Tuesday, May 22, 2012

I enjoy weekends like that

Weekend Highlight (Non-Roller Derby Division): running into my most favorite professor from college outside his house, and having him remember me, seventeen years after I graduated.

Weekend Highlight (Roller Derby Division): looking at the scoreboard about ten minutes into the bout and seeing the score is 101 - 0.  (The final score was 322-105.)

A close second goes to the afterparty.

Friday, May 18, 2012

bout weekend WAHOO

This bout's kinda cool because it is about ten minutes away from where I went to college (Vassar), so I'm leaving a few hours earlier and gonna take some time and wander around the campus.  I haven't been back in years, so it'll be interesting to see how things have changed since the (gulp) early 90's.  Plus there's a Sonic on the way WAHOO.

Saturday will be my last bout for the season; I took myself off the availability for the final home bout (June 2).  I've been helping out with the fresh meat skaters and they have a scrimmage the last practice before the home bout, and I said I'd skate in that, and I need to be going to practices with them, and Roy has to work the weekend of the bout and someone would need to keep an eye on Maverick, and so on and so on and so forth.  So yeah, this'll be it for me for the season.  (there's a final away bout on June 16, but I have had too many things going on on weekends for the last year now, so I've been cutting back in the last few months).

This season was....weird.  Being out for several months for my knee injury was really frustrating, and I felt like I never really got my mojo back completely.  (That whole away bout thing didn't help either.)   We get, like, a month off, and then start practices again in August for the home season. 

Monday, May 14, 2012

ok, yeah, I'm old, JUST GIVE ME A REMINDER OF IT

Yesterday at practice I was asked to sing to distract the skaters who were doing wall-sits.  Instead of singing, I related a bit of information I had just been reminded of earlier in the day - that Steve Clark, one of the guitarists of Def Leppard, had died twenty-one years ago, in 1991.

"I wasn't born yet in 1991!" one of the new skaters chirped happily as she geared up.

GUH.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

oh this is awesome

So I'm not sure if I've gone into the full story of my helmet(s), so here we go.

When I first first first started playing derby, my helmet was the usual mishmash of stickers and whatnot. 

Helmet 1.0


At some point I decided that I wanted to have a crown painted on my helmet, so I asked one of my teammates to do it for me.
Helmet 1.1

I liked having such a distinct helmet because it was easy to find myself in pictures.  (It also worried me when the occasional "hey we should all have matching helmets because that would look fierce" conversations would bubble up, because MY HELMET IS MY THANG.)

Anyway, I wore that helmet for two seasons.  (During Season #2, another teammate glued little jewels to the points on the crown, to make it bling.) 

Between Season #2 and Season #3, I decided to get a new helmet, which required a new crown.  I had another teammate do it up for me.  This one was much more bling-y.
Helmet 2.0
I liked this one because it was big and colorful and HEY LOOKIT ME.  The only problem was that if I wore a pivot cover, it looked all lumpy and tumor-riffic.

At the end of Season #3, I realized that the lining from my helmet had come completely unglued from the shell of the helmet.  YIPES!  TIME FOR A NEW HELMET!

Since I didn't have a spare helmet to wear while waiting for someone to paint a crown on my helmet, I took matters into my own hands.

Helmet 3.0

Because of my knee injury, I didn't skate much at the start of the season and probably could've had someone paint my helmet fairly early on, but I didn't.  My helmet looked like this pretty much until last week when I asked another teammate to paint it for me. (I wore a spare helmet from the gear bin for about a week.)

And here it is!

Helmet 3.1

I LOVE it.  It's stylized, it's simple, it's elegant, there's no jewels to give me helmet cover tumors.

 (I also have to include this picture - one of the refs and my teammate (who did Helmet 3.1) were playing Draw Something, and the ref's word was "Queen")

This is my Facebook profile picture

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

apparently yesterday was "knock the crap out of kicktoria day" and I missed the memo

Ugh.  It's odd, though - I took some hits that people kept coming up to me later going "are you okay? are you okay?" and I was totally fine, but the one hit that really floored me, the one that I had to take a few seconds to catch my breath and recover from (a full-force hit to my chest that *still* aches a bit over twelve hours later), no one really said anything.

Ah well.