Rebel Girl

So this is popping up on the interwebs today. It's Estro Jen, being badass as usual.

Holy crap. I get so nervous with outdoor skating, but this looks TOTALLY awesome. I wish I could do like 10% of the stuff she does in this video. I have to admit that I do find it a bit cringeworthy when she's skating all like this without pads on, but it's nice to see that sometimes even the superstars still stack on sidewalks though. :)

Happy Friday!

Glitter everywhere

So, the league has a monthly meeting, in which they recognize a "member of the month". And at this month's meeting, it was me!

Again, getting this was a WAT moment.

I'm not good with stuff like this so I probably wasn't even paying attention when they announced it and then if I hadn't already been sitting on the ground at the meeting, I probably would have fallen off my chair. Apparently I've been improving a lot, and I have a good attitude and am willing to learn. Yay me! (Also, Bettie said that if I shit glitter and rainbows it is with a degree of cynicism. Heh.)

I do feel very humbled by the acknowledgement, though. In previous months the people who win this are people that put tons of time and effort into the league. That said, I feel like I have been learning a lot in the last few months (although knowing when to apply it can sometimes be harder since it's like I KNOW what I should do but my body doesn't know how to do it in time, or I realize like 2 seconds after the fact that I should have done something else, or something dumb like that). This blog helps--it's like I can take notes on the stuff that I am learning to help keep it in my brain.

Everything's coming up Milhouse!

Save your point!

Here's one thing that I learned about blocking if you're not doing a 4-wall (i.e. in a straight line). Suppose you're all rushing to the front of the pack to save your point. How should you go about that?


To illustrate this, suppose the yellow jammer is coming up to the blockers (as seen below):

You would probably want your weakest blockers (2 and 3) to be furthest up front. Why? In virtue of being the weakest blockers, they are the most likely to get sucked back into the pack. So you want to keep them in the pack, but as far away as possible from the opposing jammer, who would get their point. (And I guess you'd also want them as far away from the opposing blockers, who might goat them. But of course, this should all be done while still maintaining the pack.)

Of the two of those, you might put the weakest one in Blocker 3's position, so at least 2 can hold the inside line (with B1 if necessary). Plus it would take the jammer more energy to get to the outside past B3. 

This would entail that you also leave your strongest blocker (Blocker 1) in the back, and if necessary they can tractor-trailer off the frontmost blockers, to hold the jammer in the pack and stop her getting the points of all three blockers.



This probably all sounds really obvious in retrospect, but sometimes I need obvious things explained to me to help the light bulb go on!

A very derby weekend

So two weekends ago was very derby-eventful:

Hehe, Mouse with a mouse. I am so funny sometimes.
(Photo: Bettie Lockdown)

Thursday was the league's Trunk or Treat at the skate rink. Basically all this means is we do Halloweeny stuff and give out candy to the local kids. I can't say that this event is a great success, since there's usually a godawful low turnout of children (well, the rink is kinda far away from everything really), but I got to eat a shit load of candy bars and pixie sticks. And I revived the pikachu outfit but this time it was family friendly and I was sober (but full of sugar).

Halloween is also the anniversary of my munty hand injuries. One year later, my fingers are still slightly crooked and still require physical therapy. Good times.

Friday was a party at Pumpkin's house. Pumpkin is my Team Pie collaborator here at NRV. She is super artsy and makes awesome food. So a party at hers means a shit load of awesome food and lots of nice homemade arts and crafts things. A bunch of people from the league showed up (in costume!!) and I learned about some awesome American cultural practices like this totally INSANE game where you wear oven mitts and punch open boxes (yes, WTF!) and then we did things like drink a lot of booze and play spooky bingo.

Arrak-Kiss and I wanted to play a geography game where people would have to list the states in Australia (given that I get shit for not knowing where ANYTHING is in the US, I thought it'd be nice to reciprocate), but we had maps of Australia and Canada and I didn't even know Canada looked like how it did until someone pointed out that I was looking at a map of Canada. MEGA FAIL. :P But it was a super fun night, yay.

Okay, seriously, how the fuck was I supposed to know? :P

Then Saturday was pre-bout day! The B-team had a bout out in WV, and a few of us decided to take Beth's RV and go camping the night before. Hell, it was more like GLAMping--this RV is the fucking shit. It was super fancy and had a TV with cable and a fancy kitchen and oven and running water and everything. It was seriously good fun and an awesome team bonding experience.

FANCY SHIZ YO! (Note presence of TV)

And we got to have fire-roasted bananas and smores for breakfast the next day! How fucking fancypants is that, really!

Fucking breakfast of champions!
(Probably not really, because too much chocolate = crash)

And finally, Sunday was bout day! We had a lazy morning (complete with smores--see above), showered, played with some of the native wildlife (well, some of us wanted to throw grasshoppers in to the fire... :/), then we packed up the RV, and then headed over to the Civic Center in Charleston for some bout prep. There's an entry about it here, but this was basically the pinnacle of an awesomely derbylicious weekend. Yeah. That felt good.

Bout v Chemical Valley

(I know there was a photographer at the bout, but I haven't found any photos yet, so I haven't posted them. Plus--as you'll see--chances are that most of them involve me getting my ass kicked or my face punched in.)

So our last bout of the season was a B-team bout against Chemical Valley in Charleston, WV.

Due to some previous stupid shit, our bench was much, much shorter than we had anticipated. We played with only nine skaters, which meant that there were a lot of back-to-back jams for people. Lindy and I were primarily jammers, so we went in every second jam, with Ape occasionally coming in as a relief jammer when we got too buggered.

And hell did I get buggered. First of all, I was told to be in the first jam of the bout, and I am REALLY not good with that. I usually take a while in the bout to get my head in the right space, so being told I was not only jamming in the first jam of the bout but also doing that slow-mo demo jam before hand was seriously like a deer-in-the-headlights moment for me. I was nervous about fucking up the demo jam, hahaha. Ugh. I hate all that stupid winding-up-to-the-bout stuff that happens, with intros/national anthem/demo bout stuff. I just want to start skating dammit!

Lovely rink rash from sliding on the concrete, or is that
just from someone's velcro? I don't even know anymore.

But when that happened, shit was tough. The first two jams CVRG broke first and got lead, so we didn't get any points on the board until the third jam when I got lead jammer and put five points on. Then it was a slow crawl up the scoreboard, but at the cost of getting seriously pummelled. I don't know why but my ankles and shins were super killing me (I think it was playing on concrete and banging my toe stops on it when I was running, or something?) and as I got tired, I got stupid and sloppy. In fact, at one point I cut track, got sent to the box, came out (the other jammer got sent to the box), cut track again, got sent to the box AGAIN, then the next jam started when I had 0.16 seconds left on the box so I came out and immediately backblocked the shit out of someone, then got sent to the box AGAIN. I was sent to the box THREE times in two jams. How fucking embarrassing. UGH. I wanted to punch myself in the face.

But after all that time out I got my shit together and didn't have any more penalties for the entire game. Yay. And I didn't need to punch myself in the face because my face (and the rest of me) was suitably tenderized by CVRG. They have a pretty big team, so my face was a prime target for elbows, fists and shoulders. Surprisingly, I didn't get a bloody lip this time, but I did get elbows to the eye, and shoulder blocked so hard in the face I had someone's number on my cheeks. I got at least three people boxed for high blocks. I also stopped counting how many times I got hit in the face after about six. :P

Lovely face bruise, complete with blood pooling.

The best one was an elbow to the meaty part between my cheek (like the bottom of my eye socket) and my eyelid. Apparently the refs were going to make that an ejection but then they rescinded it. :/ But I got ice on it and after a while my field of vision got a bit obscured by puffy eye meat. Lovely. I took the first four jams of  the second period off, while I was trying to sort out my shit. But once I had had a bit of a rest, I did feel much better going in. We racked up a few more points in the second period but didn't end up winning. No biggie though.

The score differential was so much that I don't think we really cared. On the B team we don't get to do a lot of bouts, so I think most of us were just super stoked to be bouting at all. It's hard to get practical bout experience if you're not an A team or bridge skater, so being able to have our own bout (with some A teamers helping us out of course) was a very exciting experience. And there aren't really that many just B team skaters, so sometimes it doesn't feel like we get a lot of bout time, or bouting experiences. So I think we just wanted to get out there and skate, and we really did. We busted our asses out there and tried our hardest, and it showed. We were still learning, and it was still fun for us even if we got our asses handed to us on a plate. We didn't care about that.

Oh, but this was the best bit:

The mug was actually full of Kit Kats,
but we ate them on the ride home in the RV.

Seriously. I vaguely heard them announce it after the bout and I was just like, "WAT" until somebody (Psycho? Shilo?) told me to actually go up there to get my award. Haha. I'm so dumb. The cynnical part of me wants to say that it was because CVRG felt bad for punching me in the face too many times. :P But whatever it was, this was a seriously humbling experience. I totally never expected anything like this because all I wanted to do was jam (and not get pummelled too much).

But yeah, hooray. :) And that's the end of our season!

Happy NSOvember!

If this is what they say beforehand, they actually do!

Yep. So somehow it's sprung up that November is the month in which we celebrate those unsung heroes of derby, the nonskating officials. We usually take their efforts for granted, but NSOvember is about changing that!

Okay, so I've NSOed a bit in a couple of different positions and THAT SHIT IS HARD. You're doing some realtime work, and how you perform affects the overall quality of the bout. Like, when I had to penalty track and do IWB, you have a set number of tasks that you have to do within seconds, really. Or when I did jam timing, you're responsible for how long the bout goes for, and that could affect which way the score goes. And your brain has to be switched on the WHOLE time. And, unlike skaters, you don't get breaks between jams--you spend those 30 seconds doing other work. And then half time is spent doing work. It's actually surprisingly tough.

So, props to you, NSOs. Everyone knows that it takes an army of NSOs to run a bout. We literally would not be able to do derby without your contribution.