So while I was at my folks' for Thanksgiving, they were showing how they get more channels now that they have a digital TV. They're out of range of cable, so they can't get it, but now every channel has three channels, or something? Some of them are just low-fi broadcasts of the same thing. Anyway, they were idly flipping the channels to show us, because we thought it was weird, and this nature show came on, about a marine rescue group in California.
e:Fi and I were totally riveted, and sat and watched.
The marine rescue center would pick up injured/abandoned/sick seals, sea lions, otters and stuff, and they'd take them in, give them vet care, and feed them up so they could re-release them. (If the animal wouldn't recover enough to be released to the wild, they'd euthanize it, which they did show a couple times, and it was sad. The way these shows are.)

One of the perks of finding a horribly sick/dying/injured animal was that you'd get to name it. The center had themes, usually. One volunteer was naming them all after French artists. Duchamp, Magritte, Degas etc.

One seal, they'd named "Your Mom", because it was really funny to the volunteers to say things like "Your Mom's getting fat!" Then they got another, and named it "Your Sister." At the end of the show, Your Sister was healthy enough (fat) to be released. A volunteer quipped, as the finale, "Your Sister is, once again, wild."
Har har!

Anyway.

So speaking of Facebook (i.e. my last post on here)... My mom is on Facebook.
I can't really explain how weird that is, but there it is. My mom's on Facebook. Really!
Yeah.

Incidentally e:fi had every intention of blogging once she got to Buffalo but it turns out the computer I gave her suddenly needs a new wireless card. It works for everyone else, but whenever she uses it, the Internet dies.
Which makes two computers in this house having connection difficulties, but the Apple geniuses swear our Airport base station is totally fine. ... OK! Whatever!

i am just hung over. so so so hung over. so amazingly hung over. this is the worst hangover i have had since april. that was the worst hang over i ever had in my life. this one is less pukey, less dramatic, but bad nonetheless. on a day like this you have to wonder what you can possibly expect to do with yourself. I don't regret last night, of course, though i do wish I'd not hit my head on a table somehow. I had a lovely time and would not wish to change anything I did. I did make an attempt to drink a great deal of water, so I can't kick myself for forgetting-- I just didn't drink enough water, and wasn't persistent enough in continuing. I didn't actually drink allll that much booze either. Though the boxed wine was probably a mistake, after the um four Jack and Cokes and half a bottle of home-brewed mead.

I am almost ready to try eating food. Earlier I drank a lot lot lot of water, and took two Ibuprofin and chugged more water, and that was a mistake because I promptly upchucked the lot, but I am being more conservative now, and am thinking maybe, maybe maybe I can eat. (It was actually the least unpleasant upchuck ever because it was all just mostly pure water, still slightly colder than body temperature-- I basically just flushed out my tummy. It went out my nose and hardly even stung, the stomach acid was so dilute. Sorry if that's way TMI for some people, but the point I'm trying to make is how astonishingly not gross it was. Cuz believe me I know all about gross. See above re: April.)

So I'm thinking I could take a chance on, say, a bagel. I remember when I was little, if I'd thrown up anytime within the past day my mom wouldn't let me have any dairy products because she said my tummy had to re-grow the bacteria that digest milk, but is that even true? Because I want a little fat to soak up the acid my stomach's making now, and I want it to be cream cheese, but I don't want to make things worse. I have to be better by tomorrow because I have practice.

Speaking of roller derby... of course that's who I was drinking with last night. It was a pretty crazy party. It might even have been crazier than an e:strip party. There certainly was a whole lot of lapdancing anyway. At one point, I was quite drunkenly watching a lap-dancing lesson being given; one of my new teammates had this move she does where she'll do a headstand supporting herself on the dance-ee's thighs, winding up with her legs wrapped around the person's neck. Another teammate was trying to learn it, but was having trouble; I think I fairly accurately assessed the difficulty's source: the teacher was a tiny slip of a thing, and the teachee was what I had formerly considered as such, but by comparison... well, let's just say the larger girl is about five-seven and a whopping one hundred and fifteen pounds. I used to think that a fairly small person, but this new teammate is... well, even smaller.
Our smallest team member now is four feet seven, I might add. She isn't the headstand one, though. The headstand one is probably five feet even and has thighs like my wrists. The four foot seven one is a Pilates instructor and recently survived a pileup in which I landed on her ass-first and rolled off her shoulder-first, crushing her the whole way; I landed really hard on my shoulder and lay there a second, then sat up shrieking "Oh my God, did I kill her?" but she had already bounced up and skated away. This is not a delicate little person, this girl.
Anyway.
I idly wondered, at one point, how someone learns such skills. I mean, how do you learn to give lapdances? Even among close close close friends I won't do it because I just feel too self-conscious that I don't know how. I dunno.

Anyway. I have decided that I need to spice up my look on the track just as much as I've improved my skating, so I'm buying a set of eyeshadows that include blue, black, and silver shades. It's going to be hot.

First bout is the most exciting-- January 3rd. Mark your calendar. It's going to be fucking awesome.

So I'm starting off with awesome photos.
My team had our photos taken this past month and just got the results posted up on the inter-netz for us to look at. One of our team members' boyfriends is an avid photography hobbyist, and has been taking action shots of our bouts for a full season now. He's really quite good, and has gotten some awesome results.
He, on his own, came up with a concept/theme for this season's team photos. Last season, since we're called the Knockouts, we went with a boxing theme and got our photos taken in a boxing gym. It was kind of neat, OK, sure, cute.
Last season there were a lot of complaints that we were the most violent team, that we were thugs and we committed more penalties than other teams. The stats (and reviewing the footage) don't really back that up, but the reputation stands.
So this photographer fellow decided to take that theme and run with it. His concept was "P(r)etty Criminals", and he set up a shot with each of us doing some dastardly deed or other. (He did stipulate that there would be no conventional weapons-- I'm not sure why, but I do know our rivals' photos last season featured all of them holding weapons, so maybe it was in response to that. Or maybe he just thought it would be funnier.)

Anyway, here's mine.

OK, I've uploaded it three times and every time it says "Percent complete: 100" but doesn't put the code into the entry. I've manually put the code in in the past and it never works, so I'm just going to link to the site where the photo's hosted.



Hope that works!

If you page through, you can see everybody's photos. Mine is pretty funny, but I think my favorite one has to be Hyper Bean's. She really enjoyed her photo shoot. It's almost disturbing:


Am I scared of my own teammate?
Yes, a little bit.

I'm also fond of Liquid Courage's shot:

And Holly Lulu's is cute:


The infamous Sweet Pea:

Ah, they're all good; I shouldn't link to all twenty of them. Go and look.

Anyway, we will be playing vs. last season's champions, the Suicidal Saucies, on January 3rd. This will be huge-- we've had a rivalry with them since day one, three years ago now, and have never beaten them. Most seasons we get to face them twice, but this season we will only see them this first time unless both of us wind up in the final bout for the championship. So it's a really important bout.
The Knockouts will have a cheering section led by the Kockouts, a bunch of husbands of skaters and former skaters. Last season members of the Kockouts dressed up as characters from Star Wars. There have been air horns. There have been foam fingers. We're looking forward to seeing them again. Anyone interested in joining the Kockouts, definitely let me know.

The bouts are, as ever, at 7 pm at Rainbow Rink in North Tonawanda (101 Oliver St). I'm not actually positive, but I think we won't be raising ticket prices, which is pretty awesome given that we have regularly sold out in the past. If we do raise them, it wouldn't be by much. (Formerly, $10 advance/$15 door, available online until the day of the bout; we may close online sales earlier this year but I'm not sure. will have all the up-to-date info as well as tickets to buy.)
I do know that the venue has made a number of improvements to better accomodate the sellout crowds-- more restrooms (even if they're outdoors, they're under some cover now), more bleachers, better lighting. So that will be pretty awesome.

I hope to see some peeps there!!!! I am so excited for this season, I can't even stand it. We have a travel team! We have a fourth home team made up of rookies whose maiden bout will be vs. Rochester!! We have new skaters and old skaters and all kinds of awesome stuff!!


I am still hung over, but at least I can eat now. i'm going to bed. It wasn't a total waste of a day; I managed to make carrot ginger soup and address a bunch of Christmas cards. But it was nearly a waste-- I am going to have to not drink much anymore if I am to get all the shit done that I need to. Boo.

***Pre-entry commercial break: TICKETS FOR THE FIRST ROLLER DERBY BOUT OF THE SEASON HAVE GONE ON SALE ONLINE

, ALONG WITH SEASON TICKETS FOR ALL OF THE BOUTS, AND YOU SHOULD BUY THEM BECAUSE I AM AWESOME AND SO ARE MY BITCHES. Thank you, and we now return to your regularly scheduled entry.***

I'm pissed at the thundersnow because the clap of thunder this morning (well, more a roll of thunder-- in my half-waking state I thought it was a basso profundo chord on a pipe organ) scared away Chita, who had been snuggling my face and purring and purring.
So sad.

I am going to be making Christmas cookies today, of at least two kinds. The cookies you roll and cut out have to have their dough refrigerated from anywhere between an hour to overnight. I have two kinds of roll-out cookie dough in the fridge now. One is the kind my mother always made, from Fanny Farmer's Butterscotch Cookies recipe. That dough is tastiest raw, and many happy childhood memories were made eating the scraps left over after cutting cookies out.
The other is Piparkukas, a traditional Latvian cookie that must be rolled out very, very thin so that it is crispy. The dough is very sticky-- there isn't much flour in it, or really much of anything except for spices. The ideal finished piparkuka (Is that the singular? I don't know Latvian) will be a whisper of crispy spiciness that melts into a sweet/savory suggestion in your mouth, and leaves a lingering spicy scent of Christmas about you.
Often when I make them they're too thick, though, because the dough is extremely hard to roll out. It's largely molasses and honey, and if it's warm enough to work, it is sticky and incorrigible. If it's cold enough not to stick, it is also the consistency of brick. I tried to cheat this year-- I spread the still-warm dough (the honey and molasses are boiled to start off with) out between two sheets of wax paper and have put it in the fridge to cool that way. Hopefully I'll be able to roll it out thinner if I start with a sheet instead of a brick.

I'm not too optimistic, however. I've been working out daily all month, because of the roller derby bout on the 3rd. I've missed probably three or four days all month. That's fine, that's good, that's OK-- I am dealing with sore muscles as I get them, and am enjoying the feeling of how strong my body is getting.
But shoveling snow makes for sore muscles. So my triceps are killing me on both sides, and yesterday while I was scrubbing the bathtub I noticed how much weaker I was than normal because I was so sore. It's not much better today.
e:zobar took a turn shoveling, so his arms are like noodles now.
And even e:fi shoveled a bit, and did something to one of her shoulders.

So of the three people in this house, none of us is really in much of a state to wrestle large quantities of obstreporous Latvian cookie dough into thin, meltingly-crispy submission.

Oh well. We're pretty much snowed in, so I haven't much else to do. Except oh yeah, maybe finish my Xmas cards.