"Don't drink, don't smoke ... what do you do?"

I've been a little behind schedule with the posts. Of course I know, in order to maintain my readership (which may be up to 7 by now), I need to update regularly. But I get busy, you know?

Hopefully soon I'll post some photos of my annual birthday walk around the monuments, but I'm sort of hoping that Soung will send me a few of the pictures she grabbed.

As for now, and sorry to post something about skateboarding again, but I'm just super excited...
My girlfriend bought me a new board for my birthday, and I finally got to set it all up tonight with trucks, wheels, griptape, etc. I even managed to skate it down the street for a bit. Attached is a photo.
It's a Welcome deck.

Click for a larger view. It's totally worth it.

After skating a Scum board that I really liked, and since I grew up riding a series of Luceros, I really wanted a board shaped by Paul Shmitt, and I selected this Adam Garuda model for the shape alone. Since I'm well out of the loop on current skaters, I've never heard of anyone named Adam Garuda, so before Erin bought it, I had to do some Internet searches on that name to make sure that this Adam Garuda person wasn't a miserable piece of doo-doo. For all I knew, he could've been some sexist, or racist, or some guy who lights farts... and I wouldn't want to support that. There's a lot of that in the world of skateboarding, and I'm not trying to support any of it.
So I searched the name and found nothing. I mean, I found nothing about a guy named Adam Garuda.
So I searched Garuda and found out that it's the name of a mythical bird/human-like creature from Hindi culture. Cool.
Then I looked a bit more closely at the graphics and realized that the Adam is supposed to be Adam Ant, and he's riding on on the back of this Garuda. Unbelievable. The graphics magically 180'd from the ugliest I'd ever seen into the coolest I'd ever seen.

Alright. I've got a ton to draw tonight for a new Taffety Poster.
More later.