sparkle j dot com

Let it be known: Foxie is now an Old Money Honey!

I was notified of my team at the meeting on Tuesday. So, woo hoo! I’m a honey! Yay! I’m so excited to be on a team. For serious.

I didn’t get to do much at practice tonight, though. I keep falling on the same spot and now my thass (thigh/arse) is all jacked up. Seriously, it looks like I have a third cheek. Or maybe an alien growing out of my leg. Either way, it’s really nasty looking. It was thought to be hoovey of me to not do contact this evening. So I just skated around and did squats and what not. I fell pretty hard last week, right on my thass/hip region and it swelled up almost immediately. Then I fell on it again on Sunday. And then again tonight. During warm ups, no less. I’ve been icing it, but I think I need an ace bandage to 1) hold the ice pack on, and 2) keep that weird alien in check.

Purchasing padded shorts is on the agenda, indeed. I didn’t see any at the shop that I thought would be good; they were way too bulky and I thought would just get in the way. The ones I want are a bit sleeker and fit better under clothes.

Thanks to the Bohninator, MK, and RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr who came out to the dance party this evening. It was pretty fun. JeT wasn’t feeling well, so we left early (but really only a half hour earlier than we had intended to leave). Thanks so much for coming out and supporting your local roller girls! And MK? I think Trophy did a good job trying to recruit you. Are you going to wuss out? Like I’ve been telling everyone: I seriously think anyone who wants to can do this, it’s just a matter of working really hard and trying your best. Start going to a local rink and skating during an open skate time or something. You can totally do it! That goes for you, too, MO! The off season is the best time to join, so if you start working out now, you’ll definitely be ready sooner than later.

Ok, getting off recruiting soap box now. I need to get to bed. I think Hahvahd would like me to at least be marginally coherent tomorrow.

I do not have a fractured rib. Just inflamed cartilage. Whenever I try to tell people about it, I invariably say “inflamed cleavage” which is not quite the same thing.

Saw the Yarn Harlot at WEBS on the 27th of April, and it was way fun. Not really many fun stories, though. (I should clarify: Stephanie had plenty of great things to say; I just don’t have any good stories about the day.) It was just a really good day out with friends. I met up with Andrea and Bill for the talk, and Blake joined us for food and beer at the Northampton Brewing Company. I barely bought anything, and had to scrounge to find a project to bring with me. I may have to relinquish my knitter status if my yarny dry spell doesn’t improve.

JeT and I went out to western MA Friday night to celebrate the arrival of May and springtime fun with our morris dancing fiends, Blake and Sarah. We came home Saturday evening. It was cold and rainy, but super fun times. Besides, with umbrellas like ours, rainy times are still fun. And it didn’t rain steadily all day, just sprinkly but cold and damp. Bells and hankies and garlands and flowy skirts and the maypole and Green Man and lots of awesome. We took some photos, but I still have to weed through them, and our camera ran out of batteries, so we didn’t get too many good shots. Will update with a link soon. Click through photo above for crappy photos of the dancers. Damn, we need a better camera.

After spending much time watching our friends dance around a may pole and hail the coming of spring and just generally being happy little heathens, we went to see Kristen sing about eating, drinking, and being merry! (And praising Jesus, apparently.) It was a pretty fun show, and I’m glad we went.

Today, practice is canceled because the rink is flooded. I love skating at the outdoor rink, but man, this is our second canceled practice so far. I need to get motivated to work out at home during these situations. Even if I don’t get to that tonight, I’m still going to make myself useful by doing up a couple more cover letters today, so that process is going slowly but surely. Let’s hope I get a few bites.

Featuring Eva Licious from Boston Derby Dames and a few members from the Charm City league. Check it out!

Also, there were people filming PRD at our Derbytaunt Ball. One of them has a public access show. And the others were filming a documentary about us. For information on the public access show, and viewing times, see this blog.

Thank you, thank you! Thanks to everyone who came to the Derbytaunt Ball last night!

It was a super fun time, and the Bee Hives totally ROCKED!!! Holy hell, that guy sounded just like Fred, it was uncanny. I just wish I didn’t have to work the raffle table during their performance so I could have seen them better. Oh, well. Hey, if I ever hear that they’re doing a show some time, I’ll let you all know, and we can go rock lobstah with them.

My dress came out pretty good. And once I get pictures up, I’ll post about it. (No time now, since computer is running out of battery, and I need to go track down my power cord.)

So, thanks again!!!

ETA: click through to see a few photos of the dress. The ones taken at the event didn’t come out at all; I’ll have to wait for others to upload theirs.

To celebrate earning my snazzy new derby name, I got a snazzy new hair cut. The photo is a bit grainy, but you get the idea. There’s a better photo of the side (so you can see the cute angles) if you click through to Flickr. It looked awesome when I came home from the salon yesterday (Gloria and Company in Fairhaven, if you’re curious), because she used some sort of product and took the time to dry it and used a round brush and all that good stuff. I think, however, that it’ll look great as a wash-n-go sort of cut as well, so that makes me happy. The photo was taken today, and I just ran a brush through it, and it still looks pretty good. Gloria cut off 13 inches to donate to Locks of Love, and she cut off still more in the styling.

Aw, thanks everyone for your support! It means a lot that you are all cheering for me!

So, this is the deal: I am now eligible to scrimmage, and once I’ve been scrimmagable (I swear that’s a word) for 12 practices, then I get placed on a team. I’m wicked jealous of everyone else who’s already on teams, but I totally understand why I can’t be placed yet. They have to be able to examine my skills in action for several practices so that they can see where I best fit in. I’m just happy I have my name. (Still waiting on official approval. Soon, soon. Must be patient.)

I participated in two jams at last practice, and let me tell you, that is one of the most overwhelming situations I’ve ever been in. It was so much fun, but so confusing. I was given two instructions: hold the inside line, and keep up with the pack. I managed to do both well enough, I think, but it’s more than enough to focus on at one time until I get the hang of it.

I hope to expect a bunch of you at the Derbytaunt ball next Friday! It’s the debut of all the rookie skaters, and in addition to raising money to help us produce the summer season, it’s going to be so much fun! I’ll be there pretty much the whole night, and I am running the raffle for the latter half of the event. The best part is that there’s going to be a B-52s tribute band there! How awesome is that?! You should totally come!

Here’s the info again:

Foxie Renard, that is!

Yup, I passed my assessment, and I am a for-real derby girl now! YEAH! I await the official approval of my name, but that should come in a day or two, I imagine. I’m pretty sure I’ll have no problems getting it approved, though. More later, but for now I must to bed.

In the summer of 2000 I decided to have my own website. I used some cheesy, annoying template from earthlink and put up some goofy photos, crafty ideas, and a few “essays” on various topics that amused me. In this state it sat with little or no updating for three years until the winter of 2002 when I registered sparklej dot com. It stayed pretty dormant until March 2003 when I finally built some structure and put up some content. Hooray for basic html tutorials and notepad! I started a blah blah blahg and in April I found some bloggish software for to keep track of archives and comments and what not. Then a couple of years (?) later that broke (and crashed the whole site), and I went back to hand-coding in 2005… I think. Here my memory is a bit fuzzy. After that got way too tedious for words, I installed Word Press. This was 2006, judging by the archives list on the side bar over there. I uploaded some old posts from 2003, but I never got around to uploading all the other ones. Those are still on the old hard drive waiting for me to do something with them.

I’m not exactly sure what I want to do with them, or any of the old archives, but I think it’ll involve printing out most of them to keep for posterity. The diaries and letters of manuscript collections are always the most fun. Well, maybe not always, but usually. The point is that they exist and you can get a good sense of the personality of the people in question when you read their own account of their lives. If my computer or server goes kaput then I’ve pretty much lost the last several years of my life. Not the end of the world, no, but it would be a sad loss for me, even if most of my entries are about me being stressed out with all the stuff I have to do. Especially the posts from the end of every semester. Annoying or not, it’s my own account of my life, and it’s important to me. And no, I don’t expect my personal papers to be of any use to any historical collection, I’m just saying that having personal accounts are important. And if I have children, and if they have children, then someone somewhere down the line might be interested to know what I was like.

I didn’t actually intend for this to be a post about my potential posterity, but there you go.