norsegirl

This virus is still kicking my ass and I'm finding it may not have had anything to do with Ash after all. People with nothing better to do than sit around writing viruses should all die in the most painful and creative ways the fates can conjure for them. Until this is cleared up posts will be short and I won't be reading anyone else much either. iPod us okay but not the best for long missives.

In other news had a game today and sucked royally. It was like my skates were filled with lead. But at least I managed to look good while having my ass handed to me. I had a cute outfit and so did Georgia. Pics on facebook and I'll post them here too when the lappy is fixed.

Off to comfort G while Jason continues to try things with the lappy.

Had a Rec League roller derby game today. I played for "team pink". It was a wonderful game. Low-stress because I wasn't really invested in the score. We lost by a landslide but I didn't really care. My goals were to keep up, get some good blocks in and have a good time. I succeeded on all counts. I had one GREAT block where I came from the back of the pack and knocked a jammer right out. On several occasions I was in the right place at the right time. It was awesome. I usually feel so useless out there, so this was a nice change. I wasn't like an all-star player or anything, but I didn't make a complete fool of myself.

It was a "closed-door" game so spectators were not invited. Georgia (and Daddy who had to come to watch her) were the only exceptions because of the breast feeding thing. Georgia happily slept through the first half of the game and then woke up and just LOVED watching the second half. Brightly coloured girls going in circles are AWESOME! She was totally silent for the whole thing. She smiled at every roller girl that came up to chat with her, and then babbled in the back of the car all the way home. It was like she was telling us about what she'd just seen. It was super-cute.

In other news, I have started my Ravelympics project... my very first sweater. I am kinda cheating in that I am making it for Georgia. I just don't feel any real desire to make a sweater for myself. Seems like a lot of work for something that might not end up fitting any better than something I could buy. For me I'll stick to hats, scarves, mitts and fun little things.

Any other knitters or crocheters out there, or if you just want to see what I'm working on, feel free to check me out on Ravelry.

It's official, Jason's accepted the position in Austin. Now we just wait for the immigration stuff to go through and off we go. And no, at this point I don't have a date because I have no idea how long this immigration stuff takes.

Our plan at this point is that Jason will go down and I'll go with him for a week to try to find a house. Then I'll come home and make a bit more money and I'll move down with all our stuff when the deal closes (2 months tops). That all depends when the move happens though. If we go in December or later I'm going with him. No way am I staying here during winter all by myself :p I'm going to take a month or two when I get there just to get settled and do any work on the house that needs doing and hopefully the work permit will go through in that time. Then I'll have to start looking for a new career.

Really, other than the weather, Edmonton's been great. I'm especially going to miss E-ville Roller Derby. I went to practice tonight and it was good. I still suck of course, but I hope to improve with a bit more regular practice this month.

Moving is scary. Having to find a house and commit to a purchase that big is ENORMOUSLY scary. But it's a good scary, like getting married. It's scary because you know everything is going to be different and you don't really 100% know how it's going to be different, but at the same time you really want it and you know you're ready for that adventure.

Went to the Calgary Roller Derby "Rookies Rumble" on Saturday with three other roller girls. Skated my little heart out and had a great time, but spent a lot of time in the penalty box (whooopsie, need to work on making sure my hits are legal). Woke up the next morning sore. Strangely, sore in my chest and arms and not feeling any pain at all in my legs, just like last time. I wonder why I seem to use my upper body so much in games and not in practice?

My solution to waking up stiff and sore on Sunday was to do another workout at home that day. The theory was to work and stretch my muscles a bit, get some blood flowing and feel better that way. The end result is that my chest and arms still hurt and because of all the leg lifts and stuff now my bum and legs hurt too. Practice tonight is going to kill me. Speaking of practice, I found out that the Calgary travel team practices 4 days a week!!!!! No wonder Gaia (who will be on X-Weighted on Wednesday) was able to shed the pounds so well. Though I wonder how one can do that and still have a life of any sort? I mean, I love derby and all, but I'm also fond of my husband and dogs, and having clean laundry on occasion is nice too.

My new piercing from last week is looking well at last. It was fine on day one, a little sensitive of course, but it looked healthy. I think I caught a bit of infection half-way through last week though as my ear was very red and hot to the touch. Not gross-infected, but maybe just getting the beginning of trouble. I treated it fairly aggressively with saline, alcohol and polysporin and it seems to have healed up nicely now. It will still be about 3 months before I can change the jewelery and about 6-12 months before it heals completely (apparently cartilage is very slow to heal). I can't quite sleep on that side yet, but it isn't distractingly painful any more at least.

Also, bought tickets to Tina Turner's farewell (again) concert in Toronto for November 13th. So I won't be home for Christmas, but if you want to see me that week in November, the line starts here.

Didn't get a whole lot accomplished this weekend.

Achieved my Nether-ray mount on WoW (not much of a real-world achievement, but made me happy, so there ya go). Died a zillion times in our guild's first Shadow Labs run. Gave up after the 10th or so death on the second boss and decided next week we should try some place a little easier. Did some quests with my husband and he's only two weeks away or so from his dragon mount, which has him all excited. Actually didn't waste too much time in the virtual world.

Saturday I made my breakfast omelete cup things to bring to work this week. Putzed up the recipe and wound up making twice as many as I had intended to make (note to self, when making a half-batch, use 3 eggs, not 6). On the bright side, actually caught Jason (the egg-hater) eating one on Sunday.

Spent most of Saturday watching the "So You Think You Can Dance" marathon of reruns on Much Music (Jason and I both totally love this show) and then watched the finale of "Colin and Justin on the Estate" on HGTV, which was a real eye-opening inspirational show coloured with a bit of crushing reality. It's really interesting watching reality television that actually reflects some reality instead of a bunch of bored, bug-bitten, mud-coated beautiful people lounging around a beach in China for 6 weeks stabbing each other in the back for $1 mil. On the Estate is basically two designers going and spending 8 months working with a ghetto and trying to make it tolerable for the residents. They make some pretty great strides and accomplish some really wonderful things, but they also suffer a whole bunch of set-backs in the process. It was a fascinating show and I would LOVE to see a follow-up a year or two later. It feels like they're fighting a losing battle, but it could be a tremendous turn-around as well.

Ended the evening off playing WoW until 4am. And now we know when the daily quests reset.

Sunday morning woke up with the odd sensation of knowing that the day's WoW quests were already done and as a result didn't even turn the game on all day. Also crawled out of bed shockingly late (unsurprising with the late-night WoWing the night before). Spent the morning (what little was left of it) eating breakfast and watching S1 episode 11 of Rome. How much do I LOVE that series?

Finally got off the couch and showered Sunday at noon. Jason made plans to hang out with a friend so I hung around the house cleaning while we waited for him to come pick Jason up. I then headed out to arrive fashionably late at 2pm for our derby fundraising BBQ. We made a scant $136 on a day's work apparently, which has some girls miffed. Some of them feel it is too much work for that kind of money, and that they could have spent the day doing something much more productive (like sleeping - not making that up, someone actually said it) and that we are making too little money for the effort we're putting in. Seems to me we're making just about what we should. All we do is show up and the store wheels out a table, BBQ, cooler and all the food. It's risk-free, we pay for nothing up-front, and we take 50% of the money we collect. Some of them are upset that we only get 50%. I'm thinking that with no set-up, no clean-up and no risk, that's about right. And I'm willing to say "hey, between the two days we did it, that's $250 or so we didn't have before, and pays for a week's worth of practice space".

Anyone out there have any good ideas for fundraisers? We need to have about $4,000 by November for pre-bout expenses (Hall rental, liquor license, booze, posters etc) so we can hold our game in November against Calgary.

Ended the evening off making apple tarts for the office out of the free apples donated by one of my co-workers, Steve. Interesting making something out of apples other than the ones off Hjalti's tree. These ones were much harder and OMG SOUR!!!! The final product is a sweet-n-sour thing that is rather interesting, though I think I prefer Hjalti's sweet, eatin' apples for my baking. My poor, bent apple corer feels the same way.

Next weekend sister arrives, brunch at Bioware and 4-day weekend! Woo!

In other news, the bruise is much darker and more impressive today than it was when I photographed it, but hurts less.

How is it that I do Roller Derby, a sport where you use your legs to skate, and yet after yesterday's practice I'm only sore from the hips up? My abs are screaming, my shoulders are aching, my rib cage is complaining a bit and my arms are just limp. I obviously need to do more core work in my down-time.

Big old life-update. This got rather winded so behind the cut it goes.
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Today is my 3-month anniversary with E-Ville Roller Derby - wow, I didn't realize how long it had been. I was telling newbies last week that I'd been here a month, month and a half maybe. We had our boot camp last weekend, which was ass-kickingly good. I sucked out and sat on the sidelines in quite a few drills though. I need to work on my endurance.

I'm still learning new stuff and improving, which is good. But I'm not really improving as quickly as I'd like. We instituted a new "no suck" rule. I now have to do 20 push-ups when I say anything negative about myself. In addition to the 20 push-ups we have to do if we say "sorry". We split into teams last night. I LOVE the team I am on. And if I'd been able to pick any girls in the league, the ones I am with are the ones I would have chosen first. In order to make the teams the trainer paired the girls up by skill/style. I was the odd-one-out and went unpaired, but I also ended up on the team that was short one girl, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret that. I also found out I was not among the 12 chosen for the travel team for the July 23rd game against Vancouver, which wasn't a great surprise. There are still 2 spots up for grabs, but I'm not sure I'll get there skill-wise in time to be included. I get the feeling that this is where I should have been after 1 month, not 3. There's a good reason why I'm not improving at the best rate. I have skipped a few practices here and there. I've not done any extra work on my own. If I really want to improve I'll have to start committing more time to it.

On the bright side, being fired from Dell means I have all kinds of time to put towards whatever I like. So far I haven't accomplished a whole lot. I've re-arranged some of the furniture in my living room. I've washed some things that rarely get washed (the guest/camping pillows, couch blankets etc) And have pre-washed some fabric with the intent of finally making my Norse coat. I'd like to re-hang the shelf in my sewing room that fell down on me a month ago (no more drywall screws, need to actually locate the studs and use them). Once that's done I'd like to get some sewing done and maybe get back to the torch. I did get around to making myself a "birthday hat" for June coronet, which was cool. That's something I've been meaning to make for a few years now.

As far as job hunting... I'm still waiting to hear back on some things I applied for when I was still with Dell. I'm keeping my eyes on the city site to see if any city jobs come up. I need to apply for a job with the Children's hospital foundation here. I've got a head-hunter who has proven to be a complete waste of time thus far.

This month's to-do list:
- get the house shiney-clean
- finish the hand-finished linen dress I've been working on for months
- start work on a norse coat for me or Jason, or maybe some new beads
- send out one job application per day at least
- spend the first hour of every day working on my fitness (skating, running or strength)

Am getting stronger on my skates. Last night discovered that the wheels had wiggled loose and that was why my skating was going all to crap. Having fixed that I am back to improving. Actually got up to doing some fairly nice crossover turns in one direction last night. Still crap with the other direction as I never did learn that one, even on rollerblades back in the day. I can turn left real good. Don't ask me to turn right, just don't. Still much work to be done, but it feels good to be improving.

More crud going down with the SCA thing, but I haven't heard about exchequer problems recently and I think I am working closer to an understanding with Manyra. I think it's just important that I not lose sight of the end result here. The end result is that I no longer have a job I hated. The way it came about may not have been ideal, but I can't affect that. The only thing I can affect is how I go forward from here and the only thing I can manage is my feelings about my new non-officer role. I just need to stay positive and not let it bother me. Also working at not holding it against Manyra. She may not have handled it well, but the directions did come from elsewhere, so it's not entirely her fault. Added her back to my friends-list (hi babe!) and we'll talk about it at May Crown. Until then I'll just let it lie.

Was late to work this morning as I tried to figure out how to navigate Western's website to order a transcript. Need the transcript to send in to the CMA people to see if I am qualified to follow up on a slightly different accounting designation. We'll see how that goes...

Still haven't given my resume to a head hunter yet, but have applied to two city jobs and have a line on a good job at Bioware. Keeping my fingers crossed for getting out of Dell Hell soonish.

People have been asking what cool stuff I've found on e-bay. I also have to decide what to wear to the Roller Derby fund-raiser tonight. I'll be serving drinks on skates, and possibly doing a bit of bouting too. The only guidance I've got is "dress to impress". So I thought I'd take some pics and let you guys have a say :)

( Lookin' hot behind the cut )

And during the whole photo shoot, we had sad, bored, loyal beagles:


Well, what outfit does everyone think I should wear to a rock-concert/fund-raiser where I'm a bar-tender and bouting rollergirl?