Day Eleven
We all got up at 7:00 so we could be at the site in time for the 8am delivery of the Skatelite. In a magnanimous moment, Gordo graciously decided that it was too cold to work, so we could sleep in a little. When Gordo finally returned it was 9:30 or so and he was pretty cold. Grover and I were ready to work but Gordo was having a hard time getting warmed up. Actually, I think he was suffering with separation anxiety from his baby daughter. She’s cute, and was really into him this morning. We had planned on grabbing a bite to eat in order to kill an hour and let it warm up a little. By the time we got Gordo out the door it was 10:30. We stopped off at Harbor Freight to exchange our two cordless drills that we had broken the day before. Gordo didn’t have receipts but they exchanged them anyway as long as he promised not to return anything else. That really happened! Grover was insistent on going out for breakfast, and as a result we didn’t get to the job site until shortly after noon.
It was still super cold. We started working on the second ply and were still having problems with the plywood cracking. We tried several application methods with varying degrees of success. Gordon had made an elaborate timetable for finishing the second ply and all the platforms. The real world decided that his timetable was full of shit. We had two brand new drills, but they had to be charged before we could use them. Birdy, our favorite electric drill from yesterday began to exhibit signs of illness. Grover performed emergency surgery on it but ultimately had to euthanize it.* Gordo is against euthanization, very strongly against it. So with Casey dropping by and only one working drill available, there was a lot of standing around and shivering. Grover’s double extra short attention span wasn’t helpful either. Remember our friend Carl the Ramp Critic? It turns out that he is in charge of the athletes for the Ice Village. Gordo spent most of his day walking back and forth talking with Carl who kept insisting that we had to double up on all of our ribs behind the transitions. It seems that he doesn’t have a grasp on the concept that a one-event ramp is temporary and therefore does not need to be made like one that travels from venue to venue. Carl was stressing Gordon out so much that he didn’t even enjoy testing the ramp to see if it was indeed “mushy” as Carl feared. Without the final ply, the verdict is still out. I suppose we will add some extra bracing just shut Carl the hell up.
So what did we get done today? We put down another third or so of the second ply, raised the final two platforms, and plyed half of the vert’s first layer. We finally got Gordo to agree to buying a second electric drill. We learned that when it’s really cold out, Gordo’s legendary plumber’s butt looks like two angry red salmons in a denim basket. Much to everyone’s amusement, I fell down several times during the day. My lack of dexterity on the ramp means that I should wear full pads during construction as well as when skating. Casey kept trying to change the new wave station to the nu-metal station. He is under the impression that our appreciation of the new wave station has something to do with latent homosexuality. Casey’s dog Ajax likes to attack skateboards. I took a picture out the window of our moving car of a amusing sign. If you want to see what eight grand of Skatelite looks like, take a look at the second picture up top.
When we got home, Gordo ate some pizza and then went to bed at about 8:30.
* Grover’s euthanasia method involved swinging a short bit of cord in a high velocity arc, repeatedly slamming the drill into the frozen asphalt.
Next Day: Rollerblading in the snow.
