To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Uhhhhh, so apparently Spain was hiding some extremely bizarre skaters somewhere in their ice rinks until they let this one escape: Javier Fernandez does an aerobics class on ice exhibition number. Complete with what appears to be a Superman outfit with a big "J" on his chest, for Super!Javier! And if I'm not mistaken, that's him doing the narration over the music.

Even the British EuroSport commentators, who are rarely fazed by anything, sound a little nonplussed in the version with their commentary.

I am unsurprised to find that Kurt Browning choreographed this number.

Despite the amusement factor, I think what I like best about it is seeing interesting and unusual skills that would never be rewarded in competition these days, like the opposite direction jumps at 4:09, and that super cool up-and-down sit spin at 1:48.

*

I had a good lesson and practice yesterday. My Waltz Eight was actually...well, okay, I don't think I can legitimately call it an "8" shape, since the right-hand circle kept collapsing in on itself because my left side still doesn't believe in back outside edges, but there was a definite circular motion to the stuff on the left-hand side. I still can't check my three turns worth a damn, so we ended up shortening the back inside edge part and pushing more quickly into the back outside edge, which helped things stay on a circle. I'm not 100% sure if I can just keep it like that or if I'm going to have to be able to check better before I take this test.

(If I could just alter the figure to put a poor man's back inside loop there before moving on to the back outside edge, it would be gorgeous and totally circular, but it doesn't work like that, alas.)

We worked on the forward perimeter stroking pattern for a bit, and I learned I actually get six strokes to make it down the long side of the rink. Hot diggity! I thought I had to do it in four! I can actually do it in four, especially since you're really going from red hockey dot to hockey dot rather than goal line to goal line, given how the intro steps and crossovers work, but apparently the rule-makers want six. Per C, "You actually have a lot of power, but we need to control it."

*beam*

I also managed not to fall over doing the spiral pattern for the first time, but I doubt my free leg was anywhere near my hip. You get two spirals, one on each foot, down the long side of the rink, and each of them has to go for about 50-60 feet. You get one push in the middle to build some momentum for the second spiral. I was just pleased to make it on both of them without running out of gas. Height can come later.

In practice, because someone in my group class was asking, I pulled out the half flip I haven't worked on in weeks and...actually managed to jump rather than step from toe pick to toe pick. IT WAS A MIRACLE! Apparently mastering that ballet jump (for generous values of "master") actually helped. Alternately, benign neglect improves my skating skills.

In other miracles, I managed to generate power on my backward cross rolls after applying P's advice from last night that it's kind of like a mutant edge pull. Now, we are not talking a lot of power--we are talking, like, AA battery versus the nuclear reactor that a pro could generate from these--but I could get the sixty feet or so from the goal line to the first blue line before I came to a standstill, which is much better than last week.

And I got a very interesting piece of general advice from fellow adult skater R, who told me about the idea of finishing a lobe*/edge, coming to a neutral position, and then being able to move to any foot/edge/direction from that position because you're not tipped over too far one way or the other. Which is a cool idea. I applied it to my swing choctaw and came out with...something that looked a bit more more like a choctaw than an unhappy mohawk, anyway. Maybe this will be helpful.

* I don't know where the term "lobe" comes from--I suspect figures; are the circles that make up an 8 called lobes?--but it basically means an arc.

*

I don't know if it's the dust mite covers I put on my mattress and pillow last night or the Prednisone, Zyrtec, and/or Nasacort finally kicking in, but today was hugely less snotty than the past week or so has been. Downside: I am very obviously sleeping on plastic. It rustles when I move, and is warmer than I'd like. But if it means I can breathe...

So apparently--and I cannot say that this comes as a surprise to me--I'm allergic to everything under the sun. The allergy/sinus clinic did a standard 40-item test, and I reacted to almost thirty of them, primarily in the grass and tree area, but also some weeds (ragweed, my ancient enemy, how you made me swell), dust mites, cat, and (sigh) dog. But I can be around mold and cockroaches without problem. For joy.

One of the nurses literally made a series of o.o :O :( faces, while the other called me an overachiever. Most of the prick welts have gone down (minus the timothy grass, or generic lawn grass, which is still pink and raised five hours later), but the intradermal parts are still kind of scary looking.

Barring moving to a bubble in the the desert, my best bets for prevention are to keep on staying indoors a lot, get dust mite covers for my mattress and pillow, wash my bed linens a lot, replace carpet with hardwood, and vacuum all upholstered furniture--while wearing a mask. Yep, I gotta wear a mask to do housework now. I also got a crapload of oral and inhaled steroids, a prescription antihistamine, and a nasal rinse bottle that's supposed to be better than my neti pot. The oral steroids are thankfully temporary, because the long-term side effects sound horrifying.

The LPN said I was a great candidate for allergy shots, and since the clinic is less than a block from my office, I think I'll go ahead and do that. It's a 3-5-year commitment, which is less than ideal, but apparently the success rate is very high.

That said, I don't appear to have a sinus infection, which was my original reason for going in. They said my tooth pain might clear up with all the anti-allergy stuff they're going to throw at it, or it might be dental in origin, even though it responds better to decongestants than painkillers, waxes and wanes with the weather, and in all respects acts like a sinus infection. But what the hell, I made an appointment with my dentist for next week to get it looked at.

And on the other end of things, my gyn originally thought I didn't have endometriosis because the symptoms didn't sound right, but did an ultrasound anyway and found what looks like an endometrial cyst. I get another ultrasound in six weeks. Whatever it is, she prescribed me the minipill after basically asking what I wanted the first move to be, and I cannot WAIT to start taking it.

The year I turn 30: The year I stop falling apart! Maybe!

Yesterday I managed to open my car door into my face, because I'm coordinated like that. It was hard enough to make my jaw click together and send me back into the house to make sure I wasn't bleeding everywhere. I have a thankfully small, not-very-noticeable bruise on my cheek right under my eye that hurts if I move that area of my face too much. I also managed to send my glasses slightly askew, to the point where they don't quuuuuuuite stay on my nose anymore.

I think I'll hold off on walking all the way across campus to the eye clinic for an adjustment until Tuesday, though, when the temperature will climb (barely) into the double digits. They've revised us down to a low of 8F tonight, with a high of 9F tomorrow and a low of 2F. Hooray.

Frankly, it sounds like getting to work tomorrow at all may be iffy, if the flash freeze warnings they're bandying about turn out to be true. Apparently the streets will turn into solid sheets of ice if the rain we're getting now doesn't have time to run off before the cold front gets here.

...Maybe I should skate to work tomorrow?

(Especially since it looks like the practice session I was planning to attend tomorrow is going to be a lost cause.)

Today at the public session I acquired a new little buddy in the form of a six(?)-year-old girl whom I'll call Marcie, since she continually called me "ma'am." Marcie begged me to teach her my moves, though she couldn't really stay still long enough for me to teach her much. She taught me her moves, which mostly consisted of skating in drunken circles, but she also did a two foot hop in place--it's exactly what it sounds like--that I had seen but never actually tried doing before, so score one for the kid. (Marcie: "See, now you know a jump!") She also complimented every crappy inside three turn I ground out, which was kind of awesome.

Marcie had appointed herself safety marshal of the ice rink. "You can skate fast, but you shouldn't, because then you'll fall down." [to some boys skating by at slightly over a crawl] "Slow down!" [sigh] "They never listen."

Don't worry, kid, I'm with you. The little girls in my class this session regularly skate rings around me when we're all using the same hockey circle for something, but I keep on keepin' on. Compared to them, I have enough mass to form my own gravity field; they are welcome to orbit me.

Marcie inadvertently helped me get my counterclockwise inside three, because I was so distracted by talking to her that I just kind of did it on autopilot at one point, and it worked! Apparently the trick is to not overthink it. Hmm.

Marcie's dad came to collect her after forty-five minutes or so, and we almost had a heartwarming moment where the crabby old lady learns to love adorable moppets when she flung her arms around my waist in a hug I was not expecting at all...and promptly fell down.

Luckily, I did not tumble on top of her. Or at all. That would've been bad.

First rehearsal for the holiday show is tomorrow. Oh, God, what am I doing? The registration form says that everyone gets some kind of mini-solo in the number, which I'm half-seriously wondering if I can waive, seeing as I'll probably be the lowest level skater in the group and may very well just look kind of silly. I suspect any kind of solo on my part will involve an imitation of Bambi's first encounter with an icy pond.

Apparently we aren't getting a fall this year. The first frost of the year was yesterday--and it reminded me how much I hate scraping it off my car--and today I finally had to admit summer is over and switch out my winter and summer clothes. My weight has stayed about the same since, like, April or something, but I still discovered that more than half my winter clothes are too big, so at least my shape is still changing. Skating must be transmuting my fat into muscle.

Speaking of skating, we started another session today, and now I'm in a class with three little girls. Alas. We're all at about the same level, so it's fine, but I have to admit I really liked having the last class all to myself. Nevertheless, I did make more progress on my inside three turns. I technically managed to do some the first time I learned them a couple of weeks ago, but they were never clean or stable and I could never actually repeat them after that class. Now they're...well, not stellar, but a bit more credible than they were. I'm still having trouble eking out any ground at all on the back outside edge after the turn, but at least I'm turning without putting my other foot down, usually.

Last week, I learned how to do the forward inside and outside edges exercise that comes up in ISI Delta and USFS Pre-Preliminary Moves in the Field. It is a lot damn harder than it looks, let me tell you. I wondered why they waited until Delta to introduce it, and NOW I KNOW. It took me all week to figure out how to coordinate my arm and free leg positions, and even now that I mostly have them, it's hard not to fall to the side on those curves.

On the other hand, after practicing those all week, now I can draw a nice ever-decreasing spiral on the ice. It's the little things that amuse me. (Sadly, I don't think that's on any of the figures tests you can take. It should be.)

Another exciting thing that happened today was meeting castalianspring for lunch! Wooooo, a fannish friend where I live, yay! :D

I'm not really a crafty person. I prefer to exercise my visual artistic impulses via camera and computer, and I don't enjoy fiddling with beads, sequins, fabric, thread, hot glue, etc. just to fiddle with them. However, I do get my craft on when there's something to make that would materially better my life, such as hemming EVERY DAMN PAIR OF PANTS I OWN so I don't look like I'm playing dress up in adult clothes.*

Anyway, I determined last week that my skates need better arch support than they have. Theirs is decent, way better than most shoes, but my arches are high and mighty and need more. Skates fit so snugly, though, that getting a three-quarter insole of the kind I prefer for regular shoes in there is a lost cause, at least if you're not fitted with it when you buy the skates. And it throws off the geometry of the boot if you raise your heel higher in it (there are actually features built into the higher-level boots designed to keep your heel in place; seriously, it's bad for it to move). So I just needed something to fill the space under my arch.

So this evening, from a pair of $2 air foam insoles, I created FRANKENINSOLE: ( Pictures )

I get to try them out tomorrow. Hope they work. If this is a success, my next necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention crafty task is making my own blade soakers. The ones I bought off Amazon fit, technically, but they're a little hard to get on without catching my finger on a toepick or blade tail, and could use just a half inch or so more length. I ordered the medium size because the seller claimed it was for boot sizes 1-5, and a I wear a 4.5,** but obviously this was a mistake. To be fair, Riedell makes its boots with a lower heel height than most other manufacturers, so that the equivalent size to everyone else's requires a quarter-inch longer blade, but still. On the other hand, making my own will let me choose fun fabric, which I do enjoy when there's a purpose to it...


* Except for the two pairs of pants I bought this weekend, which miraculously came in short lengths that were actually short! Sears, yo. I need to shop there more often. K-Mart too, come to think of it, because I recently got short-length jeans there that are actually a 28" inseam. In other news, apparently I am now a size 10? I feel like this is vanity sizing run amok, because the last time I was about this weight, which was high school, I was definitely a size or two bigger than that.

Also, I apparently went down a half size in shoes. I...didn't realize this was possible, but 6s seem to fit better than 6.5s now. I guess my weight was spreading out my feet before? Or something?

** Skate sizing is weird, don't ask. Actually, I think it might follow kids' sizes, 'cause I'm a 4.5 in kids' shoes too. Yeah, I have reason to know this. *facepalm*

According to the physical therapist I saw today, my problems are due to the fact that my ankles' range of motion is limited when flexing upward (toes toward shins) due to tight calves. He had this nifty ruler thing that measures in degrees, and apparently average is somewhere around 10 degrees. Mine was about negative 2.

It is, apparently, fixable via assorted calf stretches, so that's what I get to work on for a while. As long as it makes my heels and ankles stop hurting, sounds good to me!

(My mom, when I demonstrated to her how your ankle is supposed to bend forward more than mine does when you walk, said, "You know, I always thought you had kind of a stumpy gait...")

Googling confirmed what I suspected: my skating-induced knee pain is in fact a reoccurrence of the condition I had nine years ago (which was apparently induced by walking around Europe or, according to the doctor I saw, the fact that women's hips aren't directly over our knees). On the upside, at least I know exactly what exercises I need to do, and I know that they start helping almost instantly. Plus the linked PDF gives me some different ones I can do. On the downside: c'mon, body! I try to do right by you with exercise, and this is how you repay me?

Bah.

While I'm here, have some a link to this free 65-song mixtape (you may have to "like" NoiseTrade on Facebook to access the link, sorry).

I'm particularly fond of the offerings by Steve Moakler ("Today"), Kate Tucker ("Hangover"), Rachel Yamagata ("Saturday Morning"), and Matt Wertz ("Get To You"). I don't know if Yamagata is actually reminiscent of Joni Mitchell or if it's just that all of my Pandora stations used to play a song by her called "1963" incessantly, but that's the association I have.

I think the Matt Wertz song might make an interesting The Americans vid, if only because it's a song produced in 2013 that's doing its absolute best to sound like it came straight from 1986, and on a meta level that amuses me. Lyrically, it doesn't fit anyone in the show, although isolated phrases may lend themselves to certain shots. I guess it could be twisted pretty easily to be about spy missions, though. I'll have to give it some thought once I finish watching this season...

One music rec today: Milo Greene, a band that deliberately set out to make rock songs that sound like sweeping film scores. Just my kind of music! There's also a strong whiff of eau de hipster in there, but that could just be the unkempt, bearded-and-behatted dude who stars in all their music videos.

Anyway, while "1957" and "Perfectly Aligned," among others, are wonderful, my favorite is actually this live version of "Don't You Give Up on Me." (The album version's not bad, but I like this one better.)

This is an odd association, I know, but for some reason all I can think when I hear that song is that it would've been perfect for an exhibition program skated by Kate Mosely and Doug Dorsey of The Cutting Edge. Something about the beat, the guitar line, and the cymbal crashes just says skating punctuated by jumps and lifts to me. I don't know. I think it would also be an excellent group number for something like Stars on Ice, because I can totally envision multiple people flying around a rink skating loops around each other and doing awesome things in unison/one right after the other to it.

(...Doesn't everyone choreograph to songs in their head? Just me?)

Speaking of Stars on Ice, I rediscovered the fact that YouTube is basically the perfect platform for archiving 4-minute-long figure skating programs, and spent much of yesterday happily watching random things. Like this: "Chair Men." To which I can only say, "I want all y'all's muscles. ALL OF THEM."

While I'm here, have my favorite of the things I rediscovered yesterday: Renee Roca & Gorsha Sur, "Everything Must Change." Aiiiieeee, so pretty. So many beautiful lifts. So much gorgeous extension. I love the way they express the music all the way to their fingertips. Since I'm reminiscing, I'll tell you that these two were my first introduction to ice dancing, with the equally lovely "Maria," and I remember being, like, twelve in 1996 or whenever it was watching this in stunned silence, then going, "WHAT WAS THIS BEAUTIFUL THING AND WHERE DO I GET MORE???"

Did I mention how great YouTube is for this kind of stuff? I remember tape-trading to get older programs of my favorites! /old*


* Speaking of which, happy birthday to me! 29, on the other hand, does not feel old, except perhaps for the point today where I realized that the crop of freshmen I taught in grad school is going to graduate in two months. WHAT.

That was fun and I will totally do it again! There were enough newbs that I wasn't the only one flailing around, and the experienced people were very kind. I'm definitely a fan of the "we're here to have fun, not set the world on fire," vibe and how informal it was. Yay hippies! (And ohhhh, there were many hippies there.) This is great, because the lack of that informality was exactly what was keeping me from ballroom lessons--well, that and the price. What I really wanted was a place to dance around to some music and learn a few new things at a reasonable pace, and this is exactly what I wanted.

Contra is a nifty style of dance, just similar enough to ballroom to give me a bit of an edge over the other newbies, but otherwise very, very different. I like that all the steps can be done very simply, but as you get more experience you can add various flourishes, which is probably what kept the experienced people from wanting to beat their heads against the wall. I also like that the steps are barely gendered at all. Lead and follow do pretty much the same thing no matter what the step is, just maybe at different times. And there's not really much leading too it; it's all directed by the caller up front. (Well, maybe the flourishes require leadership. There was a guy I danced with who kept leading me into underarm turns, which was awesome.) As always, the gender ratio was a bit dismal--though much better than in most of my ballroom years; there were probably 40 guys to 60 girls--so I was a guy about half the time.

To no one's surprise, since this is Nashville, the four-piece band was very, very good.

Although I will say, the one great failing of contra dancing is that, as opposed to ballroom dancing where if you can start out on the correct foot, you're usually good for the rest of the dance, in contra, you continuously have to remember which is your right and which is your left. DON'T LAUGH, THIS IS HARD FOR ME. I failed the differentiating right from left lesson in kindergarten. (No seriously, I think I actually do remember that being sent home on a report card. I still sometimes have to look for the mole on my left thumb.)

Also, the other downside is that you and your partner travel up the long line (~20 people; basically you change places with the people to your right--or left, depending on the side you're on, but let's say right--continuously until you reach the end, then come back down by the same method) so the dance, or I think they call it set, can go on for like twenty minutes. And if you get confused or tired or want to stop for any reason, there is no escape because you would screw up the entire line. asinpterodactyl, you remember the Hustle of Death to...I think it was "Thriller"? Yeah, it's like that, only longer.

Nevertheless--fun! Yay!