Sunday, 6 March 2011

CALLING ALL RUNNERS

If you can get to QLD, Australia, please do, because right now I am very stressed. And when I am stressed, I bake. And when I bake, I mean, I really bake. So now there are approx. 11 million cakes, cupcakes, muffins, cookies, tarts, bread loaves, and pies in my house. They are amazingly delicious, but I cannot eat them all. The guest also cannot eat them all (he's still mostly on an icecream-and-jelly diet while his mouth heals.)

This is where you come in! I'm rostered off for a while, so if you happen to be in Queensland, I can feed you. Since it's the season and the river is nicely full, I can also teach you useful things like how to climb eucalypts, how to catch yabbies without losing one finger per capture, how to dispose of stolen cars/bodies/pitchblende, and even, potentially, how to make various illegal but useful supplies. I'm just saying.

Seriously, swing by. Not only do I have free baked goods, I have an awful lot of BWS stock that needs drinking.

lost some time yesterday, but doing okay now


This charming thing showed up outside my house today! It has been, err, altered in the ways you'd expect.

This is very strange, because while the old man hasn't shown up, several unpleasant pieces of body horror have started to make themselves manifest. My calves, for instance, have gotten longer. By about 10cm so far. I'm assuming this is something to do with the old man. Honey, I'm 30-something divorcee. Not only am I far too old for a growth spurt, but the dead animals and teleportations are quite enough to impress me.  A+ for effort, but kindly settle down. 

(Though on the plus side, I'm losing weight with a speed usually associated with crystal meth use or multiple organ failure. I haven't looked this good in a while. The old man may brutally murder us all, but at least I will leave a fantastic corpse.)

My guest is quite sick--I think there's an infection in some of his injuries. His teeth have gotten some attention and are looking a lot better now, but there's not a lot of ways to explain what happened to his fingers without getting asked questions we'd rather not answer. I've got a friend who can patch him up some, but what we really need is someone planning a ram raid.


Friday, 25 February 2011

I was in the CBD this evening. I looked at my phone, it said 5:54, and when I looked up I was in a forest. I don't know where the forest was, at a guess I'd say Canungra because there was a lot of the fucked up malevolent vegetation they get out that way before. There were... Bags. I think you know what I mean.

Looked down at my phone, 5:56. Looked up. Back on the CBD as if I'd never been gone.

But I know I was gone.

I also know that the old man is not here. I cannot see him. Inky cannot see him. He has not shown up in photos or video and believe me we are taking a lot of those.

He is not here.

He is not here.

although if he is here it would explain something about mt current... state of being.

And Ava's still missing. I don't want to tell Inky yet. It'd break his heart. So shhhhh nonexistent audience. Sh.

Thursday, 24 February 2011

Odd.

Constant storms, awful static on every phone, radio, TV, etc. in the neighbourhood, and no Internet access until I get 11km or more away from my house... but neither hide nor hair of the old man. My guest's doing well, his hand is fucked but the dentist might be able to do something for his teeth.

There is... other stuff too. Suffice to say something REALLY FUCKING WEIRD happened to me today. I think we might need help.

Proper status update when I can get to a real computer.

Monday, 21 February 2011

crisis averted

Sorry I haven't been around lately, but I have a new job. It's even in the field I want to work in! I've been buried under a mountain of paperwork, though. Now that the worst is over hopefully I can get back to updating here...

I have a friend from down south staying with me. I'm sure some of you know him. The poor kid lost some teeth recently, so I'm stockpiling icecream and looking for bulk-billing dentists.

In other news, I've definitely got some of my skills back--this is what I did to K's leg at training the other day. :D FUCK YES ROLLER DERBY. It keeps me young.
We have a very serious problem.

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

that most elusive of creatures, the job that doesn't suck

I'm a grown-up with a post-graduate qualification. I have been reduced to applying for jobs at Woolworths, Liquor Land, and the local sex shop.

FML.

Sunday, 13 February 2011

gasp! sunlight!

We had a whole day of sun today! It was amazing. The last time we had any sun was the day I burned my shoulders to a crisp, and even that was only for a couple of hours. Today we had light from sunup to sundown. Beautiful.

Naturally, I had to go for a nice long skate to celebrate (I remembered to bring my sunscreen this time!)



Beautiful day on the bayside.


You know why the beach is closed? Because the flood washed a fuckload of stonefish into the shallows. You can't see them--as the name suggests, they look exactly like normal rocks--and if you step on them and don't immediately receive CPR followed by advanced life support, you die! Charming beasties. Oh, Australia.



As much as I complain I do actually love this country quite a lot.

coaches are bastards

Q: Why do derby girls wear kneesocks?
A: To hide the strapping tape.



Like the perfect ballet dancer, the perfect rollergirl is a mythical beast. The human body is not meant to bend and stretch in the ways we do. A coach told me I would not be allowed to skate if I didn't get the pain in my legs checked out by a physio, and the physio opined that I'm a few steps away from giving myself a stress fracture. I have been informed I should "take it easy" for a little while.

...yeah good luck with that.

(Yes, I have a tattoo on my foot. I have many tattoos.)

Friday, 11 February 2011

well i knew this was gonna suck

Shin splints. Ow, ow, ow...

The worst part is that I know exactly what causes them. There's a pair of hills I skate up every single day that are... not hugely steep, but very long, and my skating stride is not good for them. Most derby girls have a speedskater-esque stride, pushing straight out to the sides. Mine is much closer to an artistic/figure skater stride, pushing behind with a twist at the end for more push. It's effective on the flat and gives me a lot of maneuverability (very handy, given my major strengths as a blocker are my big dramatic sweeps and positional blocking) but when pushing up the hills the twist causes intense stabbing pain down the inside of my tibias. Trying to stretch it out is nigh-impossible, though I've had some success via enlisting other people to lean their full bodyweight onto my feet while I do it.

At least I can actually see progress now. I do this skate nightly, usually with at least a couple other people. When I was first starting out, I asked around my league for people who might want to come with me... only the people who wanted to come were VV and M, a couple (a jammer and a ref, their forbidden love is epic) who are super fit, super fast, and heavily into extreme sports. VV can sprint the bridge while pushing their baby in a pram they had made special for this purpose--the whole rig weighs about 30 kilos now, an amount that will only increase as Derby Baby grows.The other person who comes along, though not as regularly, is J--she's also a jammer, and I'm pretty sure she was a pro speed skater or something for a while. Again, crazily fit. Other people come along sometimes, but again, most of them are super fit (most people who are at my level are too intimidated to come along, I think.)


L-R: VV, M, Derby Baby, and J.

(Err, the reason I'm going by acronyms and not mentioning specific places or teams or leagues is because I have a bad habit of picking up internet stalkers every time I make myself even a little bit identifiable. Hence why all the pictures on this blog are taken with a shitty cameraphone, with crap lighting--this one was taken in the glow of J's headlights.)

But I am improving. I know this, because the first time I did the skate I couldn't keep up at all, I was gasping for air the whole way, and I wanted to lay down and die at the end. Tonight I kept up the whole way except for a little bit near the end, and even managed to talk instead of panting my way through it. All this after ten skates! It's certainly good motivation to keep going (and watching VV setting an insane pace while pushing Derby Baby is certainly motivation to push my own limits pretty hard.)

I just wish my damn shins would take the message... this bullshit is getting old.