Dog Food Fetch Quest

Do we make it? Do we get hurt along the way?

Yes to both those questions.

Watch elder millennials have a midlife crisis after obeying their boomer overlords for too long.

This is part 3 of our adventure vloggy video series where we get our isolated socially awkward meat popsicle bodies outside, have strange encounters and get injured. Check out the video and see what I’m talking about. Zoltess’ ankle was still a bit sore from twisting it in the wrong footwear. Something I should back way up and tell you about before I go any further is the differences between longboards and skateboards and it’s not just that one is longer. Stability!

We got fairly comfortable over the winter on the longboards to the point where we started to want to learn some basic tricks. Specifically, we always wanted to be able to ollie.

A few YouTube videos later, a special thanks to Sarah Park-Matott, and a Shove-it became the next to do item for life.

It didn’t seem like any of the basic skateboarding tricks were possible on our current boards. One longboard didn’t even have a tail, it was designed for some down hill sliding (very low on the to do list). My huge dance board was too heavy, had too much traction, tiny tail… I don’t really know, I couldn’t do anything I tried, and I blame the board. It didn’t look like the board used in the videos I was watching. It was like trying to learn how to shoot your first goal with a goalie stick. I could see clearly that something didn’t line up.

When the spring came so did our new boards, an ATV-X, Dinghy Blunt, and Dugout, which I guess are also called Cruisers. Kind of a hybrid – they still had large soft wheels like the longboards but much smaller different shaped boards. Big difference in stability. We realized just how much our first boards were perfect to learn on. That huge dance board rides over lots of rocks and has so much room to stand on. Longboards became our gateway drug to skateboarding. The smaller boards taught us we could easily stand in the wrong spot and that we hadn’t mastered anything. Foot placement became important. I even thought I could land safely without getting injured – I was so wrong. This also made them a ton of fun, it opened us to a bunch of beginner tricks and gave us an infinitely high learning curve to start climbing. I guess more importantly it gave us a learning curve of things we could accomplish today and tomorrow and next week.

I really like the ATV-X Perfecto Racoon, I’m 6’3″, size 12 shoes and somewhere over 200 pounds and I don’t want to be standing on my tippy toes on a tiny board that I worry I will snap in half.  It looked like from the Landyahtz videos that people could easily  do the tricks we wanted to learn on our new boards and they also felt great cruising. This board is 9 inches wide and 32 inches long on 66mm78a lil EZ Hawgs. It requires little effort pushing, has been going over rocks, sticks, and gravel and the possibility of an ollie is there. The first board I started on was the 45” long and 9.25” wide Stratus Watercolor 46. Great to first learn on and made the transition to the smaller board easier. The huge wheelbase makes the board very stable.

Now, that we are all caught up you understand the reason why after months of no issues we suddenly start getting hurt now. We are on less stable boards and trying less stable moves.  If you feel old, if you feel out of shape, if this is something you always wanted to do but were too scared to do it, I highly recommend starting with a longboard. I’m 41 and started at 41. Happy Birthday 40-year-old Millennials! Skateboarding is great exercise and longboards make it easier: less effort pushing, lots of room for bad foot positions, and can ride over some rough terrain. This is what brought us eventually to the shoe problem. Proper skater shoes don’t just manage the wear and tear that would destroy other shoes, they are balanced right, your feet have better traction and sit on the board better. Zoltess had feet sliding around in her shoes, the shoes were sliding around on the board and the board is sliding around on the pavement. Bad combination but perfect for injury. With the right shoes we can now just focus on getting our feet in the right positions and the board on the pavement part. Enough about shoes, this video was about getting Dogfood!

On a side note, Artorius is our Scottish Terrier, and he eats fresh fruit and veggies with most of his crunchy processed fish food. He really likes seaweed and eats pretty much anything. We headed out to the local pet store as a family for a resource run. After spending thousands of hours playing pandemic boardgames and pandemic videos games and watching pandemic movies, being in a pandemic has been surreal. Cruising around on skateboards has always seemed like the right thing to do in a post apocalypse setting. Is that where we are?

I don’t entirely think so. There are problems though and I do want to spend my life learning how to better communicate and address them. In my experience, processes and systems are often blindly followed. People tend to act very robotic when following a system, they believe they are doing their job, but those systems don’t ultimately benefit humans or life. This is the process. I would be fired if I didn’t follow the process. I am paid to say this. The insurance company has withheld paying out insurance, E.I. has withheld E.I, the company has terminated its employees because it predicts profits will be better, and we spend our lives listening to automated messages on hold while people follow their processes. Just doing our jobs.

The most interesting thing about conspiracy theories to me is how organized people imagine things to be. Order is the only real conspiracy.  We are sitting on a rock hurtling through space, and we keep inventing the rules, the whys, and what’s normal.

Most systems I have seen, or have been apart of creating, have been designed with profit and short-term growth as the goal. This has created a culture that has long passed survival, and long passed trying to meet the basic needs of humans, to one of blind exploitation to fulfill wants, greed, the illusion of competition, and numbers for the sake of numbers. “It’s my job” is the response from the lowest employee to the highest CEO. So many people have been born into this thought pattern I don’t think they are aware of how much they have perpetuated the system of their own destruction. One example is a planet of people wasting water to sell each other water while they all run out of water. We collectively poisoned the air and now we will sell the wealthy clean air. The stuff of dystopian sci-fi in the 20th century is occurring now. Ultimately there needs to be a shift in vision and values. There are people that want to save life and people that are ambivalent to its destruction.

Please send us your comments and thoughts on anything you see, thought was interesting or disagree with. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed the video!