Day Sixty One: You Read It Here First

You either know what I did for the circus,
or whatever you can imagine will be more entertaining

That's right. Day Sixty One. We all know what that means, I haven't back dated and I've missed a few days.


Don't get me wrong, I'm shattered as hell, learnt a basketful of new things, had joys, disappointments, a lot of beer, a cake pop and got to use my aprons for the first time since I worked for the circus. 




I've finally become too busy to be convinced taking time out of my other activities to run the blog every day is worthwhile. I expect things to stay this way, beyond my control, until mid-July. By late July I'll probably have a few things backed up that I've been putting off since March to catch up on. So.... who knows when I'll next be swamped by freetime to do as I please. Pretty sure even then that returning to a daily blog will not be close to the top of the list. Maybe eighth. I have a variety of other seemingly disconnected tasks I want to complete first and it's hard enough finding time to take the desk downstairs and resand/varnish it without wondering if that could be counted as "Fitness": yes, carrying a computer desk down/up two flights of stairs by myself is a good workout.

Instead of going through the 'five tasks of Rachel', I'll just touch on the last three days.

Now, one sleeping panda cub just doesn't seem cute enough

Weekends. They're ruining me for the work week. How dare they.

On Friday night I was feeling decidedly uninspired about skating. Not because I didn't want to, but because I didn't want to have my feet fail on me during the weekend - plus I was feeling decidedly like having a nap instead (which seems to be happening a lot lately). I managed to drag my sleepy, uninterested arse to the rink after playing around with the van for a while (seems I may have broken another engine mount. This is not representative of my driving ability that I break one every other year). Public skate was fun times, I met someone from Taupo! I feel a bit like an ignorant schmuck that I didn't know Taupo had a league. But then I'm still new to the intricacies of derby myself, even if I've had a passing acquaintance with it for longer than my skating career. There was a bit of discussion about a Zombie Derby movie, as tempting as it all is this is one of those 'When I have some time' projects, which at the moment runs to a few minutes every other Wednesday, and ten minutes on one in four weekends. Anyway, we had a good time at the rink.


Saturday the ARDL hosted an open scrimmage, which I have to admit was a big learning curve. Logically, a large part of me assumes that a scrimmage like that shouldn't be so different from a game, but I'd be hard pressed to say that there was much in common with what we did that day and what we did vs Swamp City. It's great seeing myself and the team in varied situations, I still have a lot to learn just about me, as well as how my skill and attitude interact with the rest of the team on the track. My only concerns are how much I can really take on board and master at a single time, it's like when I know what I want my feet to do but they don't know how yet... learning how everyone deals with the mental side of the game and how to behave appropriately in the middle of a stressful situation is also key. I can certainly adapt that side a lot quicker than I seem to be able to teach my feet what I want them to do. We had a deconstruction on Sunday and during the downtime at the rink we had a bit of a mess around. Nothing wrong with a little jam skating and 'just for show' whips.

Then we threw a Bitchin' Bingo fundraiser on Saturday night almost straight after the scrimmage. We had a great time, I remembered how to be a kitchen wench in short order, then various other trivial events transpired, like chip throwing and general hilarity.

I still get a little misty eyed about the whole thing - I can't believe it's only been a couple of months, I have a lot of pride in myself that I sucked it up and made the right choice. Part of me thought I wasn't ready, the other part of me was intimidated as all hell, a little star struck and could see the ARDL is where I wanted to be. All the little things like being nice to me, having blue and white as their colours and generally being totally awesome were just bits of icing and candy on top of the cake. 

A little like this, but with more drowning

Sunday just kicked off the same again, training was a bit subdued and more reflective, it had already been a long weekend by Sunday morning. That  afternoon we headed over to Special K's place, lured under the promise of a welcome spa only to find the water areas were due for maintenance, so while we couldn't have a spa we did make an eight person whirlpool in the swimming pool. Next time, we gotta aim for eleven at least. We headed back to the Castle for pizza and a movie, which is great because I was highly capable of sitting and not much else by then.




I'll leave how that impacts on my emotional scars from years gone by at a later point. It's a hard trial getting back into work after a weekend like that, that's enough to deal with right now