a day of dumb sean stuff

Tuesday at work we had some youths that decided it would be fun to skateboard across the roof of my office building. I helped discover them and then watched them flee. For the life of me – I can’t understand skateboarding on the roof of a building. However, I too have done some pretty dumb things in my life so today you get memories from being dumb.

One family I grew up in had 10 kids. Brian and Alan were close to my age and so we occasionally hung out. One day we got the bright idea that I owned a truck that had ropes attached. They owned roller blades. In what seemed like an ingenious plan, they held onto the ropes while I drove around the block going 25 or 30 MPH. This was okay, but the rope allowed for too much sway. (I could be done with the turn, but they could still be going the other way and then the rope would tighten and they would get snapped in line with the truck.) So we decided to forgo the ropes and they just held onto the back of the truck. Things were going fine until two of the wheels on Brian’s right skate started to chip. He tried yelling at us to tell us to slow down, but we were too busy laughing and playing the radio loud to hear him. Brian let go and glided into a parked car. He ended up hurting his legs (bruises and cuts). Of greater importance was we now needed to find a reason for Brian’s chipped wheels because Brian’s dad wouldn’t have liked the idea of us taking him out at 30 MPH holding onto the back of the truck.

My brother and I swam on the same swim team in high school. One time after practice, he loaded my bike into the truck and we went to his work (a donut store). The parking lot of the shopping complex had raised pedestrian parkways. “I bet you I could jump those,” Chad said. “That would be cool,” I responded. So Chad gunned the engine. The first raised walkway was exciting but nothing compared to the second one. Chad swears only two wheels left the road at one time but I swear all four were off. Either way, the truck bucked enough that the bicycle flew out the back. It was so cool. In fact it was so cool that I tried repeating it several times when Chad moved away and I got the truck.

I was a senior in high school when I was in choir (yippee for fluff classes your senior year. I was in Beginning Choir). In my choir was Josh. Josh owned a huge dually 1-ton truck. Near his home was a girl I enjoyed spending time with. I would often go pick her up to go do things. If we had some spare time, I would go by Josh’s house and flip him off. One day he thought we should have some fun and so he got in his truck and gave us chase. Scattered through Fremont are speed bumps. In theory, they are there to slow you down, unless of course you are in a truck, at which point they become ramps to adventure. As Josh “chased” us, I took him through all the neighborhoods I knew had speed bumps. We both did fairly well on them and had a good 45 minutes of fun speeding through the streets of Fremont. I lost him twice before we eventually called it off. The next day in choir he commented on how fun it was but how hard it would have been if either of us were in cars or if either of us cared about the suspensions of our trucks.

In August 2006, on the Saturday before finals, Adaptive Services sponsored one last Adaptive Cycling ride for the semester. We loaded all of the bikes into the back of my truck and headed over to Smith Park in Rexburg. This park is small but has a paved path that runs in a square around the park. On the southern end there is a slight hill. On the last run of the day, I was riding a hankcrank cycle. The way to steer this cycle was to lean left to go left and lean right to go right. This trike did not do sharp turns well. As I came down off of that southern hill, I was going rather fast and I took the right turn. As I came out of the turn, my right back wheel left the ground. Then I started to fishtail. Instead of doing the smart thing and applying the breaks, I chose to try to lean out of the fish tail. I was still going pretty fast as I did the leaning. After the third time of my tires leaving the ground, all of the tires left the ground and I flipped the trike. I landed on my wrist first, breaking it, and then I used my face to slow down. There is a lot more stupidity that goes with this story, but I’ll save that for next week or later than that.