Tuesday, June 25, 2013

si teh Tuesday? si teh Tuesday.

I didn't go to practice last night because I'd spent the entire day at work shlepping files from one room to another and back (we are losing our storage room in the building and needed to get about 20 bankers' boxes of files out of it) and I was EXHAUSTED.

Gearin' up and getting excited for ECDX.  Yay! 

Friday, June 21, 2013

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

a link! for you!

Questlove on roller-skating with Prince

I WANT CLEAR ROLLERSKATES THAT LIGHT UP AND LEAVE RAINBOW SPARKS

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

so I'm more sober now

but really the gist of my last post is pretty clear - our bout (we played second) got called at the half because the track was getting treacherous.  (I could've kept going, personally; although I did have problems where I'd hit a player out of bounds and fall myself [at least more than usual].)

Next weekend is ECDX, wheeeee fun!

Sunday, June 16, 2013

I may or may not be a wee bit intoxicated

so we were winning, WINNING I SAY, by like 176 to 3 at the half, THAT IS NOT A TYPO, ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX TO THREE, but the track was really horrible because apparently when everyone showed up this morning the floor was FLOODED (see there's ice under them thar track and they put concrete slabs over it and then we put our sport court on that and usually it's okay but this time the ice melted and evaporated and went up and condensed and rained on the track) and it was crazy slippery and squeaky and whatnot so either the other team forfeited or the refs called it off I'm not really sure which so we only played one half and that really sucked but then there were rum and Diet Cokes and Cards Against Humanity and LIFETIME PRESENTS LUNCHABLES, THE STORY OF DEAD BABIES and there was a ref in a Godzilla costume and everything ended up okay.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

so!

last night was a particularly brutal practice - I fell and landed hard on my elbow (the elbow pads did NOTHING; I have a nice sore lump and bruise right below my left elbow) and just to the left of my tailbone, and I bonked my nose, and my left ring finger bent back the wrong way.

But ability-wise, it was a good night.

Friday, June 7, 2013

sooooooo

expanding upon last night's post:

1. we ended up doing the whole assessment.  We broke up into groups of four, each group with its own off-skates assessor, who watched us doing our THANG.  

2. I basically made myself hold my arms out so that I wouldn't be tempted to use them to get up from my two-knee fall.  It worked.

3. The 27 in 5 never gets easier.  Even with a good pace, hearing "ONE MINUTE LEFT!" when I was on lap 24 still made me panic.  My average speed was 10.03 seconds a lap; yay me.

4. The cones were a bit nerve-wracking, especially when skaters ahead of me missed cones.  I concentrated on not snaking wide and just doing tight, controlled swerving and I aced it.

5. The coach of the A team did the assessment with us.  She's 35 weeks pregnant.  Yeah.

The whole thing ended up taking about an hour and a half, after which we scrimmaged.   We've evolved to the point where the skaters in "our" lineup (we've been skating together pretty much all season) have the hive mind thing working and our personalities mesh and we're awesome together.  (An interesting anecdote: we're all on different home teams.)  So we got to work together and work our magic.

I've become more of a "chaser" this season - the last-ditch effort person who tries to get the jammer one last time before she's out of play.  Because I play derby circa 2009, I try to accomplish this by going for a big hit (which the jammer invariably jukes around and I invariably fall after), but THIS time I made myself not do it, and concentrated on keeping her behind me and slowing down and ZOMFG POSITIONAL BLOCKING and it worked for about 1/4 of the track, at which point the pack caught up to us and she got reabsorbed AW YEAH GO QUEENIE GO QUEENIE.


Thursday, June 6, 2013

so!

assessments went fine.  Did my 27 laps in 4:31 on a fairly full track (there were probably about 15 of us doing it at a time), didn't use my hands on the two-knee falls, weaved through the cones without missing a beat.

Practice night, yay!

So tonight is reassessment night and scrimmage.  They apparently plan to reassess us all in an hour; not sure how that's going to work, unless they're like "hey, we've watched you play and we know you can give whips and pushes and whatnot properly" and they're just going to have us do our 27 in 5 and jumping and weaving and whatnot.

Because our February bout was canceled because we didn't have a venue, they've added a July bout to our schedule.  This is cool, but it also means we really don't have any off-season, since home season practices start up in August (unless they adjust the home season and have it start in October, but I doubt they'll do that).

ECDX is coming up soon; very excited for that!  I think I'm going to buy myself a new set of Radar Diamonds; I've had my current set for about a year and a half and they're definitely starting to get cone-shaped.  Hopefully I won't have the issue finding natural ones like I did last time I went to ECDX.  Other than that, I'm fairly content with my skating equipment. 

Now I have to figure out what bouts to watch!  We'll probably end up getting there late on Friday so we will probably miss that stuff.  Saturday, our A team's first bout is the first one at 10:30am.  I'll wanna see Philly Block Party vs. the New Hampshire Cherry Bombs (the team we're playing at ECDX vs. a team we've already played) at 2:20pm.  Our A team's second bout is at 5:00pm.  Our bout is Sunday at 11:50am, and we'll probably leave shortly after that.  I know I have friends who are competing in fun bouts and I want to see as many of those as I can, but there also needs to be pool time and wandering around looking at stuff that's on sale time and hanging out with friends time. 

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

my coach and my team are awesome

last night was a fairly rough practice - a few people skated off with injuries, I got knocked into someone and my helmet pretty much gave her a black eye, our head ref got smacked in the face by a flailing hand, I ended up Rage Jamming (I jammed, kept getting knocked down, our coach called the jam as soon as I got through the pack, I was like I AM NOT DONE YET and kept going back around through the (now dispersing) pack.  Then I was like I AM GOING TO JAM AGAIN, GODDAMMIT, and it went a little bit better, but I did see some of my teammates making "Oooookayyyyy" faces).

So anyway, practice was weird, and with about an hour left to go, our coach was like "okay, LET'S GO GET ICE CREAM!".

So we did.

Best practice EVAR.

Monday, June 3, 2013

so

yesterday I went for an outdoor skate that ended up being a little over ten miles.

I didn't plan it that way; I took a bunch of back residential roads up to the lake, then skated along the trail by the lake, then realized oh I need to get home too and took two major streets to get back.

Two major hilly streets.

Plow stops FTW, I am tellin' ya.