Berry spinach smoothie

I just realized I have a tag called "I like food" and no actual recipes for derby awesomeness in this blog, so here is a quick and easy one to start with. I like this because it takes literally a minute to throw together and is healthy and tasty.

So, you just start with the following things:

For 1 person:

• 1 banana
• Baby spinach
• Orange juice
• Frozen mixed berries
• Protein powder (optional)

Haha, notice that I didn't put quantities of the things besides banana. That's because you can make this according to taste. Don't like spinach? Fine, put in less! Want more berries? However the hell madam pleases! That said, I usually do a big handful of spinach and maybe a cup of OJ. You can't taste the spinach anyway.

The method is pretty easy. Throw stuff in a blender. But if you use protein powder, put that in somewhere AFTER the juice but before the solid ingredients, or else you get weird powdery floaty chunks which aren't totally great.


And then blend it. Do 10 squats while it blends.

Depending on how much stuff you put in, your smoothie will be somewhere between pink and green. You won't be able to taste the spinach but you're getting a crapload of fresh vegies. And the smoothie is surprisingly filling, because the banana, protein powder and frozen berries thicken it considerably without making it all dairy-y and sludgy. I made one for Killy when she was staying with me and she said it was pretty good and she normally doesn't even eat breakfast.

So there you have it! I usually have one of these on bout days, or when I feel like I need to get energized for doing something (like derby practice or grading a bazillion papers). It is so quick and easy to put together that I've also managed to put a smoothie together while I was having a 30 second break in a workout so that it was ready to drink when I was done. :)

Protip: when you're done, wash the blender and glass right away because it looks like bad poop when you leave it and it dries.

Seasons Beatings, the second year: the night before

So here I am packing seasons beatings again. However, this year I managed to only pack two bags of food, which is equivalent to about this much:

That foil thing is two PB&Banana and two PB, Nutella and Banana sandwiches.

Goliath once said that I take enough food to a bout with me to feed a small village. Heh.

I'm super stoked to be driving up tomorrow to see and skate with all the awesome people I met last year! Yeah! 

(Also, this post was a sneaky way for me to test my liveblogging capacities. Phew!)

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.

All of the rookie fails.

Officially now I have bouted in a full (although not WTFDA sanctioned--that might be the next step) bout. Hooray! And I wasn't munted (well, severely). Hooray! The weather was awesome; a couple of us drove up to Appomattox together and it was nice to get the road tripping experience in as well.

I'll write more about the actual bout in a little while, but this is just a list of some of the things you should NOT do during your first bout.

Another thing that I should do for a bout:
Provide a picture for the program.
(But yay, I'm actually in a program!!)

I guess I didn't really have pre-bout jitters or anything; I did a bit of work earlier in the day, made myself two peanut butter and banana sandwiches, ate a stupid amount of breakfast burrito and packed my gear. We got to the skate place with plenty of time to spare, so there was no rush to get ready or gear up as we went to hit the track.

Then I went on to commit all the rookie mistakes possible in the history of roller derby.

During warmups we were doing the "three people in a wall and a jammer tries to break through the wall" drill and I got elbowed in the face and busted my lip. DURING WARMUPS. The bout hadn't even started yet and I was already bleeding. And the EMTs weren't getting there until right before the bout, so I had to stop warming up and go and wash out my mouth and mouthguard and everything, but there wasn't any ice so I just had a fat lip for the first part of the bout. Interestingly, getting elbowed in the mouth was exactly what happened in my first bout for Season's Beatings too. My prebout ritual is now eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and getting a bloody lip from a teammate. I'm 2 for 2.

Then, when the bout was about to start, I fucked up the rollout by almost plowing into our bench manager.We were doing an intro when we skated around the track in a pack, and when your name was called, you skated a lap, high fiving the other team as you went, and then rejoined the back of the pack.

What normal people did.

Gritz was announcing, and she had a little description of everyone based on their derby names. So mine was something about "cruel and unusual punishment", and then I got very excited and started skating my lap. We were right about to go into turn 3 when I started. I took the corner too fast and almost smashed straight into Smack in the high five line, but she was right in front of the Blackwater team so I could either skate into her, or into the opposing team. I think I made the right choice. :P Still, that was embarassing as fuck. I don't even know how that happened.

What I ended up doing. FML.

I also managed to projectile vomit (well only a little bit) on myself and possibly an opposing blocker in the second half of the bout. I was jamming and back blocked someone. But I backblocked them so hard and because they were taller than me their butt basically went into my stomach.

The drill, or the jam, or whatever.

The downside was that I was full of gatorade and breakfast burrito and bananas and water and clif bars and it was like getting punched in the stomach, and all that predigested food had to go somewhere, so as I sat in the box it came up a little. It wasn't like I was skating and barfing on the track at the same time, but it was enough that I had little chunks of undigested gatorade-clif bars-banana on my wrist guard and in my mouth guard and a bit on my pants. Go me. And I was only in the box for four seconds, so I wasn't feeling too amazing when I got out and finished the jam.

But seriously. Who the fuck does that?! At least I didn't puke on the track. It would have been worse if they had to stop the bout because I had barfed all over the track and it was ruining people's skates.

I think those were the main things that one should probably not do in their first bout. Okay, so maybe I didn't commit ALL of the rookie mistakes in history. I didn't forearms anyone, I didn't multiplayer block anyone, I didn't hit anyone with my elbows (I think). I spent a total of FOUR SECONDS in the box for the entire bout. I'm not sure if that means I wasn't working hard enough or something. Or maybe I was playing very cleanly.

I hope this means I won't be such a derp in my future bouts. I just get a bit overexcited at the prospect of actually bouting. Hopefully that is all (or mostly) out of my system. No pun intended, but you get the idea.

But it was fun, and I learned a lot from it, whee! More on the actual bout later.