expect regular updates to resume. Also, check out my Neopets Daily Reminders page if you play Neopets as religiously as I do…

Now back to our regularly scheduled post:

Long ago I swore never to ski again. Snowboarding is my passion, and skiing just looks SO effeminate. I do a hilarious skier impression but it would be lost on you the reader as it is a purely visual performance. Maybe I’ll do an animated GIF of it some day. Oh yeah, that reminds me, here’s a random gif I made one night in the Ames parking lot in Caribou with the guys, some chocolate Necco Wafers, and a lot of boredom. Crude, I know, but I just remembered to animate it and some of the guys wanted to see it. BTW, did you know that Necco stands for New England Confectionary COmpany? Getting back to the topic at hand… I swore never to ski again, but a birthday present I got last month made me alter my oath. I now swear to never ski on snow again. Grass, however, is another matter entirely.

Upon returning home from a trip to the store, I encountered a long box on my porch addressed from my mother’s house. I brought it inside, cut it open, and was presented with the usual mass of packing peanuts (not the ones that shrink with water (._.) ) with a little piece of metal sticking out. Naturally I trusted both hands in, grabbed the first big object I found, and yanked them out, spilling peanuts everywhere.

In my hands I held two bright yellow and green things that looked like miniature conveyer belts. They had plastic skids attached to seat-belt type nylon webbing. At first I didn’t know what they were, but I had an idea. Zach and I looked at each other and said “Are those…”
“No way!”
“They can’t be…”
“But they have to!”
We went online just to make sure we had what we thought we did, and found this page: http://www.natives.co.uk/news/2004/05/31gras.htm
“They ARE grass skis!” We both exclaimed in unison. I didn’t have my old ski boots in Bangor, so we 100mph taped them to my shoes, and went outside to try them out on the slight hill in my back yard. They worked great, but we couldn’t think of where to use them on a bigger hill, until I remembered Zach pulling me around the park on my snowboard with our mountain bike (the one we used for snow jumping).

This was just too good to be true.

After grabbing some stuff and throwing it in the car, we drove down the road to the park (about 30 seconds away) while Zach rode the bike there.

Amme took all the pictures and worried about my health while Zach pulled.

Don’t worry, Mom. As you can see from the pictures, I got incredibly queerly dressed just to be safe.

Zach pulling me on grass skis

I started out with perfect form:

toms form

but toward the end I got better stability by crouching low:

crouching

We had lots of fun (I’m sure I had way more fun than Zach, since he was the work horse, but it was my birthday so I got special treatment), though I almost gave Zach a coronary thrombosis. I’ve never felt someone’s heart palpitate at that rate!

Zach passed out

Ah… *content sigh*. Good times.

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