Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

October Challenge was today.  We did our first ice dance competition!

It's sort of odd; if you're skating against an actual competitor, the worst you can do is come in second place.  It is technically possible to come in as low as third if you're skating "against the book", if you do really atrociously and score low on the point scale.

No worries here, though.  We came in first. :)  We'll get a DVD of our performance Thursday, which I'll attempt to rip video from and post to YouTube or something, and point folks to any pictures that come out well.

(I didn't even freeze!  Rinks turn warmer in the afternoon when the sun's been out all day.)

Hmm.  Polyester/spandex blend lets the wind rip right on through.  Tights, despite claims to the contrary, are not as warm as jeans, largely for the same reason.  I am going to friggin' freeze during the competition! 

I am grateful that, start to finish, it only takes a little more than a minute to do Dutch Waltz twice through, even with slightly fancy beginning and ending.  And presumably there will be warm drinks available upstairs during the whole affair.

It turns out that fashion in the ice skating world is as rigorously programmed as fancy clothing or auto designs are in the real world.  Designers/makers use This Year's Patterns basically exclusively.   And wouldn't you know it - the dresses that I like fall into last year's category!  The immediate upshot of this is that the dress I ordered in blue isn't available in blue for grownups any more, but only black.  After hemming and hawing, I went ahead and responded to the email saying that yes, I wanted the dress in black.  I haven't heard from the person since, and they failed to give a complete phone number in their email.  (I haven't listened to the phone message they left at my home; hopefully there's a complete number there.)  Another website that claimed to have that dress admitted, when I called them, to having none in stock of any color.

But really, it seems rather unfair that things like this cannot be found in adult medium anymore because it's last year's friggin' pattern.  I am peeved.

(As an aside to the previous post: I can get into an adult small, but it's awfully tight.  I misremembered; it was the juvenile 12-14 that I couldn't fit into at all.)

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EDIT: Dress ordered.  It is promised to be in my hot little hands on or before 9/30.

There's an ISI open competition at our rink in October.  We still aren't sure that we're actually going to compete in it, but the head of the skating program figured that since today was the last day of classes in the current session, everyone in the dance class could test up to one level or another (there are ten levels in the ISI scheme).  So, kind of accidentally, we passed Dance 1 (4 chassés; 4 progressives; each in 4-count rhythm with music) and Dance 2 (swing rolls in 6-count rhythm to music; Dutch waltz to music)!  Hey, I feel competent now.  :)

(Of course, we also started learning swing dance today, which is... well, harder.  Feeling of competency goes away really fast.  I gotta go work on left front 3-turns now, kthxbye.)

I've spent the week all by my onesies at work, so to speak, as my coworker is on vacation in his homeland of Turkey.  While I can claim to have accomplished certain things (taking care of tissue culture and counting cells, getting genomic-based PCR to work to the point I'll be able to clone stuff next week), I am peeved enough by the various results I got yesterday that I am REALLY GLAD that I get to take today off to go watch people skate.  Ha!  So there!  Work, I shall deal with you next week.

- Tea eggs for the win!  Thanks, digitalemur !

– No skating class this AM, but we went skating during public session and got Very Tired.  Reverse Killian position feels *really* weird.  But then again, so did standard Killian at first.  Practice practice practice. 

- Speaking of practicing, there were about three different kids all working on their routines for ISI Worlds, which happens in about two weeks.  They took it in turns out on the ice: the "Ease On Down the Road" girl would go, then the girl with the vaguely recognizable music, then the James Bond boy.  Then they'd do it again.  And again.  That's quite something, in kids none of whom is over the age of about 11, if that.

- Speaking of ISI Worlds, why is it that I can't find ticket information anywhere???  Grmph.

- Having fun with Tactics A2.  Everyone's about level 14, and I clearly need to buy some more spiffy weapons so folks can learn more skillz.  (No, it's not really spelled that way.)  It's a slightly odd system, if like me you never played Tactics Advance but loved the original FFTactics: equipment teaches you how to do stuff.  And everyone gets ability points, even if they didn't participate in a given battle.  Huh???

I Like Weekends.  :)

Today's been really very nice.  We've been home, for starters: while the mattress on the floor at my parents' house works okay for about a week, there's nothing quite like one's own mattress with nice fuzzy flannel sheets to give one a good night's sleep.  We were both so tired that we went to bed around 8-8:15 local time last night.  Woke up around 6, dozed and lolled till, oh, 7:30 or so.  So that was good.

We've done a good combination of "distinctly useful" and "just fun/pleasant" things today.  The combination of having company coming tomorrow and being in a somewhat messy environment for much of last week inspired us to do a fair amount of cleaning.  I tidied the dining room and coffee table (though the coffee table could stand more), cleaned much of the bathroom, and thoroughly vacuumed the  dining room and living room rugs.  The huz cleaned the stovetop and went through a pile of stuff on the kitchen table that's been collecting for quite some time.  We went ice skating for the first time in a bit over a week (last time was Saturday of last weekend), we both played our Wii games that we're working on (one star for the huz, and unbepuzzlement on various paths in Hyrule Castle for me), we've done computer stuff, read, and I even lay down for a while this afternoon after skating.  I beat Golem at card dueling in Chocobo Tales too.  Oh, and we've spent time with the kitties, which is both fun and useful.  Tazz is dozing on my lap even now.

The more I play FFF:CT, the more impressed I am by how generally kid-friendly it is.  Sure, the little chocobo hero is generally saving the world from a nasty demon book-thing, but how threatening is that when the method of saving is to play lots and lots of little games?  Especially when the worst that happens when you lose a challenge, either in a minigame or a duel is.. okay, fine, you lose, try again?  Even in a card duel, if you lose, you lose all your HP and the duel is over.  But the 'real world' chocobo avatar is just fine.  It doesn't die; there's no Game Over.  Golem (or whoever) just stands there and waits for you to challenge him again.  Eventually, you must beat him to advance the plot, but it's entirely likely that there are several mini- and micro-games for you to wander off and beat in the hopes of changing the local environment (usually to access a new area), rescuing one of your chocobo buddies, or gaining a new dueling card with which to improve your deck.  It's true that some of the games are kind of tough.  The microgames are set up in such a way that if you get some moderate number of points, you get an okay sort of dueling card; if you get a much higher number of points, you get a rather cooler card.  For most of the microgames, it's not hugely difficult to get that first level of card.. but of the many many microgames that I've come across, I've gotten the second level card all of twice, and there are two microgames where I haven't managed even the first level.  All these games are short, no more than a couple of minutes, and almost all of them give the sense that if one tries just one more time, one could beat battle level five or achieve the hardest trial run.  Just one more try, really!  Frighteningly addictive, but straightforward in terms of its structure to play for five or ten minutes and then shut it off again - a really excellent setup for a portable system.  Very very good investment, this.

The huz and I have been taking group ice skating lessons since January.  It's a fun - and much less expensive - alternative to fencing, which had been our primary form of 'fun' exercise for a couple of years.  Lessons are held on Saturday morning, and we try to go once some time in the middle of the week between lessons (usually Thursday mornings).

The public session Thursday morning is usually fairly populated.  There's generally between eight and twelve other adults, and often a handful of kids of varying ages and abilities.  Usually someone has the CD player going so they can practice their routine for an upcoming performance or competition.  Oftentimes a staff member is giving a private lesson to a child, complete with portable boom box playing some entirely different piece of music from whatever's in the sound system.  With all these things going, the rink is generally sort of noisy.

The first ten minutes of Thursday morning this past week were different.  For starters, there were only three people on the ice: me, the huz, and another adult.  All three of us are still in fairly basic levels, so none of us had music in the player.  And we all traveled at about the same rate, so we each had our own fairly sizeable piece of rink. 

The sounds that I could hear were the whirr of the cooling fans overhead, the slight scratching noise my blades made as they traveled over the ice, and the whistle of the air traveling through the gaps between my blade and shoe as I moved.  It was a lovely and almost magical experience.

Then a couple of little kids dressed in hockey gear entered the ice along with their parents.  So much for silence!  ..But the experience was great while it lasted.