Oh Fortune! Variable as the Moon!

Sometimes in popular culture or on the news you'll hear a particular piece of music is played to indicate fear, terror or intimidation.  It's this one:




This was one of my favorite pieces of music when I was a kid.  My mom says that when I was about three I used to run around the house singing it.  I have no memory of this, but I do remember that there was this delicious period of time in elementary school where I was old enough to be home alone in the afternoon after school.  My older brother took longer coming home from the middle school than I did from elementary school and my parents got home an hour or so after that.  This was my first taste of autonomy.  The opportunity to be really weird without judgement.  I think I probably spent a fair number of those days illicitly watching Saved by the Bell - which we were not allowed to do - but not all of them.  Sometimes I'd get a piece of music stuck in my head at school and then run home, pull the curtains on the picture window, put on the tune at full blast and dance like no one was watching (because no one was).  Prime candidates for this activity were Dvorak's New World Symphony, Gustav Holst's Planets, Cats the Musical, and Carmina Burana.  During the soft bits I'd lie on my stomach with my faced pressed into the carpet and just breathe it in.   

In any case, the first movement - the one you usually hear - isn't meant to convey terror at all.  It's about the human condition and dispair.  The lyrics are as follows (courtesy of Carnegie Hall):

1. O Fortuna (Chorus)	O Fortune
O Fortuna, velut Luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis; vita detestabilis nunc obdurat et tunc curat ludo mentis aciem, egestatem, potestatem dissolvit ut glaciem.	O Fortune! Like the moon ever-changing, rising first then declining; hateful life treats us badly then with kindness making sport with our desires, causing power and poverty alike to melt like ice.
Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis, status malus, vana salus semper dissolubilis, obumbrata et velata michi quoque niteris; nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris.	Dread destiny and empty fate, an ever-turning wheel, who make adversity and fickle health alike turn to nothing, in the dark and secretly you work against me; how through your trickery my naked back is turned to you unarmed.
Sors salutis et virtutis michi nunc contraria. est affectus et defectus semper in angaria. Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite; quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite!	Good fortune and strength now are turned from me. Affection and defeat are always on duty. Come now, pluck the strings without delay; and since by fate the strong are overthrown weep ye all with me.

This is just one movement of 25.  The poems come from medieval literature and I didn't really take the time to read them until I was much older.  They're wonderful and put the tone and style of Orff's adaptation into the appropriate context.  He uses a lot of musical references to invoke chanting and the church but the poems are much more pagan than Christian and as a result have a wonderful earthy feel to them.  It's all about love, lust, luck, misfortune and of course drinking.  Lots of drinking. 

But I come back to this concept of fortune or fate - however you want to think about it.  "Like the moon ever changing, rising first then declining."  In modern Christianity the equal sentiment is "God has a plan for you even if it's not your plan," which sounds MUCH more comforting than "much of what happens around you occurs at random and you will either prosper or suffer as a result."  I do sit in that second camp but in either case it's clear that as circumstances change you must also change.

Which is a really long winded way of saying my life has changed in these past months and so I'm needing to set roller derby aside for a while.  I've been very depressed and while I've gotten good help for that it's become clear that I need to ease up on the stress of my lifestyle for a bit to get back on track.  I've also decided that while finance has been a good safe harbor for me for the past six years it's not really something I want to do forever.  Any other career I'd like to pursue will take a fair amount of effort and training and there's no time like the present.  My roller derby fortunes have waned considerably in the past year and I'd like some time now to do other things that I can participate in fully and enjoy.  It was a difficult decision to make but the sense of relief I'm feeling now lets me know it's the right one.  For now. 

Recoveries (warning: graphic content)

Never, ever, ever, ever, give up.

I haven't actually written much here or otherwise about what my recovery has really been like.  I keep meaning to but mostly it's been kind of shitty and I try not to dwell too much on that.



When big life stuff happens my tendency is often to try to rush the process.  I know that there are going to be all the feelings and I want to try to have them in as quick a succession as possible so that I can have gone through the process straight to acceptance.  It would be a very convenient thing to do if it were possible.  But instead there have been all these wild ups and downs particularly as I've been able to get back on skates and play a bit.


The first most difficult thing has really been to quit comparing my recovery to anyone elses.  Kim Janna from Terminal broke her leg at The Big O this year (about three months after me) and before I had skated my first full practice word on the street was that she was already back to full contact.

"wow!"
"what an athlete!"
"you knew she could come back from that fast!"
"she must have rocked that PT!"

Or last year when Scald Eagle broke her leg and got back into the game in just six weeks.  Same thing.  The assumption is that the recovery is primarily influenced by the work effort of the athlete.  I am by no means implying that these skaters are not great athletes.  If I had abs like Kim Janna I would never wear a shirt either.  But not all broken legs are created equal.

 

In one of my self pitying moments this summer I Googled "broken leg roller derby" and ran across this horrifying article and the accompanying photos.  The skater pictured is Kaitlin "Muffin" Krause of the Mile High Club.  She's a great skater, great athlete and she also couldn't walk for 7 months after this photo was taken.  7 months.  Anyone can see why.  Her whole damn foot was on backwards.

However my foot was not on backwards.  It also wasn't a clean non-displaced fracture.  It was somewhere in between and so while some comparisons seems reasonable really none of them are.  And PT is great but it's not a panacea.  There are 1000 different ways you can break a leg and 1000 different ways any particular person's body might respond to that.  After 9 months there's a lot I can do.  I can run a mile (not too fast), jump up stairs (not too many), skate a full practice (sometimes).  There's also a lot I can't do.  I can't skate more than 3 days a week (or sometimes even 3 days a week), I can't sprint, I can't hop on my left foot, I can't tell you how it's going to feel tomorrow or next week, and I can't walk down stairs without pain. The truth is that while I can try to make goals or plans I really don't know how long a full recovery is going to take and I have to stop trying to guess.  And I wish people would stop asking me to guess.


Next week I go back in for more surgery.  Of everything mentioned above the one really unacceptable thing is being more or less unable to walk down stairs.  Derby or no derby stairs are a thing you have to be able to do in life.  My joint is too tight and so not only is there not enough flexion my foot is essentially permanently collapsed because otherwise I'm not able to move normally.  The flexibility has to come out somewhere and right now that's my arch.  My surgeon believes that removing my hardware will solve nearly all of this problem and if it doesn't there are a couple of other things she can try (in this surgery.  There won't be two.) 

So I'm headed back into a full on recovery.  The surgery should help and will be easier than the last one but it's still more pain at a time when I'm really tired of having to deal with pain at all.  This whole broken leg thing is no joke.  I had to really think hard this week about what it felt like to be able to skate often enough to really be good at it again.  I keep taking out my favorite memories of my last weeks on skates and they've become pretty tattered over the months.  I long for fresh victories.

Vagine Regime vs. Caulksuckers RollerCon 2014

If you were really waiting in anticipation for the resolution of the questionable pork roast I want you to know that it turned out fine.  A little odd but tasty.  I made a couple other soups that weekend but was too tired to blog about it.

And onto the main event:

I don't want to steal You Should Be Watching More Roller Derby's thunder but she hasn't been posting lately and there are a couple of games from RollerCon that are totally GIF worthy.  So while this type of posting is more suited to Tumblr than Blogger I have no interest in creating a Tumblr and we're doing it here.

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This is a great example of using backwards crossovers to gain enough momentum to make a backwards hit worthwhile.  We see that Stephanie Mainey is able to get to and make contact with the Jammer but it's Fifi-nomenon who actually has enough force to land a solid hit.  Lesson learned:  Don't just turn around and hope.  You should still be actively skating while backwards.

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Here's an example of a jammer using a lateral toe stop move to get by on the line.  Watch Satan's Little Helper (flesh tone #666) sneak by on the outside.  In this case she doesn't need to use more than one or two steps to get out of a sticky situation.

...and again

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...and again.

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Proof that the same move really can work over and over and over again even when your opponents can probably guess that you're about to do it.




I don't need to explain what's going on here but I will say that we should all take this moment to appreciate that everyone gives up the inside line sometimes - even high level skaters like these.  Don't be too hard on yourself when it happens to you.  On the flip side, if you're jamming and your blocker gives you a massive opportunity like this  it's your job as a jammer to RUN LIKE HELL.  You're not safe until you're out of the engagement zone and don't ever forget it.



I feel like this version of the spin move is underrated.  Smarty is not spinning here to get around her opponent.  She's spinning to get out of the hit and reset behind her opponent.  It works too.  Freight Train thinks that she has the opportunity to pull a cut when she doesn't and Smarty pretty easily makes her way through the pack.  Lesson:  You as the jammer can control when a hit ends.  Don't get pushed out of bounds if you don't have to.  Notice that this is a clockwise spin, not the usual counter clockwise spin we would use on the outside line.




Here's the same move on the inside line.



This is what a seamless D to O transition looks like. Fifi Nomenon (the grey pivot) loses the jammer at the very start of this gif. Rather than trying to waste time, opportunity and energy chasing down the many times over world champion speed skater who is her opponent she takes out an opposing blocker and clears a very wide path for her own jammer. She is probably perfectly aware that her own jammer is in the pack and therefore taking out any opposing blocker is helpful. This is the perfect answer to a total pet peeve of mine. Skaters often chase jammers out of the pack that they have no or little hope of ever catching. If you chase her out by a half a lap and then have to come back a half a lap to the pack you have no time to help your own jammer. So if your jammer is lead you lose points. If your jammer is not lead then you could find yourself in a vortex where she's struggling and struggling and never has enough help to get through because you're spending your time as a blocker continuously running the length of the engagement zone.

I'm not saying second efforts don't work. I am saying that in the heat of actual game play you should be smart about what you can and cannot execute.

Alright kids. That's it for tonight.

FEAST MODE: Pasta e Fagioli

I'm making several soups this weekend.  This is partially because the magazine in question has a lot of soups in it and partially because soups freeze well and make good lunches.  The first soup is called "Pasta e Fagioli" and is described as 'chock full of pasta, beans and vegetables, making it a hearty one-dish meal."  If that's not Minestrone then I don't know what is but evidently "Fine Cooking" doesn't stoop to Minestrone like the rest of us.

In any case, the soup starts off with bacon but I'm going to digress a bit from the get go and talk about stock pots instead.

When it comes to life's possessions I try to be a bit of a minimalist and that's no different in the kitchen.  I have two knives - a small one (paring) and a big one (chef).  I have two pans.  A small one (egg) and a big one (affectionately known as my 'big ass frying pan.')  Until recently I've only ever had two pots as well (you can probably guess at their classifications) but my parents bought me a stock pot for Christmas and I have to admit it's been a bit of a guilty pleasure.  You can certainly get by in the kitchen without a stock pot but it is nice to have one.  Not only is it useful for making stock (which I should probably do given that I've purchased 9 boxes of chicken broth for my adventures this weekend) but the very large pot is also good for making large amounts of soup or stew which I sometimes do.

Back to the Minestrone.  Before I start any soup I always try to chop all the ingredients.  This saves on unnecessary stress later when you discover that you really need to add the garlic but it's not ready to go yet.

The wine is not actually for the soup

We start with slicing 8 slices of bacon into small pieces and frying them in the bottom of the stock pot.  This really illustrates the necessity of having a good thick bottom stock pot because the bacon will burn in a thin bottomed cheap one (I know from experience).  You should cook the bacon as to be to the texture you want in your soup because you won't be boiling it more later.  Once that's done, remove the bacon and set it aside on some paper towels.




The bottom of your stock pot will likely be covered in some delicious half burned bacon fat.  You can and should let the bottom of the pan coat with this substance but let it get too dark and you run the risk of making your entire soup taste like burned meat.  Try to avoid that.

Once you've removed the bacon add three diced red onions.  Now - if you have a the aforementioned large food processor you can always chop it in there.  If not, I recommend the following technique:  Peel the onion, chop off the end that's not the root and then score the onion into little squares:

Then, all you have to do is slice it the long way.  Add the diced onion and saute it in that bacon fat until it's a nice soft consistency.  Then add 3 cloves of diced garlic and 1/2 teaspoon of dried rosemary to the mix and cook it for about a minute. Speaking of diced garlic, I have this totally amazing tool specifically for the task.  You just throw the garlic in there, put on the lid and twist it.  IT'S MAGICAL.  And besides, everyone hates dicing garlic anyway.

After the minute, you add pretty much everything else.  That includes 2 quarts of low sodium chicken broth, 2 cans of rinsed chickpeas, 1 can of petite diced tomatoes (plus juice), 4 chopped carrots, 3 sticks of celery, 1 cinnamon stick, 3/4 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp. pepper, and one cup of water.  Bring it to a boil, then reduce to simmer for a half hour.

That half hour is a nice time to catch up with our roast.  I've been basting it from time to time (turkey basters do not make my list of necessities for the kitchen but I do happen to have one.  If you don't, you can use a big spoon.  It works just as well.)  This is also the time to cook the pasta.  This magazine recommends tubettini' which I imagine is Italian for 'very tiny little tubes of pasta.'  They didn't have that at my store so I just bought a random bag of fancy pasta instead.

After the half hour is over you remove the cinnamon stick and add the bacon plus 1.5 tsp of red vinegar.  (side note:  I don't know how this happened in all my non-cooking for the past four years but I have a really massive collection of vinegars.)  Then you season to taste with salt, pepper and more red wine vinegar.  This assumes that you have not been steadily drinking from your Red Table Wine.  I have left the final salt count for my future self.

Roast update:  We are now at 150 degrees with 10 more to go.  It smells fucking delicious and the braising broth tastes pretty damn good too.  I'm feeling optimistic about our pork/beef bastard of a roast.

Thank you and good night.  We shall continue tomorrow.

FEAST MODE: Pastalicious

I've been saying to myself for awhile that I wish I could get back to a place where I cooked 80%-90% of my meals like I used to.  Then I realized that 'awhile' has actually been the past four years.  Home cooked meals are almost always cheaper than the alternative and making a decent salary removes the necessity to actually cook.

That said, back when I did actually cook my folks used to sometimes give me gourmet magazines to draw inspiration from.  Our recipes for the rest of the weekend come from "Fine Cooking - January 2009."  This simple pasta dish is from the back cover.

It's generally a good idea to read through recipes before you get started on them.  That way you don't get caught off guard by instructions like 'marinade overnight' or 'chill until hardened.'  In this case, the recipe asks that you reserve a cup of the water that you boiled the pasta in so you can use that water to finish the dish.  Hard to recreate that ingredient after the fact and while pasta water won't make or break your dish it does add something a little special.  Bill Buford, the author of "Heat" assigns the pasta water an almost mythical quality and who wants to miss out on mysticism?  Not me.  Also, the recipe doesn't mention boiling the pasta until last but if you want to finish the recipe in a timely fashion then it's better to do the pasta first while you prepare the other ingredients.  Do so in salted water.

The recipe calls for Orecchiette (pasta).  I don't know what that is.  But the picture looks like shells and I found something like it on the shelves.  As I said before, I like to make sure the primary ingredient in my recipes is quality, so I bought a good quality dried pasta.  I think they make a pretty big difference in the final outcome.

Next, roast half a head of cauliflower and a pint of grape tomatoes in olive oil, salt and pepper.  Pro tip:  'roast' nearly always means a temperature between 400 and 450 degrees.  In this case, 425 for 15 minutes.

Before roasting

While that's in the oven you're supposed to pulse four cloves of garlic and 9 leaves of fresh sage in a food processor.  I have three thoughts about that.

1.)

When you buy fresh herbs, you pretty much always wind up with more than you need.  Fortunately, most fresh herbs actually freeze pretty well so at least you can do something with them rather than throw them out or try like hell to use all that fresh sage.

2.)

When you buy garlic, try to buy a head that has paper that's tight to the garlic.  That means it's fresh.  Also, fresh garlic is purple in color so if you can find some in the store that has a little purple in it, that's a good bet.

3.)  Food processors are big and take a lot of space in your kitchen.  If you're going to buy one, get in the habit of using it a lot and right away, otherwise you're wasting your money.  I have the little one that's pictured and it triples with other attachments as a submersion blender and a motorized whisk.  I love it and use it all the time when I'm cooking.

When the garlic and sage has been diced in the processor, add about 3oz of prosciutto.  I feel about prosciutto the same way I do about bacon.  It's great as a flavoring agent but not really meant to be the main attraction of the meal.  

Add that to the cauliflower and tomatoes once their done and roast for another 5 minutes.

Roasted

By the time the roasting is done your pasta should also be done.  You'll want to mix everything together along with a little of that pasta water to add mysticism plus about 3/4 cup of parmigiano-reggiano cheese and 5 ounces of arugula.  I don't know how much 5oz of arugula is so I just added a couple of handfuls and called it good.

By the way - this is really fucking good.  I mean like - wow!  Add a little of that Red Table Wine and you have one fantastic dinner!

(Also, the roast is setting pretty at 87.2 internal degrees)

FEAST MODE Where's the Beef?

In an effort to reconnect with my love of cooking and my love of food I'm taking this weekend to live blog some culinary adventures.  We're starting with pork roast.  It's pork roast not pot roast because I got into a hurry at the store and picked up the wrong kind.  But whatever.  Pork shoulder is good too.  What follows is something I've just made up.  It could be awful.  Life is full of adventure.

Whenever I'm taking a day to cook a lot I like to make sure to get a roast, a chicken or something else that takes a lot of time and only a little effort to make.  I figure that if I'm already spending the day in the kitchen I might as well use the oven or the slow cooker while I'm in there.

Pro tip:  Whenever I'm making something that has one big primary ingredient I try to make sure that the primary ingredient is of a high quality, otherwise the whole dish kind of goes to hell.  In this case, that means getting a really nice piece of pork.  I found a shoulder roast at PCC.  3.8 pounds for about $15 and sustainably raised to boot.  Sure, it costs a little more than the regular kind but it tastes a lot better and there's some research to suggest that all the crap they feed factory raised meat makes its way into the fat storage of the animal so not only are there a multitude of ethical concerns with factory raised meat, it's also probably not very good for you.

I started today by roasting up some bone marrow.

So yes - this would have made a hell of a lot more sense for a pot roast but should still make the pork fatty and delicious.  Marrow bones can usually be found somewhere in the deli section of your grocery store and if you can't find it, ask the butcher.  They always have some on hand.  In this case, I've split the bone with a knife and a hammer and set it to roast at 400 degrees in a roasting pan until it starts to brown.

Before

After

You can't really overcook marrow but if it stays too hot for too long it will render and just be liquid fat which we actually want to save for the next step.

We're bothering with the marrow because I'd like to make a nice braising liquid for the roast.  Braising something means that you have enough liquid for the meat to sit in but not enough to cover it.  I've transferred the marrow into a large pan and rendered it into liquid.

Then I add one very thinly sliced yellow onion and caramelize it on a low heat.

As the onion carmalizes, I add a little beef stock and a little red wine.  We're reducing the beef stock and letting the alcohol boil off the wine.  So the liquid will taste very concentrated and beefy with a little tang to take the thickness off the marrow.

A note on cooking with wine:  As a general rule, I buy whatever's cheapest and use that.  Today, I'm using red wine and so I bought a wine that I also like to drink - Red Table Wine by Townshend Cellers.  If I'm cooking with white wine I buy whatever's $3 and leave it in the fridge until it dies.  I don't drink white wine.

When you're cooking from your brain and not from a recipe it's really important to taste as you go.  That's actually true for regular recipes too.  The great thing about doing that is it prevents you from over or under seasoning your food and also gives you the opportunity to flavor your food exactly the way you want it, not the way the author of the recipe imagined it - and isn't that better?  In this case I'm not adding salt yet because I'm planning on rubbing the roast with salt and herbs before it all goes in the pot.

Speaking of herbs, I've combined rosemary, thyme and kosher salt together and worked them over a bit with dried thyme and rosemary.

Then I rub the roast with it and throw it in the pot along with some large chunks of carrots, a bay leaf and the braising liquid.  From there it goes on low until it's done.

There are several different methods for knowing when a roast is done, but my favorite is a thermometer like this one. It takes the guesswork out of it and only costs about $25.

So there's my roast.  Hopefully the beef/pork combination will be delightful and not completely weird.  I'll keep you posted.

Anticipation and.... Anticipation

"Are you so excited to be skating again?"

"Best.  Day.  Ever."

"You're going to be back on the track in no time!"

People keep saying these things to me this week and while I totally understand and appreciate the sentiment it's perhaps my friend Razor who has had a broken leg herself who expressed it best.

"I remember getting back on skates again that first time.  It's so emotional!  And like - fuck you universe!"

Yes.  Fuck.  You.  Universe.

This - of course - is hardly an expression of joy and while my friends have a more or less universal assumption of my happiness to return to the track I can't say that happiness is a part of my emotional palate at the moment.  It's is probably due in no small part to my somewhat contrarian nature but surprise, frustration, and no small amount of fear have been my emotional companions de jour.  Surprise, because I wasn't prepared to begin skating again so soon.  Frustration because I can in no way skate like I did before the accident and fear - well - isn't that obvious?

I have no doubt that this too will pass and don't consider this to be so much a cry of anguish as it is a recognition of the distance yet to be traveled as well as an acknowledgement that perhaps it's still a little too soon to be strapping on 8 wheels.  I had to remove my inserts because while the swelling in my foot has gotten a lot better, it's still too large to fit into the skate they way it used it.  My balance is good generally but of course the left ankle is still a bit loose.  The nerves on the inside of my left ankle still aren't working properly so I can't tell whether that area has some ligament related pain or just nerve damage related pain when I try to use the inside edge of my skate but I can tell you that it hurts to put pressure there. 

Much remains to be seen.  And yet this Sunday when no one was looking there was a time - just a few laps - when I could pretend that things were headed back to normal.  That I could still cross over like normal, flick my toe like normal and feel the wind in my hair once again.

Game On!

I hate diets - they're pretty much the worst thing ever.  This is tough, because I also really miss my size 8 jeans.  Actually, a lot of things were easier in size 8.  Clothes fit better, I could shop more places, long pants were long enough.  My current size (14-16) means that a lot of places I like to shop don't have my size.  Plus sizes are too big and the biggest size at most other stores is too small.  I can find pants that are long enough or pants that fit around my midsection but not both.  It was also easier to do a lot of physical tasks two years ago than it is now.  These are all good reasons to try to reduce my waistline.

But do you know what sucks about it?  It's not eating differently or exercising more although those have their challenges.  It's people.  When you're a little overweight you pretty much disappear.  In some ways that's nice.  Actually, a lot of ways.  Men hold doors open for you less.  Men stare at you less.  Men catcall less.  (I was going to say 'people' but realized these aren't problems with people, it's rather specific to men.  Not being a manhater here, just never been catcalled by a woman.)  You get more respect from men for things you do, say and think when you're a little less conventionally attractive - or at least that's been my experience. 

And there are some 'people' problems too.  People are weirdly obsessed with what you eat.  Declare that you're trying to eat better and about half the population will try to tell you what's wrong with the method you've chosen and the other half will try to convince you not to do it altogether.  It suddenly becomes everyone's mission to help you either drive yourself crazy with insane dietary restrictions, judge everything you've put into your mouth or find a way for you to 'treat yourself' when you may not want or need to do any such thing.  It's as if the declaration that you're making a change is tantamount to admitting that you're helpless and begging for salvation. 

Last fall I threw out my back and was in quite a bit of pain so finally sucked it up and and went to see a doctor at the Seattle Sports Medicine Clinic.  I've dealt with this from time to time for awhile now so asked what I could do to make sure that this time was the last time.  He looked at my chart and mentioned that I'm 30 pounds overweight which could have something to do with it.  I suspected that weight might come up and was hoping for some sound advice.  What he told me was that I should exercise more and try to eat about 1700 calories a day and then went with some crap about the Mediterranean diet.  I stopped him and mentioned that I already exercised 6 days a week and that I wasn't sure that 164 pounds (the theoretical maximum healthy weight for my height) was a reasonable number given my strength - that I had been 158 pounds when running 50 miles a week which is still barely under my 'maximum.'  Not listening, he said "well then you can do it again" and I took that as my cue to ask for a referral to a dietitian because this fool clearly had no idea what he was talking about. 

Just so we're clear, 1700 calories a day is a starvation diet for a very active, very strong 195 pound 29 year old woman.  Been there, done that, ended it in a binge of epic proportions.  MyFitnessPal recommends that I eat 1400 calories a day to lose weight.  Slim Fast says 1500.  Weight Watchers is a little better at about 2000.  I can stand about one or maybe two weeks on any of these before I'm just too hungry to function and too neurotic to continue.  Food obsession doesn't really seem to lead to a healthier lifestyle but it sure as hell makes me crazy in a hurry. 

Fast forward to today.  I'm trying again, but much more hopeful about my chances.  Liberty found a food plan called "Game On!"  You don't count calories but they suggest somewhere between 2800 and 3300 calories a day is a reasonable intake for someone like me.  It's the first time I've seen a number that high along with a plan that lays out a way to eat that much healthy food without feeling like you're spending all day every day chewing.  It's 5 whole food meals a day.  But the best part?  IT'S A COMPETITION - and we all know how much I love winning.  So we'll see.  In the very least it's good to start to eat food that I'm cooking again.  I haven't been able to do much cooking until very recently and then it's always hard to get the motivation to start up again after a dry spell.

Team Awesome

Peer groups are SO IMPORTANT. 

This is all I could think two weeks ago, driving home from the Big O in Eugene after spending the weekend with my friends Liberty and Razor and Waffles*.  Last year I started a cross training group with the specific purpose of trying to provide a place for myself within the league where I felt like I belonged.  Skating for a league with home teams is great, but it also means that the mix of people on my team is pretty diverse.  We have a handful of skaters on their 8th season this year, a handful on their first and everything in between.  Some are all stars, some would like to be, some need a way to get away from home, some want a way to exercise and be fit within a community but we all skate together.  I love my teammates, but its pretty clear that we're not all working toward the same individual goals.  So I needed a peer group and I was hoping to form one by cross training.

*Technically waffles are not a part of this peer group.  They are a delicious breakfast item.  3 of 3 meals eaten outside of the fairgrounds that weekend were eaten at Off the Waffle and I don't regret a single bite.

In my mind (because everything is grander in imagination) I thought that group was going to encompass 8-14 of Jet City's mid level skaters who were aspiring to become A team players.  We would inspire our home teams and work together to provide support and be total bad asses and the derby community would look to Jet for providing such a great example of how to get people motivated and fit.  What  I rapidly discovered was only two of the people I invited would show up on a regular basis.  Thus began Team Awesome.

Team Awesome is great for so many reasons but partially because it helps with motivation.  Not sure you want to get up early and cross train?  Too bad, people are waiting for you.  Can't decide whether to attend the next boot camp?  Nope, because we're all going.  Don't have anyone to drive to the next tournament?  You do now.  Think you're going to let yourself off the hook for doing good enough?  They're there to remind you that good is the enemy of great.

And am I writing this because I LOVE MY FRIENDS AND I'M FEELING REALLY STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT HOW GREAT WE ALL ARE RIGHT NOW?  Oh yeah totally.  This is my love post to dedicated people everywhere.  And waffles. 

Shredded Bats

Did you ever wonder where wood chips come from?

College is expensive.  At some point in 2004 I was faced with the millennial's dilemma and realized that as great as my summer job at the local pool was it just didn't earn me enough money to offset some of the cost of school and living expenses during the year.  I needed to find something more profitable than the $7.50/hr that I had been making.  This is how I came to work as a temp. 

LC Staffing was located in a small and slightly abused building just between the edge of town and Evergreen, the unincorporated town outside of town.  The paperwork asked what sort of work I was looking for so I asked the receptionist which jobs made the most.  She told me it was manual labor so that's what I chose.  I was then assigned a staff member who did the formal interview.  We sat in a cramped back office cubicle with no light as she went through my questionnaire and I reiterated my desire to earn as much money that summer as I could.
"You want to do labor?"
"Yes."
"You can lift 100 pounds?  Really?"
"Yeah, definitely."
"wow.  you must be strong."
At the time I wasn't really familiar with the tone of voice used by people who think you're lying to them.

She found me a one week job in landscaping on a dude ranch just south of Whitefish.  What I didn't know is that when people say that you're going to do landscaping they usually mean that you're going to pick weeds.  It paid more than my lifeguarding gig but not as much as moving furniture or working construction like many of the other temp workers did.   When I got there I was surprised to see a former high school classmate getting out of her car in work clothes and gloves.  Tiffany had pulled the same landscaping card I had and we were set to work grooming the lawn and tending the gardens.  It wasn't a bad way to spend a week.  The weather was nice, the supervisor was friendly but not creepy and the company was good but I was still hoping for a longer gig that paid more.

After several more landscaping jobs, a stint at a deli and a horrifying 5 hours as a bus girl in a restaurant it dawned on me that I was never going to get sent out to work construction.  When my assigned staff member at LC Staffing told me that she was trying to get me jobs that 'weren't too hard' what she meant was that she didn't think girls should do that kind of work.  It's hard to put your finger on why you know that kind of thing when you're in that situation but between that, the jobs I was assigned and the rumblings among other temps that women weren't wanted on particular jobs even though you legally couldn't say so it became clear that gender was the overriding issue preventing me from earning the kind of money I wanted to be able to earn.

Before I had much of a chance to contemplate what might be reasonably done about that sort of thing another opportunity presented itself.  One of the members of my parents church was a person of some degree of importance at our local lumber mill.  He mentioned that they too hired through LC Staffing and that perhaps I should see whether they were needing additional summer labor at the moment.  When I asked, my assigned staff member abruptly handed me off to another staff member who sat me in front of a training video, gave me directions to the mill and and told me to report in at 5:30am the next day.

We were more or less surrounded.

It's worth noting at this point the degree of influence Plum Creek has on the local economy back at home.  They are the largest private landowner in the United States with about 6.8 million acres, nearly 900,000 of which are in northwestern Montana.  A job at the mill was a good blue collar job with lots of hours and decent benefits in a town where about 75% of my graduating class did not go to college and the other options were the aluminum plant, a boom and bust manufacturer of semiconductor washers and not much else.  When I was in the fifth grade we got to go to the FORESTRY EXPO! Which was an educational event on forestry topics for local fifth grade students.  Among other things, I remember a very cool demonstration of logging techniques and forest management put on by Plum Creek.  They made the case for logging in a community that in many ways depended on it.  Many of my friends parents worked there (and still do).  It wasn't exactly a hard sell.

I was to report to the C shift of the re-manufacturing (REMAN) division at the Evergreen mill.  I didn't know what the meant, but I did know I'd be making over $10/hr so it seemed like an improvement over pulling weeds.  Everyone I talked to told me I'd probably be pulling plywood off the chain.  I didn't know what that meant either.

The next morning in the pre-dawn darkness I drove into the lumberyard and parked my dad's tiny '86 Honda Accord somewhere between a forklift and the requisite lineup of Ford F-150 pickups.  The sweet smell of sawdust greeted me as I walked into a mostly empty break room and asked for Jerry*.  What greeted me was a manic gorilla of a man addicted to steroids and just shy of his 35th birthday.  This was my shift manager.  They later told me that Jerry used to sometimes pick up the vending machines and shake them to dislodge free snacks - peanuts in particular -  but then management got wise and nailed down the vending machines.  I determined that it would probably be better to be on Jerry's good side.

From there I learned that REMAN had nothing to do with plywood.  We were actually the third largest producer of finger jointed 2x3, 2x4 and 2x6 in the world.  A finger joint looks like this:

When 2x4's are made without jointing, the machines run the entire tree through a machine made for that purpose.  Some of those long 2x4's come out unusable as a single piece of wood.  The way to make those 2x4's usable is to chop them into smaller pieces that fit the grade and then glue those pieces back together into 116 1/8th inch long slices.  That's what we were doing.

The trouble is that someone has to decide which long 2x4's are usable and which aren't.  We had a machine for that, but sometimes it's 'eye' couldn't decide and that's where I came in.  My job was to sort through the undecided pieces of wood.  If one end of the 2x4 was bad, I used my chop saw to cut it off.  If a long end of the 2x4 was bad then I used my rip saw to turn it into a 2x3.  Bad pieces went to the wood chipper and good pieces went to get jointed and glued together.  I manually sorted about 5,000 pounds of lumber a night and went through a pair of gloves every week.  It was the bitch job, it was mine and it made me about $8,000 a summer.

Terms:
See the bark on both sides of this piece of timber?  That's called wane.  You can't nail into wane and it has to be removed if it takes up more than half the nailing edge of your lumber in order to be stud grade wood.  Knots that are larger than half the width or edge of your wood are also below stud grade and must be removed or sent to the chipper bin. Wane that covers the short end needs to go too. 






The constant roar of the machinery meant that conversation was not possible on the floor and in any case my station was not close enough to anyone else to talk so I mostly got to know my co-workers in the break room or not at all.  There were 11 of us on shift and one other woman so by the second summer it was really like having 9 older brothers and one very tired aunt.  They adored me, and in what seemed like not enough time I was as much a part of their family as anyone.

One day I was pulled from my usual work to do what was essentially quality control on a long line of identical pieces of wood running by a conveyor belt.  I was to be the second eye in addition to the machine and flip anything bad to the person at the chop saw.  At first watching the belt made me dizzy, then gave me a little headache and before I knew it I had full on motion sickness.  Vomit came roaring out of my throat and so I turned and yakked in the first thing I saw - the belt to the chipper bin.  The guys came over to pound me on the back and laugh at me.  "You shouldda seen when Bobby done it!"  In fact it soon became clear that at some point, each of them in turn had vomited into the chipper bin.  It was a bond we shared.

Evidently at some point in the not too distant past someone had died in the chipper.  No one knew how exactly, but the guy had disappeared on shift and when someone stumbled to the horrible conclusion that the chipper could have been to blame pieces of him were in fact discovered there.  Now the room had a camera.  The chipper operated without human assistance most of the time but occasionally a long piece of 2x8 would jam it and someone needed to go in there and either pull it out or shake it enough to make it go in.  The camera was there to see if there was a jam and possibly for safety reasons too.  The only other woman on shift watched the video as she operated the 'seeing eye' machine.

It was also true that bats sometimes roosted in the wood pallets that waited outside to be processed.  So naturally when one of those bats was caught, the guys thought it would be really fun to rattle the chain of their colleague watching the camera and to do so they stapled the bat to a piece of 2x8, waved it in front of her camera so she would be sure to see it and threw the whole thing into the chipper.  They thought this was hilarious and in telling the story to me I thought it was funny too.  So many months in their company had changed my sense of humor somewhat, but when I attempted to retell the story to my other friends all I saw on their faces was horror.  Not funny at all.  Some aspects of the mill didn't translate back to the rest of my life and some of my life didn't really translate to the mill either.

By Rainbow they mean rainbow trout.  Not gay people.

"Hey, you wanna go out to the Rainbow tonight?"
"I'm not 21 yet."
"Don't matter.  Neither is Bobby!"

The Rainbow was and probably still is the trashiest of dive bars.  Its reputation preceded it so even if I had some desire to go out drinking with the boys and witness one of the many brawls they so often spoke of, fear of the venue alone probably would have kept me away.  They didn't seem to mind.

Back at work Jerry crowned me employee of the month and crowed that I was "the best motherfucking rip saw operator [he] ever had!"
"but you're not a motherfucker, right?" asked another co-worker, eyeing me.  It was 2:30 in the morning and I was alone at night in the warehouse with 9 of the guys.  It didn't seem like a great time to make a stand for normalizing gay life so I sat there in my brother's Marine Corps camo pants and work boots with what little hair I had hidden under a bandanna and shook my head 'no.'  I suppose it was true strictly speaking.  I had never fucked anyone's mother.

As the summer came to a close so did my time there.  They often hired college students to work the busy season so the guys knew that I was easy come, easy go.  Nevertheless they encouraged me to come back and put in some hours over Christmas  or maybe even graduate from school and come back to work full time as many of them had.  On my last day my shift manager pulled me up into his office, shook my hand and let me know that if I ever needed anything he was only a phone call away.  They were there if I needed them because we were family now.  I thanked him, left the building, pulled away in my dad's little car and never saw any of them again.

The Mostly Weekly Dribble

I always thought that if suffered some major injury from derby that I would write a book with my new found free time.  I also always thought that my brain would be a bit clearer than it has been but things are coming around.  It's 27 more days until I'm supposed to start walking again.  I have to admit that I've been trying steps but when I said as much to my physical therapist I got 'the look.'  They're pretty good at 'the look' actually.  Must be all those rollergirls they treat.  At any rate, I need a distraction and this is it.  50,000 words which is about 1,800 a day until I walk again and you're going to find them here (unless my inspiration runs dry in which case you're going to find whatever you find and you're going to like it). 

The first time I tried to write a book the summer before I was a Freshman in high school.  I had just read the series "So You Want to Be a Wizard" and my friends Dakota and Caleb had both just written epic fantasy novels which I did not read but was very impressed with nonetheless.  This confluence led me to the conclusion that if they could do it, I certainly could do it and so my very own wizardry epic began (this was before Harry Potter.  I swear.)  I used to hide in the spare bedroom back in the corner of the basement with my clean and perfect black composition notebook and draw out character profiles in my very best handwriting.  This took forever because my handwriting is now and has always been absolutely atrocious but I wanted it to be good.  This was my new, secret and exciting calling. 

However like all of my new, secret and exciting callings it didn't stay a secret for long.  I proudly wrote out 40 single spaced typewritten pages and proceeded to show them to everyone who would look.  My Freshman English teacher promptly had me go to some sort of writing clinic where I sat on the tired chars of the Eagles Lodge in Kalispell, Montana with other high school students.  All of them were probably older than me and many of them certainly seemed to know what exactly you ought to be doing at writing clinics.  We went through the beginnings of my novel which was nestled inside a cheap but much loved purple plastic binder and agreed that it had great ambition and lots of potential.  Or maybe that I had great ambition and lots of potential.  One of those

It may have had potential but I had run up against a wall.  My main character was an orphan who did not know that she was a wizard (I swear!  Before Harry Potter!).  She was tall, blonde, athletic and smart.  Persistent too, but did not trust people.  She had a little sister and together they went from foster home to foster home.  Kit (the nickname for my girl) was very troubled and possibly into drugs.  She needed to hit bottom to discover her true identity.  The problem with that was that I was not troubled, just a tad neurotic.  I had never used drugs or taken a sip of alcohol and I lived a fairly Rockwellesque childhood with ballet classes, piano lessons and the occasional foray into childhood sports.  So while I was trying to write about Kit's spiral into some sort of suicide attempt it was clear that I in no way possessed the emotional depth to pull it off.  I was 14 after all.

So Kit went to go live on the bottom shelf of my bookcase in her shiny purple binder.  She's still there, actually.  Sitting in my parents house, waiting for someone to come along and let her find her true self.  I like to think that if that damn Rowling woman hadn't come along I might have come back and found a way to write myself out of my literary trap but no one wants to be a copycat, least of all me. 

I think it must have been the next year that I got my own email for the first time.  My family had gotten a home computer when I was 9 or 10 but the internet didn't come until later and even then there was some degree of uncertainty as to what one was supposed to be doing online anyway.   I remember spending my allocated time entering in URLs I found on cereal boxes which provided a temporary reprieve from creating folders within folders within folders strung out in long nests of codes meant to prevent my brother from reading my very secret private computer files which for some reason I did not elect to keep on a floppy disc that could be removed and hidden.  This was all until it was discovered that I could collect the email addresses from my various summer camp friends and keep up with them much more frequently than traditional letter writing had allowed.

And thus Peatty23@hotmail.com was born.  At the time, my brother desperately wanted a PT Cruiser because he had just gotten his license and the PT was clearly the height of coolness and fashion.  Instead, we rode around in a tiny grey '93 Mazda pickup just big enough to transport a few tubas or maybe a jazz band's worth of music stands for my dad's work.  I called this pickup Peatty in an effort to goad my brother with daily reminders about that which he could not have.  23 vaguely rhymes with Peatty and so I took this address and sent out a mass message to everyone I knew talking about my adventures in learning how to drive a stick shift.  I sent mass emails with these sort of self absorbed fun anecdotes on a more or less weekly basis and called it The Mostly Weekly Dribble.  So while I'm not saying that I invented the blog at sixteen, I am saying I got an early start.

I considered the Dribble to be the side show to my main event.  I still wanted to write fiction and Kit was still my character although her circumstances had changed.  I no longer read as much fantasy in high school as I had in junior high and so Kit needed a real life scenario to go along with her fabulous good looks, street smarts and witty charm but it seemed like every story line I came up with was too pedestrian for her impeccable strengths.  I wanted her to live in a city, but didn't know how to write city life and I wasn't sure what she was doing there anyway.  So instead I just wrote descriptive scene after beautiful descriptive scene where nothing ever happened but it was all set up just so and she was alone.  Always alone.

In the meantime the Dribble was wildly successful by my own measure although in re-reading some of them its hard not to come to the conclusion that they were written by a hyperactive squirrel.  At any rate, people seemed to respond to it and I got a chance to be funny and insightful which I love.  Here's an excerpt from June 7th 2002:

"So ya know what I was thinking?...........

Wouldn't it be terribly lonely to be a superhero?  I mean yeah, you get all the sexy babes, you get to save the world and everyone loves you.  But in the end I think it would be lonely.  Everyone would respect you, but I think because of that, no one would ever really know you.  I'd be lonely anyway.  In the same respect it's like some of those people at school.  Ya know who I'm talking about.  The kid everyone knows and likes.  The one who's always surrounded by a thousand people.  I think it's people like that who are the most lonely.  What's the use of having lots of friends if all of them are too in awe of you to really ever be close to you?  It's something to think about anyway.  Why did this come up?  Well we have this assignment in history to make up superheros.  It's our semester.  Yeah, don't ask....."

^this is the saddest thing I have ever written.  Why it didn't occur to me that I was that kid is beyond me.

Then college happened and for some time Kit disappeared entirely and the Mostly Weekly Dribble became a Mostly Perfunctory Series of Updates.  I was too busy being overwhelmed to be clever.  In my Freshman year I took a small honors course discussion course whose topic I think was intentionally vague and made more so by the fact that our professor wanted us to self direct the class into some area of the humanities for a journey of discovery and knowledge.  What we actually did was talk a lot about numerology.  There were only 14 people in the class and one of them only came once.  Her name was Alexis Kent.  We talked a lot about Alexis while she wasn't there.  We speculated on her proclivities and wondered aloud what sort of life she might be living while we were in the classroom.  Her number (based on her name in n numerology) was a 3 which meant that she had a propensity for fame.  I liked the idea of her.

Later that year I went to see the vagina monologues with some friends. After the play we were standing around chatting about what we might name our own vaginas (like you do).  Before I knew what I was saying I blurted out the first name that came to mind.  "Alexis Kent."
"You mean Alexis Cunt?"  Asked my best friend.  Raucous laughter ensued.  I decided right then and there that Alexis Kent was not the name of my vagina.  But she did stick with me.  She was Kit all grown up and so after college I began again to try to write her into my first great work of fiction.  I lived in New York City for six months after school and finally could write an urban story.  I had experienced some heartache, some adversity and some really bad choices and I knew that Kit, Alexis - whoever - could weather it better than I had.  She was my perfection, and that was a big part of the reason why she never came to be.

It was at about this time that I was reading a news article about a young writer talking about her memoirs.  She had started her writing life in fiction but never had much success.  Finally, after showing a story about a little old man to a friend of hers the friend looked up and told her that the story wasn't about some old man, it was about her.  That all her writing was about her.  That in spite of all her efforts to imagine something new she was really just writing memoirs and maybe she should stick to it.  I read this, looked up from my writers block and realized that Alexis wasn't real at all.  She was just the all the things about myself that I liked best without all the things that made me interesting.  No matter what story I found to fit her it would only ever be a shiny patina over my own.  The decade I had spent writing Dribbles instead of fiction wasn't a way to bide my time until I came up with the great american novel - it was my novel.  Will be my novel.

And so we find that I am 29 and writing memoirs in spite of my youth.  Not because of a sense of vanity (although I do plead the 5th in that regard) but because its what I do well.  I don't think in novels but rather essays.  27 days until I walk means 27 days of essays about my life.  I hope you enjoy it.

Thoughts on Coaching

awesome-train.blogspot.com

Learn it.  Love it.  Know it.

After approximately six minutes of consideration I've decided that the easiest solution to my malware problem on the old blog would be to start a new blog.  And then this URL was available which pretty much sealed the deal.  Most of the old posts are here now which I imagine is mostly to my benefit but you know - you can still read them too.

Actually the review of old posts has revealed a couple of things.  First - I used to work out WAY more than I do now.  And with more drive.  Second - I pretty much only write on a few themes.  Goals.  Motivation.  Perseverance through adversity and awesomeness.  It's not necessarily a bad wheelhouse but I thought I'd see whether I could get out of it for a minute.

I've started to do some coaching this year which I LOVE.  Back in the day I used to teach French horn students (and WAY back in the day it was swimming lessons) and while I don't really want to do that sort of thing full time I do miss it and coaching has dome some work to fill that gap.

But as opposed to music lessons or swim technique, the coaching space in roller derby is a sort of weird confluence of various styles.  In my first year of learning to skate I took lessons from speed skaters, artistic skaters, jam skaters, former hockey players and then just a whole lot of folks who taught themselves.  Of course every one of them is certain that their style is the most correct and each of those styles have some pretty significant differences between them.  It makes for an interesting learning environment and that's before you get to the many opinions that exist just within the roller derby community.

Then there's the matter of trying to aim at a moving target.  Two years ago I got picked up to a team without having solid transitions on either side.  Today we don't even let new skaters practice with teams until that skill is down cold.  The rules of the game literally keep changing so the things that are most important to know how to execute change too. 

So the question becomes not just how to teach new skaters the rules of the game and basic skills but also how to best prepare them to pick the most right action for them out of the many possible right actions (not to mention the many possible wrong actions).  In doing so I often wonder whether it's possible to create a method of learning any particular skill that's more direct than what I was taught or whether doing so would miss some fundamental skating skill developed by learning an intermediate version of that skill.  Was the 'intermediate' version really necessary at all?  If we teach skaters the methods deemed most important today will those most important methods still be considered as such in two or three years?

^OK - so that's incredibly vague and esoteric.  Let me see if I can provide some examples.

I used to call getting low the 'all purpose flour of roller derby.'  Now I'm not so sure.  Consider what it feels like to get low on transitions.  Do you really know anyone who stays low throughout the turn?  Last year we took some footage of Nasty Nikki Nightstick doing a turn around toe stop and when reviewing the video at slow speeds discovered that the very moment of her turn she stands up.  If you think about it in terms of physics, this makes sense.  It takes considerably less energy to spin an object that is straight up and down than it does to spin something that is unevenly weighted on the lateral axis.  Imagine spinning a straight straw versus spinning a bendy straw that has its top bent.  The straight straw is easier to spin.  Following that logic it's easy to imagine that teaching new skaters to transition while bent at the knees and waist is actually making them less stable. 

... and what about when making a wall?

Look how low I am!  I'm Low McLowerson!  So Low!

Look at Jes Rivas! (lane 4 in blue)  She's... in an athletic position!  She's Athletic McPositerson!  So positioned!

You guys - Look.  You can't really play roller derby in a deep squat all the time.  I spent a lot of time reviewing footage last fall and noticed that blockers I admire like Juke Boxx and Jackie Daniels have a much more upright position than I had been taught.  These players stand with their back up and their butt down which gives them a less low position but much improved lateral movement not to mention a whole 'nother way of feeling the jammer on their back.  I've been trying to teach myself the same but have found that nearly everything my body knows about how to stop and move needs to be adjusted because the stance is so different.  It's going to be a long road.

So what should we teach new players?  It's true that you hardly ever see anyone playing 'too low' while we often see players who are too tall.  Should we bother teaching a more nuanced stance now or is it better to let them develop as skaters and re-learn it later?  I don't really have the answer for that and not just for skating low but for a lot of things.  And do you know what?  That's what I like about coaching.  In a lot of ways it's a skill that allows you to really tap into critical thinking and creativity in ways that simply playing the game does not.  I don't pretend to know all the parts and pieces of how to put this game together from the ground up but I do look forward to a vigorous exploration in the years to come of exactly that topic.

Therapeutastic!

(see - it's like therapeutic and fantastic put together in one word)
First some housekeeping.  My blog seems to have been infected with malware that tells you your Java needs to be updated.  I'm trying to uninfect it but should that fail I may need to move this page to a new blog.  I'll let you know if that happens and in the meantime, do not click on that Java nonsense.  Second - Morganautumn I do not see your email address on your profile but if you put it there or in a comment I will email you!
...on to other things.
Last week I started physical therapy in a cloud of expectation.  Finally!  The resting part is over!  Time to actually DO something to speed my recovery.  I was also really genuinely glad to see my physical therapist again.  I've been a patient over at Advanced Manual Therapy in Ballard on and off for the past four years (which I would like to point out predates my derby experience).  I've never been a person who had their own neighborhood bar, grocery or restaurant (where everyone knows your name!) but AMT is most certainly MY physical therapy office.  Ignoring for a moment what that says about my apparent propensity for injury I will say that it's great to know that while PT can be painful and boring at least its with people I know, like, and trust.
Having said that, I will admit that at best I am usually a pretty OK physical therapy patient which is a significant improvement over my pre-derby life where I was generally a totally non-compliant physical therapy patient.  I've always had bad feet and spent significant time in PT when I was a kid.  Other kids did not have to go see Fred the physical therapist, did not wear orthotics, were not forced to do situps every night before bed and didn't have to wear tennis shoes all summer in lieu of sandals.  I associated these things with my own weakness and so I associated PT with weakness.  It's taken a long time to for me to turn that mindset around and also to learn that weakness isn't actually a permanent and unchangeable state of being.
The roller derby community on the other hand is generally unabashed in its enthusiasm for rehab and prehab and so I too have learned to be unabashed.    Still, there are always so many exercises that it can seem hard to keep up.  I usually pick the top two that I should be doing at home and do them during my break at work.  It's not a perfect solution but it's consistent and better than nothing.
This past week of PT has been a lesson in what six weeks of atrophy can do to you.  On Saturday they asked me to do a hip adductor leg raise with two pounds attached to my foot on the bad leg and I couldn't.  Not because it hurt, but because there was no strength there.  It suddenly became very apparent that while I may be cleared to walk in another five weeks if I don't stay up with the PT my muscles won't be able to bear the weight.
I've suddenly found myself to be very motivated.
<posted on 4.1.14>

The Seven(ish) Stages of a Broken Leg

Not all of the best stories start from the beginning.  At least that's what I've been telling myself.  It's been six and a half weeks since I broke my leg and yet every time I come here to try to hash it out I come up short of a full story.  I haven't been able to process this thing emotionally.  Or maybe it's that I'm still processing it.  Grief has seven stages after all...
DENIAL:  IT WON'T BE THAT BAD
So...  Yeah. The actual breaking of the leg part really was fairly awful.  And the fallout afterwards was/is also pretty bad.  I used to have this vague idea that breaking your leg doesn't hurt that badly.  You always hear people say that the adrenaline kicks in and they didn't really feel it or whatever.  I've actually seen at least three different people break their own legs and they didn't look like they were in a ton of pain.  And you get pain meds right?  Clearly the pain meds are great and make the pain go away and also make you feel euphoric about life.  Right?
Not quite.
PAIN:  THIS REALLY FUCKING HURTS
I'm still not really able to go back and think hard about how the fall/hit/break happened because it's too traumatic.  I remember screaming and not being able to stop.  I'm hoping to be able to return to the track without having to break that down mentally but maybe that too is denial.  As far as the pain meds go I can admit that the first shot of morphine was great.  Instant relief and relaxation.  But the second did almost nothing and I was in too much pain that first night to sleep at all in spite of the pharmacy being pumped into my arm.  The pain ranged from mild to severe for two weeks.  My first attempted blog post was trying to happen about then and all I could manage was a long litany of how much pain I was in, the types of pain, the trying to get past the pain.  I had enough sense not to post that one because it was too depressing.  You're welcome.
FRUSTRATION:  I WANT MY LIFE BACK
About two weeks ago I found myself in bed and trying to work from home but actually weeping for the first time.  I was finally off the pain meds and realizing just how much I missed people.  How tired I was of existing in bed for 20 hours a day.  How annoying it was that every tiny thing around the house took three times more energy than it should have and that a simple trip to the grocery or a restaurant expended nearly everything I had.  I wanted to sleep in my own bed again, see all my teammates again and have the hours of my day filled with more than TV and crochet. 
...and do you know what?  I'm still pretty much there (but increasingly able to get around, thankfully).  I guess the next stage is supposed to be guilt.  I suppose it's possible that there's been some guilt.  I sometimes wonder whether things might have been different if I had been a better jammer that day.  Or a worse one - so that I wouldn't have been put in.  But I know that the truth is it doesn't really matter and so I've been trying to steer clear of that one.
The other truth is that there's a lot that's happened that doesn't fit into this nice rubric of grief.  Like...
GRATITUDE:  THANK GOD FOR MY FAMILY
When I was lying on the floor, panicked and waiting for the ambulance one of my teammates asked if she could get me anyone.  I asked for Razor who came over, held my hand and asked whether I had a high pain tolerance.   When I said yes she relayed the information to the firemen "hey, she has a high pain tolerance so if she says it's hurting, it really hurts."  I don't know why - but it was the right thing.
When I got to the hospital the firemen tried to move me from the gurney to a wheelchair which caused agonizing spasms.  As I lay there in tears my teammate Bruisey told them 'no.'  They couldn't move me.  It obviously hurt too much.  She said it when I couldn't.
It was my last day in the hospital when my mom came in from Montana.  I've never been so glad to see her face.  She was immediately able to organize the things I hadn't thought of.  Going to the store to grab essentials, getting my apartment ready for a less able lifestyle, making sure my insurance paperwork was in order.
On my arrival home a small army of elves from the league whisked away my sofa and replaced it with a hospital bed.  Prepared meals began to fill my freezer.  I may have been high on drugs and in no small amount of pain but the days were full of friendly faces, encouraging emails, love, life and laughter.  It meant everything to me and still does.
So that's where things stand as of today.  I know I still have a long road ahead of me and hope to do some more writing here now that I have the time.  One thing is for sure, things are looking up from here (or maybe that's the denial talking).
<posted on 3.26.14>