dragonlady7

Going to cross international boundaries to play a roller derby bout tonight. London, ON. We played them last year, 1 year ago to the day. We'd just been eliminated from the playoffs, so it was a great finale to our season; we combined it with a long weekend and came from the after-party to a slumber party in Southern Ontario where our coach lives, so we spent two days bonding, laughing, winning-then-losing (it was us by 1 point, then the refs had a score correction, made it a tie, made us skate one more jam, and we lost by 3 I think? but we'd already done our victory lap so it was suuuuuper awkward), etc-- we gave trophies to our coach and bench manager, we laughed and cried and had a freakin' awesome time. So when the London league asked us back, we said yes of course, we had such a great time last time...
But it wasn't really because of London, it was more that we brought the awesome time with us. So, uh, well, we're going anyway, and we'll probably have a pretty great time. But not all of us could go this time, so we have some guests-- people we like, but still, guests-- and most of us aren't staying overnight, but are gonna make the 2.5-hr drive home afterwards.
So.
But the difference is that last season we hadn't won a game, and this season, we're still undefeated. The final bout for the championships is next Saturday. So this is kind of crammed in-- it'll be a great chance for us to work on a couple of new strategies, since our coach is never satisfied (and yes, we won our last bout by 50, and the one before that by 20, but the one before that was 4 points and the one before that 1, so obviously you can't rest and have to keep changing your game). Our opponents for the championship are going to be pretty tough-- they want it pretty bad. But so do we. So this is a great opportunity for most of us. We're kind of looking at it like that.

I sort of just want to sleep, but actually I've caught up on sleep pretty well over the last few days so really I should get off my ass and finish packing. Oh yeah, I packed six different pairs of fishnets (basic blue, basic red, thigh-high red, fencenet red, fencenet blue, and basic white, for the record) but forgot any clean underwear, so I kind of had to re-consider the packing job.

I also forgot about needing a passport to cross international boundaries until 10 minutes ago (my ride's coming in 5), but after a moment's blinding panic wherein I ran to the drawer where I *thought* I'd left my passport, I found it exactly where I'd put it. That has to be some sort of record.

So I'm off to attempt to kick some ass. I splurged and bought myself a set of grippy wheels for this bout and the next one I'm theoretically skating on concrete-- we'll see if that one really happens-- but as it happens I like them for practice too, so maybe it wasn't such an extravagance. (They're hybrids, for different kinds of tracks, so, we'll see if I use them a lot or not.)