Random whatever.

Some days it's not worth trying to gnaw through the straps.

Shut the F*** Up, Donnie

Did this as a bowling team idea for some of the Derby Dolls. The name "Bowling Rack-Outs" is a variation on another subgroup in the Dolls known as the "Rolling Blackouts". One guess as to what they're referring to. Anyway, unfortunately the bowling team isn't using my design. Phooey, I still think it's funny.

Back to School

On Saturday we went to two parties...again. It's weird how people have been scheduling overlapping social events in my life lately. Earlier in the day we rode the motorsickles down to Orange County for some beer-drinkin', rib-eatin', tv-watchin', redone-house-lookin', bird-kissin' fun. After that we went home, fed the cats, changed clothes and went over to Eva Destruction's pad for a "Back to School" themed party. The photographic evidence shown above was the TAME stuff.

stencils are fun!

Here are a couple of pix of the Marc Bolan shirt I made last month. I made a stencil using a manila envelope and packing tape. Good for the el cheepo way of doing stencils if you spray the paint on. Bad if you use a sponge brush and apply the paint directly, as the paper gets all soggy even with the packing tape as backup. It was a fun experiment, at any rate. I gotta try this out with an airbrush, though. I don't use spray cans because the paint eventually fades.

Oh, and this glows in the dark, too. I'm such a GEEK!

Harrumph.

Uh, OK.

Today's an off day. Part of it is due to a hangover and shitty derby practice. Part of it is because I can't seem to upload stuff to this stupid blog that no one reads anyway so why am I bothering?

I don't know. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Slow

I suck. I have no job and have been extremely lazy about finishing up computer art that's been sitting on the ol' D drive for months. I gotta get off my ass. Especially when there's people out there doing cool shit like this guy: http://www.vanbeater.com/flash.html

More Stoopid Doodles

Actual Artwork-Type Stuff

OVER THE LINE, SMOKEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last night I went bowling for the second time ever in my life. The first time I bowled I hurt myself. That sucked. This time went much better, which I attribute to sucking down a couple of White Russians through the course of the game. Yes, I'm a big fan of the Big Lebowski, so I was gonna live that aspect up as much as possible. Myna Threat and Blitzkrieg also ordered rounds for themselves due to my evil influence. I even wore a Lebowskifest shirt just for added geek points. Oh yeah, this was a bowling fundraiser for the Derby Dolls, and it was fun. The best bowling form I saw was from Markie D Sod, who added some real artistic moves to the bowling repetoire. It was a sight to behold. She proudly announced that she was the lowest scorer on her team. Way to go, Markie!

Stuffed Stupid

Dang, I love to eat. And eat I did yesterday. Total pig-out fest due to going to two parties with good food. It all started Friday night, as it triggered my almost-guilt-free binge.

There's a whole sub-culture of bicyclists out there. They've been becoming a bit more prominent the past few months what with the gasoline pricing going the way it is. I found them through some of my derby teamates, as they ride bikes on their non-skating days. So I hooked up with some Westside bicyclists for what's called the 310 ride. It happens the third Friday night of every month starting at around 10pm and they all meet up by the Santa Monica Pier. I showed up...and was the only girl at first. Lourd. After about 15 minutes of impatiently waiting around(this was one helluva laid-back group), a brother-sister combo show up. Two girls out of 25 riders. Wow. Most of the bikes were typical mountain-y bikes, or racingesque bikes, a mini-bike, and a couple of weird bikes. Eventually they all get going and we ride.

It's a more casual pace than I expected. In fact, it was downright sluggish. I put my bike into the lowest gear possible just to keep my legs moving. We took up the Santa Monica streets, and people waved and yelled at us as we went by. Not all of it was negative, btw. UCLA was our goal, and some exploring therein. We broke up into small groups, head onto campus, lock the bikes up, and walk around looking for a way to UCLA's underground. No, not a club scene, but really underground. We crawled under a building to find a network of tunnels that has steam lines, phone lines, electrical lines, and any other kind of lines going through. It was fun crawling around and looking at all this stuff. By 1am I had to go home and sleeeeeeep. Good workout.

In the early-to-me morning I met up with Kubo, her two English Bull Terriers and Jihad with her from-Chicago friend for some hiking in Runyon Canyon. It's a very popular place for rich and pretty people to hike with their dogs...there's some amazing views of the city which Jihad's friend enjoyed very much. I always like hanging out with my teamates like this. We yakked a lot, had to practically drag one of Kubo's dogs up and down the trails(he's a bit lazy), and sweated a bunch. Another good workout! After about an hour and a half of hiking, we were done and parted ways. Now I was off to Exercise Option #3 in less than 18 hours.

I drove to Pasadena to meet up with Suzy Snakeyes, Axles of Evil, Kammi Kazi, Razorslut, Juana Beat'n and fresh meat Raggedy Annarchy for some skating at this weird little outdoor roller rink in Robinson Park. There's a tree in the middle of the rink with metal railing on both the inside and outside perimeters of the space. We did some scrimmaging while attempting to not send anyone into the railings, as that would hurt like a mofo and the injuries resulting would surely suck. Kammi ended up sliding into the railing and got some cement track-rash in the process. Razor got her bell rung by Kammi when Kammi tried to block Razor and her shoulder went into Razor's face. I was the worst jammer ever as I kept using my hands to block as I went by Suzy. Raggedy Annarchy got some useful hints on strategy and technique that other LA fresh meat haven't gotten yet. Juana's dogs kept wandering all over the rink while we skated. We had a great time! Next week we're bringing beer.

After all this exercise I went home, took a nap, hosed myself off, and drove with the husbitch to his sister's house in Torrance for her birthday/end-of-summer party. She's the type of person who does a lot of business networking, and so the guests at this party reflected that. Not a lot of family there, so that limited the amount of people that we knew, and the amount of people that we would want to get to know. However, there was a ton o' food supplied by caterers along with margaritas. We got over ourselves and ate. And ate. And ate.

After several hours we managed to roll ourselves out to the car and drive back home to feed the cats and prep for party numero two-o being held in Highland Park by a former Derby Doll and her husband. The theme was a seventies-type thing complete with hot tub, horrible music, lounge pantsuits and fondue. Ahhhh, fondue. I've never had it before, but damn! it's good! Especially the cheese stuff. Garlic-y as hell, which meant I was one step from just drinking it straight. It went really well with the highly alcoholic sangria-ish punch they had. My belly is distended like Buddha by the end of the night. Today I pay with some beach skating.

To top off the fun, someone posted this site on a board that I mainly lurk on. Fun stuff!

Driving and Distraction

I usually hate driving. That's why I have a motorcycle. However, it's a pain in the ass to ride a bike to, say, San Diego when one wants to skate with the league down there. So yesterday I ended up being the driver for four of us from LA to trek on down to SD for derby practice.

Despite traffic, I almost had fun driving. It's purely because I had company, I'm sure. It's not often that I actually get to talk to others in the league for extended periods of time...we're usually seeing all of each other at practice, at a meeting, or in a bar. Being stuck in a car brings up the usual skate topics, but it also expands the realm of conversation to the point where I now know that one of my teamates has a sister who's an animal chiropractor. Who knew?! I would've done the same drive today, except that I had morning plans that interfered.

Which brings me to the said plans. Five other derby girls and myself were slated to be on a game show for Comedy Central called "Distraction". It's a quiz show that's actually kind of interesting to watch. I'd love to tell you what our particular distraction was for the contestants, but it'll air soon enough in January where you can see for yourselves.

One thing that I found distracting was that I had to wear a pink shirt. I HATE pink. Loathe it. Can't stand it. Especially if it's baby pink. It's just disgusting. And it shows sweat stains very prominantly. So of course the dressing room that we were all in didn't have air conditioning or a window so that said sweat stains wouldn't happen. I'm betting that I'll be looking like a total pig in the show.

We also had to deal with a slick floor to skate on. One of the girls went to a rehearsal for the segment yesterday and told us to wear our indoor wheels. FYI, there's a difference between indoor and outdoor skate wheels. Indoor tend to be a little harder so that you can go faster on, say, a rink floor. Outdoor are softer for a little more grab and a little more cushion going over whatever comes across your path. On slick floors, the outdoor wheels would be better for the grip factor. I brought that up to said girl that advised us to bring indoor wheels, but she said she slid around more on her outdoor wheels. I was baffled by this and decided to take both my indoor and outdoor skates with me.

I'm glad I did.

The floor was stupid-slick and we had to skate in a tight circle. In rehearsal I was sliding all over the place with my indoor skates, which prevented me from doing the distracting thing I was supposed to do. As soon as I had the chance I changed skates. Ahhhhhhh, better! During the taping, however, me and one of the other girls got our feet tangled up and we almost fell. That's gonna look GREAT, I'm sure.< /sarcasm>.

Most of the crew were very nice, and the contestant who won the round we were in was pretty cool. We left some stickers and went on our way by 2pm.

Now I can get back to finishing the burlesque flyer I'm doing for the league. Btw, keep Oct. 10 free if you want to see some women take their clothes off at the Derby.

Power

So as the world knows, LA had a power outage pretty much city-wide yesterday. You'd think that the Apocalypse was upon us with the way the tv news was carrying on about it, but the only thing that happened was that traffic got even more stupid. Yeah, I didn't think that was possible either, but there it was.

I was on my bicycle when the power went out and didn't even know what had happened until I got home and the husband announced that said power was out. He also said the weird thing about said power going out was that when it did, all the dogs in the neighborhood started barking, but everything else got reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally quiet. Weird!

Everything was back up and running a short time later, except for our cable internet access. THAT sucked.

Later in the day I had to go to a Derby Doll meeting in Los Feliz, and afterwards went to the Derby to watch some burlesque. Yes, burlesque. It's alive and well, and frankly is quite entertaining in a world where explicit porn reigns supreme on computer screens across the land. I like-a the tease. And the outfits. And the musical selection. And the women. They're not air-brushed sex toys...they're real women. HAWT!! I tell you. It didn't matter what size, shape, hair color, or tattoos these women had, they were all pretty damn attractive in different ways. A great reminder that we all don't have to look like Pamela Anderson or Anna-Nicole Smith to be pretty.

Would you buy a shirt with this on it?

A Safe Place

This past week I was busy tearing the house apart looking for my social security card. I needed it for a tv show that a few of us Derby Dolls are doing later this week and we're getting a little bit of sweet moolah for it. Not enough to keep me in the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed, but it'll do.

Anyway, I had forgotten where I put my card, as I had found a reallyreallyreally safe place for it. Do other people do this often? I certainly have, and it's infuriating. I know that I have the card somewhere not too far down in the depths of stuff that's in the house, but where exactly is it? Where's the last place I remember having it? If I knew the answer to that, I would've found the stoopid thing already. AUGH. I'm also still looking for a CD case full of my rockin' self-burned cd's of the same 4o songs that I can listen to until the end of time and not be sick of them. That's in a safe place that hasn't been rediscovered by me...yet.

So after much digging, grumbling, sifting, expletives galore and a thrown object or two, I find the card. Yes! I can now go back to job-hunting with impunity. By the way, I found the card in my Xena: Warrior Princess lunchbox. Duh! Definitely a safe place!



Later in the afternoon I caught a show that dealt with the last hour of American Airlines Flight 11, which was the first plane that was crashed into the World Trade Center four years ago today. Watching this reminded me that there's no such thing as a safe place for people, especially coming on the heels of Hurricaine Katrina. LA is anything but a safe place in the natural disaster arena, but here I am...still. What does that say about me, I wonder. I prefer having my stuff safe than myself? Not like the stuff would be very safe anyway. Hmmmm. I guess I'm as complacent as the people who I'd like to think are more shallow than myself. Interesting wake-up call.

Wheeeeeeee!

Well lookie here, an official blog!

OK, I have a blog on MySpace, but this-here is supposed to be the real deal, innit?

Anyhoo, it should be fun to see me try to figure out how all this works. I just wanna post pix and stuff.

Hey look, I think I'm figuring it out already. Meet my Monkey Skeleton parasol that I made for use in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago for Rollercon.

"Rollercon? What's that?" You might be asking yourself right about now.

Oh yeah, Rollercon is a meet-n-greet of the new all-girl roller derby leagues that are popping up all over the US. It happened the weekend before Labor Day with over 400 girls attending. It was wild, to say the least. The first night there I was used as a human megaphone by the organizer of the event and for the rest of the weekend I wasn't running on all cylinders due to the damage that hot outside air and cold inside air conditioning + indoor smokers did to my throat. But I still managed to have fun. And I got to use a parasol and not be too embarrassed about it.

Hopefully our league will get some investors soon so that we can secure the warehouse space in downtown LA that we've had our eye on for the past two months and get some bouts going. I miss the banked track...it's faster to skate on, more easily manoeverable than flat-track, and it doesn't hurt as bad as concrete when one falls on it. The crowds love it, too.

Have I babbled enough for one entry? Maybe so.