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.

Team Pie revival!

We had the derby prom last night (which I'll write a report about soon) but one of the awesomest things to come out of it was the fact that Pumpkin told me she read this blog, and then asked if I wanted to start doing Team Pie at NRV.

I think I need this shirt.

Or maybe I should also get this shirt and then
I can use them like scrimmage shirts.

HELLS YES! I love Team Pie, but the kicker here is we're going to make our own pies (or maybe baked goods generally) and bring them to practice instead of going to McDonald's for their pies, even those pies are deep fried and like 2 for a dollar. The idea of homemade pie is making me hungry already.

YAY TEAM PIE! I am excite.

Goodbye Team Pie

Last Tuesday I was too munted to skate, but I went afterwards for some hanging out and possible carpark goon and shennanigans. However, it was rainy so we relocated to McShits for one last team pie. Yay!

ALL OF THE FOOD. NOM.

I don't know if Team Pie will still be around after I leave, since at some point we all realised that Team Pie was pretty much us stuffing our faces and tripling our appropriate daily caloric intake. Also, we met a lot of really weird people at Maccas. Like, REALLY weird. There was a guy who claimed to be waiting for a bus and then ranted to us about immigration for an hour, and this other dude who friended Rubi on facebook and had all these guns in his profile picture or something and stalked one of her other friends. I think that's where the term "Roller Derpy" came from, to address those people.

Anyway, so we had one last Team Pie. Maybe if I do Team Pie in the US it won't be so bad, because there are all kinds of crazy ass awesome pies in the US, like cherry and strawberry rhubarb and lemon meringue and key lime and blackberry and whatever, so maybe when I move to Virginia I won't have to Team Pie at McDonalds and people will actually bring pies to training. That would be fucking awesome. But for now this will have to do:

This was the last pie in the pie warmer when we got there.
Then they had to make like 20 more pies or we would have flipped some tables.

Plus the people who are on Team Pie are pretty fucking amazing. Yay.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Not my biceps (yet).

I’ve been skating for about 4-5 months now. At first it was just once a week (an hour on Sundays), but now I have a regime of two on-skates training sessions and one off-skates fitness session per week. The two on-skate ones are two hours each, plus one has a half-hour of light off-skate fitness. The actual off-skate fitness session is an hour of strength and core work, agility and endurance drills. We do box jumps (hilarious because I am the shortest person in the league and I have to jump boxes that are up to my thighs, and those same boxes are mid-shin for some people), kettlebell workouts (two-handed swings, weird Turkish getup things), ladder runs and a shit load of squats. Pretty much it’s 10 reps of each, in a circuit. Then, there are sit ups, front/side/back planks, push ups, lunges, sprints and god knows what else. Oh, and then on Friday I deadlifted my own body weight. Fuck yeah. And my arms aren't hurting anymore now, either.

One thing that I have noticed is that my body is changing. Not in the pubescent “I’m growing boobs” sense but in the sense that I am actually developing muscles. Or rather, I am getting back the muscles I used to have from serious-hockey-playing days. That’s a welcome return. My thighs are pretty fucking beefy, relative to the rest of my body. My ass is less flabby and bony, and more firm, according to unspecified sources (woohoo, derby booty). I still have stupid T-Rex arms, but doing more weights and push ups will fix that. I think I’m currently the heaviest I’ve ever been (barring poor eating habits at the end of high school due to exam stress), but I’m okay with that because it’s mostly muscle.

And today I saw that I have lines on my back. Like, tone lines, fuck yeah. I would like to get some of those on my front so I don’t have a beer gut. I often measure the amount of fat I have on my stomach by scrunching the fat and skin around my belly button and seeing how big of a butt shape I can make it go in. I know that’s gross, but I was inspired when I saw it once on an episode of Jerry Springer years ago, so go figure. (By the way, I really fucking miss that show.) Happily, the gut-butt I can make now is substantially smaller than it was six months ago. Fuck yeah.

Welcome to Team Pie, where there are at least 1.3 pies per person.

My metabolism is also going kind of crazy. After I skate I am a fucking eating machine. I can inhale a burger and fries like nobody’s business, and after our weeknight skate sessions we sometimes have Team Pie night, which is a bunch of us hanging out in McDonalds and devouring a fuck ton of pies and burgers and attracting the attention and ire of weirdos. Last week at Team Pie I ate three burgers, two things of medium fries, two things of medium Fanta (I hate coke) and half a pie. Fuck. That’s actually kind of disgusting. Plus if Team Pie is a weekly event (which it has been the past month), it’ll soon become Team Bowel Cancer. This week I skipped Team Pie for a slightly healthier option (oven bake fish, oven bake fries, panfried asparagus, chocolate milk). I think it’s about the same volume of food, but I actually feel better the next day about it (both in terms of diminished sluggishness and guilt). If I can eat well and continue working out as much and as hard as I am now, I’m kind of excited to see what my body will look like in another 6 months.

Quodpot Update

On Saturday we had that quodpot game (that I mentioned in this entry) against the Uni Dragons. The game itself wasn’t really that important (and that’s not because we lost 3-1), but holy shit can we really live up to the derby girl stereotype.

Not a sweatshop.

But let’s start a bit before that. So, despite the fact that quodpot was a 5-minute game, I think we’ve put in a total of at least 10 hours of effort into things like procuring warpaint, shopping for boutfits, planning and strategy, painting shirts, making team pie and general awesomeness. On the Tuesday before, a couple of us scoured factory outlets and sex shops for appropriate things to make boutfits out of. I don’t know when things from sex shops would ever be “appropriate” in non-sexual contexts, but here you go. Fishnets, frilly knickers, tutus and plaid miniskirts and hotpants were on the agenda (I don’t think we actually found any hotpants in the sex stores, wtf). Then on Thursday, I had to submit the names of the team to the HPC people, and they thought what we had come up with was pretty hilarious. Yay. Then on Friday, after fitness training, I had the quodpot ladies come over and we painted our shirts and ate pie and generally had a fantastic time.

Fuck yeah, homemade strawberry pie.

And then Saturday we basically rocked up two hours early to get our boutfits and warpaint on. Most people did the football-style black/red stripes across their cheekbones, but I opted for a big fat black vertical streak over one eye. In retrospect it just looked like I had hair over my face like an emo kid, so maybe next time I’ll try it in red. Junky brought her kid and we warpainted him too. And then walking out onto the field was seriously awesome. The reaction we got was fantastic, from both the HPC and other random people like parents and announcers and the reporters from the uni newspaper. The only exception was at one point when a little boy saw my shirt and asked his mum what a “golden snatch” was. Titter.

Fuck yeah, Smashkaban. (Photo: Rachel White)

We had our own rollout too! I gave the announcer person our HP Derby names and she read them out as we ran onto the field. She stumbled over “Whore Crux”. Actually, what’s with so many HP things that can be punnified into including the word “whore”? Like, really. Uni Dragons had something lame like “Player 1, Player 2, etc.” kind of thing. So, before we played quodpot, we totally won on awesomeness points there. And we looked a fucking lot better than they did.

The match itself was kind of tough. We had a good strategy I think, but I just couldn’t hipcheck this beefy dragon boating boy who was marking me. I tried and I would just bounce off him. He was seriously about twice my size. Juking worked really well, however, and I managed to get a quodpot (is that what the water balloon thing is called?) into the bucket by just twisting around him and then running like hell. Haha. My only regret was not smashing more water balloons onto the Uni Dragon guys when it became clear that we weren’t going to win. That would have been much more derby girl-esque to do methinks.

Oh noes, I am being chased by a beefy guy. (Photo: Rachel White)

But it was a good day. We got heaps of great publicity for the league, and we’ve had people contact us and want to join on account of our presence on Saturday. And we got to strengthen our ties with other university clubs, so maybe we’ll get to do more inter-club things like that. We also invited the HP people to skate with us too. I suppose quidditch on wheels is pretty close to roller hockey.

Oh yeah and then Hufflepuff won. Fuck yeah.

Here's an awesome photo montage video thing that Eleri did. I can't embed it because I don't know how to, and blogger only gives me the option to use YouTube. Boo.