Dog-dana...

By the cutest quirk of luck, the stupid dog boutique at Pets at Home stocks LOADS of pink and black dog-wear...

Oh...my poor poor pooch...

Photoshoot at Scruffy's and Sunday Skating :)

Saturday was our first proper photoshoot at Scruffy Murphy’s. It was great to get together outside practice and posing with our skates was too much fun. At one point we all ventured out into the freezing Birmingham afternoon to get a group shot under the Scruffy’s sign…to the delight of several busfuls of people and a group of guys with camera phones!

We got some excellent shots :) these are just some of them













Then the day after Eve L. Hart made her usual hour-long trawl over to mine to pick me up for practice. It turns out that my mowhawk stops (which I thought I’d almost perfected at our midweek practice a few weeks back) weren’t entirely fluke, but I do need to do a lot of work before they’re anywhere near perfected. As with everything, confidence is the key to pulling it off, and while you have the slightest doubt that you’re not going to turn, and the smallest fear that you’re going to end up on you’re ass, you won’t turn and you will fall on your ass. Just like I did!

Practice rocked though, even if we did get punished for taking ages to kit up. After giving us a stern talking to, Ouija Broad made the stragglers (me included) pull a minute-long plank. God it hurt…but it’s a great way to encourage us to kit up faster in future. I might be able to hold a plank for ages, but there’s no way I’m going to do it if I don’t have to! To warm up we did a five minute speed skate, aiming to get over 20 laps. I’m going to take my clicker with me next time because it’s far too damn hard to skate your fastest, dodging everyone else, pointing out renegade cones AND counting your laps at the same time. I thought I’d only done 25 but Rollin’ Robin had counted 28 and I’d stayed with her the whole time…and I trust her attention span and judgement much better than I trust my own!

We also worked on whips and stealing an assist from your unsuspecting teammates. I'm not too steady on my feet, so sometimes I can give really effective whips, and other times I fall on my bum pulling people to their doom with me. I can use all the practice I can get, but I think that taking your own whip by swinging off the hips and clothes of the girls on your team is much more effective and far more reliable! It might sometimes come as a shock to have your speed suddenly stolen as your jammer wrecks her way through the pack, but I find that at the moment the least intervention I have the better!

Knee falls are another important derby skill, and we spent time working on this too. I always find that it's really easy to do a left knee fall, but my right knee doesn't seem so willing to do its job. I want to fall, I think about the fall, but I just don't pull it off without falling into a dodgy powerslide. I think it's down to my left thigh being abysmally weak compared to my right...with a little work I should be able to pull off a more successful fall. I've already got a lot better at popping straight back up from a left fall without my leg muscles giving out on me...I've got the bouncy madness of aerobics to thank for that! Now I just need to get my left leg as strong and maybe it'll obey me! ha ha

I’m slowly getting better at backwards skating too. It’s really hard to get your head (and your feet) round it, especially when you’re doing it as part of a relay race! It was amazing to see everyone having a go, even our newbies and our first-time skater! It feels totally alien to be rolling backwards though, I just don't get how you're meant to do it! It's SO hard! It’s a confidence thing again, and it’s only down to the fact that I think I can’t do it that I’m falling on my face because I can’t get my backwards-balance! I can’t wait for the weather to warm up more so I can start getting some more practice in outdoors…once a week is not enough skating time…

Love it or hate it...

This morning I treated myself to a champagne breakfast...



Wine on toast…yummy! Perfect Rollergirl cuisine!…it’s a shame Mr Gory didn’t like it…and here was me thinking that it was a really romantic valentine’s gift!

Where's my stuff?!

My life has turned into a neverending wait for a parcel…Friday I waited in most of the day for some furniture to turn up (then had to lug five boxes of very heavy wooden flat pack up the stairs), but part of the delivery was missing so I rearranged delivery and spent all of Tuesday waiting in for the lost parcel. Turns out the delivery man has a VERY short memory and on his return journey he went to the wrong flat and so my parcel was refused and returned to the depot. Yes, it was the same delivery man each time. How stupid?

So I rearranged delivery and spent all day yesterday in too, only to discover (when I got bored of waiting and called the depot) that because my parcel had been refused it’d not only been returned to the depot, but when it got there it was returned back to argoose. At this point I got a bit angry. My anger was rightly placed though, that damn package sat in the depot for two hours after I called them to arrange re-delivery (it took them a LONG time to own up to this fact and I had to do a LOT of shouting)…so I’m now waiting (again) for the depot manager to sort this crap out. I doubt whatever they can do for me won’t make up for two wasted days of sitting in for stuff that wasn’t going to arrive, but an apology would be nice!

Matt’s birthday presents are supposed to be arriving today too but I’m already worrying that something will go wrong and they’ll end up being returned to the other side of the world. I’m so angry with the stupid delivery company that my argos stuff went through…I’ve never had any package go to the wrong house before and now I’m paranoid that it’s just going to happen again and again. Why can’t couriers give you a more specific delivery time so you can get some idea of when you should start worrying with good reason? I’m going slightly insane here…

It’ll arrive as soon as I stop focusing on it…I know it will.

I hope it will…

Irony...

This evening I watched a woman drive past a space at the end of the car park (which I parked in…it was next to Ouija Broad’s…), drive past several other spaces (as I walked behind her...she was going slowly), and then wait for a guy who was only just packing stuff into his car to vacate a space…all so she could park right by the door.

OF THE GYM!

Mmmmm....canpakes....

Happy Shrove Tuesday!
I usually forget that it’s even happening because I’d somehow managed to convince myself that I don’t like pancakes. Surely I was mad! I’m happy to say that I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’ve been making up for it in a very big way.

Matt came home from the supermarket with pancake mix about a week ago, and in true spoilt-brat fashion I had a small tantrum and enlightened him to the fact that pancakes suck. ‘I do NOT like pancakes,’ I told him as I added water, banged the bottle on the counter and proceeded to skake it. ‘And this is why,’ I said, as pancake batter flew around the kitchen from the badly fitting cap.

Anyway…long story short, since the moment I poured the first blob of (lumpy) batter into a lightly oiled pan (or more likely, since I threw that one away and started another, less lumpy one) I’ve developed an insatiable lust for…well…pancakes. And since that moment, I’ve been doing some serious making up for the pancakes that have slipped me by in the past. I’ve gotten through three batches of pancake mix…I’ve had them for breakfast, for dessert, and as a midnight snack. I think I’m in love…





Sod shrove Tuesday…2008 is going to be my year of the pancake. A pancake a day helps me work rest and play, and two or three pancakes is even better!

Thank god for 80s aerobics to work all this batter off my bum. I’m still suffering from horrible ankle blisters from last week (evil trainers of doom) so I’m going to go and treat myself to new ones this afternoon…that’s if I can drag my lardy pancake arse down the hill into town. A feat indeed…

No skating no cry...

I’ve just got back from a pretty disappointing practice. My legs have been protesting from a lack of exercise, so it was quite depressing when we all turned up at the leisure centre to find out they’d double booked our session. Luckily, we’re in possession of silver-tongued rollergirls and refs so not only did we wangle free refreshments, but we’ve secured (we hope! Fingers crossed for no more double bookings) a free practice session too. Niiiice!

So we hung around making nuisances of ourselves and drinking free coffee til we got the motivation to move onto the pub. It was crap not being able to skate (especially since we were outed by cricket, which is quite clearly an outdoors game. Pfft…) but we got to hold an impromptu meeting about future CCR events. I’m not entirely sure how many of ideas are actually legal…to be honest it’s probably more fun planning them than it would be to put them into practice! We did our usual trick of forgetting how many of us there are, and how much noise we’re making and got stares from the more conservative pub-goers. At least we smelt nice! If we’d have hit there after practice it’d have been a different story…we’d probably have cleared tables.

Bootcamp sounds like it was fun…I’m still disappointed that I couldn’t go but I’ve got to admit that the beer, champagne and copious amounts of indian food made up for it in some small way. The Hen Party was ace…still, it would have been nice to have been part of the roadtrip to london, and even better to get to spend hours and hours skating and playing derby. Hey, at least we’ve got a midweek practice this week, otherwise I’d be climbing the walls. I’d probably even be so desperate I’d go skating outdoors and end up with frostbite.

I’m going to the doctors next week to get my finger checked out. A dog bit me and it’s not been sewn up properly (my finger, not the dog) so the bloodflow is pretty nonexistant sometimes, and I’m kind of worried they’ll want to open it back up to tinker about with it. To be fair though, they’re probably such tiny blood vessels that there’d be nothing they can do. I’ll most likely have to wait til it goes black and needs amputation. Oh, I do like to look on the bright side…(you could almost sing that!)

No bootcamp for Gory

I’m sitting here like a mini version of the Hulk…mean and green! As I type this, Rollergirls from all over the UK are making their way to London for the London Roller Girls’ Bootcamp (…I only just noticed the cool animation at the top of their website…) and considering I’m sat here typing this, and not sat on the minibus stealing everyone’s Haribo, it’s kind of a given that I’m not going to be attending.

So instead I’ve been sat here watching the re-run of Dancing on Ice, trying to forget how jealous I am about Boot Camp by making myself jealous that I can’t skate like a ballerina…

My Nan used to love Ice Dancing…it makes me wish I’d taken an interest in it earlier because it’s something that we could have shared. To be honest though, I think it’s taken learning to skate to show me exactly how difficult it is. I can’t even skate backwards at the moment, and I can barely do a 180 turn, so after a year of learning I can begin to appreciate what these people are doing on the ice. They make it look so easy, like I could almost do it myself if I thought about it enough. In my head I lace up my roller skates and glide into the centre of the sports hall like a wheeled butterfly, spinning, pirouetting, performing faultless backwards crossovers and spectacular axle jumps…but reality is a whole other story.

I’d say my style of skating is functional at the moment…utility skating if you will. It gets me round the track but it’s not going to win me any awards any time soon. It’d be amazing to be that good on my skates though. I’ve been teasing myself with the idea of ice skating lessons for the past six months or so, maybe it should be a new year’s resolution?…a month into the new year?

Aerobics take two...

Armed with no less than THREE bottles of powerade (I would breathe this stuff if I could) and dragged by the brutal Hustle’Her, I actually managed to attend aerobics this week (even if it has taken me an age to actually blog this monumentous event). I even managed to be ready on time, which was all the sweeter when Dynomite Bo, Ouija Broad and Chet’s mom all crept in while the rest of us were leaping around like gazelles. Three-legged gazelles!… I say that, but I did quite well. This time round I stood on the floor (and not on my classmates), I grapevined (mostly) in the right direction, and although I got a wicked stitch, there was a distinct lack of chest pain this time round. Now that is progress my friends.

I am surprised to say that I’m really enjoying going…my attention span is absolutely awful so even when I’ve only been doing something for a short while I get impatient. I can’t even watch a half hour TV show without picking up something else to do at the same time. I’ve got to admit, I noticed that there was a clock in the room where we have our class and I did do a bit of clock watching (and maybe I willed it to go a bit faster) but that was when I was preoccupied with my stitch. So yes, normally I’d have given up as soon as it got difficult or I felt uncomfortable, but just like skating, I’m not going to let it beat me! If I’d have done what I wanted to do a year ago and sat on the bench watching, I’d never be where I am now…and I’ve got to remember that in every aspect of my life. Including aerobics!

It’s amazing how Roller Derby can change you for the better…it really does save souls. I’ve always been a bit of a push over, but slowly I’ve learnt to stand up for myself and the things I want, instead of letting other people trample all over my dreams with their own. Quitting the old league was part of standing up for myself. Maybe I'll write about it one day...it'd sure make for interesting reading!