Thanks Mark
Kicked today. My legs were feeling a bit heavy; probably because I haven't eaten the greatest this week. Oh well. Did hit smog and pigbeater both strongside. Also had (ss butter > osis > pdx mirage > rpt > ss butter > osis > pdx illusion > rpt) > rpt. Aside from some other stuff I almost overheated very nicely lol. Anyway.
NFYA!
I absolutely love the city, and I hope I can move there sometime after college. Doug Tank did an awesome write-up of the event, but I figured I'd also do a bit. And I'm gunna steal a bunch of pictures from facebook to illustrate even further.
The original plan was to work saturday morning and early afternoon, then catch a bus into the city, stay saturday night, then leave sunday night. Then, my boss told me I had to work until close on saturday, meaning I'd go in saturday morning and leave same day. THen, I was able to leave work early cause it was super slow, and there was enough people working. Yes!
Got into city by 7:40 and to Roosevelt island by 8:15 ish. Said my hellos with everyone and jumped into a hack circle for a little bit. We finally start making our way out. A bunch of us headed to Ben Cooke's awesome apartment. We spent a bit there just chilling. There was some bananagrams played while Ben and I were doing some juggling (which Johnny joined in on a bit later). MC, Johhny, Barrett, and I all headed back to Barrett's place for the night.
Sunday morning comes and the four of us all get up early to get ready to go meet up with David Clavens, his girlfriend Erin, and Ben Cooke at High Line park. That place was really cool. Whoever came up with the idea to turn an old high up rail road into a park to walk along was very smart. We hung there for a bit, and Erin took an awesome picture of the rest of us
From there we headed to the Museum of Natural history for a little bit and gave a good walk through of that. Matt's mission was to see the depiction of the Gian squid and sperm whale fighting. Alas after a bit of searching, it was found
Wow that picture came out smaller than I thought it would. Oh well. Anyway, from there we finally headed to Roosevelt island around 1 to start the footbag festivities.
From seeing who could do the coolest strings of tricks while not allowing the bag to leave your foot to the competitions, everything was a lot of fun. I hit some fs toe blurs and some whirrs and some ps whirls and such. String length could've been a bit longer, but I enjoyed it regardless.
From there we all headed to Times Square to shred for a bit. That was a lot of fun. With Doug Tank's command to "do it," I finally hit rubberman
It felt so good. Then we later joined the circle using the fuggler bags to perform and all. It was a little hard to get acclimated to the large bags, but it wasn't horrible. After moving to a bit of a smaller bag, Johnny and Dave were hitting some very legitimate strings. It'd just be nice if everyone watching enjoyed watching as much as I did. We were coerced back to Roosevelt island to get dinner. Much applause was given for Ryan Thomas among others. Yeah Ryan! It was now time to head back to Ben's awesome place yet again. First, a few of us headed up to the roof to kick for a bit. I hit spender first try there, much to my surprise lol. We were having a lot of fun, but for better lighting, we headed down to the recreation room in the building. Now, I don't know if I ever wrote it in here, but I'm always on a bit of a quest to find Jon Schneider footage, cause there isn't enough out there. Thus, I also wanted to seem him hit his super cool ripsteins in person. So to do so, I asked him if I hit it, would he? He agreed and luckily I nailed mine first try. So then as if an odd dream came true, I got to see the epic Jon Schneider ripsteins. For the rest of that session I just kind of messed around (not that I wasn't the whole time anyway lol). As a side note, I need to get better about not trying to be consistent with strings as it gets later in the night. So when Jon had to leave, we made our way back to the roof to watch and kick a bit more.
So for anyone who's paid attention to the time span as illustrated by the pictures, you might be thinking, "shouldn't John have left to go home by now?" Well kudos for paying attention. I actually called my parents earlier in the day to ask if I could spend another night in the city after Ben Cooke simply told me to. So I spent Dave Beyers and I spent the night at Ben's place. Ben's so awesome. He even let me sleep in the bed just because I had to get up really early. So 6:45 AM came and I got up to head to Penn Station to make the 8:07 train. I had to be home to get to work by 11.
Such a great weekend.
Your bothsideness is amazing. Props on all that stuff!
When I heard him and Dave mention something about how people do that these days, I realized what I was doing and really tried to not do it again while in a circle with him. It was still awesome though.
I've noticed a lot more recently that stepping on my strong side shows up in strings a lot more than flip. It's so weird though because there shouldn't be any reason for it to not show up. I can hit any trick flipside that I can hit strong side maybe with the exceptions of whirligig and blurry drifter. But it's not even like those are completely out of reach. Even one of my "recent" sessions was drilling stepping the whole time. Gr.
