Well, at the end of 2019, I decided to stop blogging because I was pretty sure that no one was reading this, and I no longer wanted to spend 1-4 hours a month talking to myself. Turns out people were reading this, and in these troubled times, asked me to start it back up. So, here I am.
And, here I was. Let’s go back in time to a more fun era, AKA six months ago. I shall pick back up right where I left off, in September, after coming home from Japan.
Well, you know I can’t sit still, right? So what did I do a mere 3 days after coming back to ‘Murica? I went to my very first roller derby, of course!!
The Rocky Mountain Rollergirls is a local league that I’ve known about for years, and a friend of mine, Sidra, and I have been wanting to go for years but I’d either be too busy or forget to check their schedule. But if you make a calendar reminder for yourself, things happen! So here we were in an unmarked warehouse on a Saturday night getting our derby on.
It was a double-header but I cannot tell you the names of all the teams right now. I think two of them were the Doom Daisies and United States Pummeling Service, hah!! Plus the players have snarky names. Click on the link above to see the team rosters and be amused.
OK, how does this weird thing work? I’ve forgotten all the terminology, but basically there are two teams with one person each that tries to break through the group (offense) and the rest of the team tries to block the other team’s offense player from passing (defense). Once the offense squeaks past the crowd, they do a lap and rinse and repeat as they hit the wall of humanity again. Points are scored in some crazy-ass way for each lap they take. One game ended up with a score of something like 103 to 25 so I have no idea.
But it was fun! I’d go again.
Next up was a lovely Sunday at the Wild Animal Sanctuary taking a friend there for the first time, followed two days later by a Japanese brush lettering class that Michael and I took! It was at Two Hands Paperie in Boulder, an adorable paper, pen and stationery store. The teacher was a petite Japanese lady in a kimono who is a Master Calligrapher. It was insane. We had the traditional tea ceremony that I missed out on in Kyoto! Then we got our calligraphy on.
Here are my practice sheets. She taught us how to hold the brush, then some standard strokes, then numbers 1, 2 and 3, and then some characters. The two pieces on the far right are my finals on really nice paper with one of her seals. The bottom character is “love” and I think the top one is “happiness”. I loved it and I think Michael really enjoyed it too.
Next up was the Scrapbook Expo, so I went there and spent time with friends Margaret and Marcie scrapping and shopping! I took a couple of really good classes, too, and got a lot of cards made for Halloween. And, at the end of the crop, they gave away huge prizes and I WON ONE!! Actually, I did not. The winning ticket was given to me by the ladies sitting next to us who left early. Whaaa?? So the three of us split the prize.
Our last event for September was a concert by a band that I absolutely adored in the 90s: Stabbing Westward. They were around during the alternative/grunge-ish era and then of course broke up in the 2000s and have sortof been back together here and there since then. Like several other bands from the 90s, they came around to tour the 25th anniversary of one of their albums, ever reminding their fanbase how old we are.
And yet, the show ROCKED. They played this very small venue called the Oriental Theater in Denver and they just took me back to my college days when I was all angsty and goth. SUCH great songs. In this photo, they showed the music video for the song behind them, so you saw adorable lead singer now and from 25 years ago. He’s still hot. 🙂
October
Flinging ourselves forward into October, it was hella busy. On the first weekend, I was in San Diego to attend my friend Dana‘s wedding! She is a member of the Beaver Sisters, a group of 5 of us gals from our college days, and the last of us to get married. Her and James were having a chill, beach-side wedding close to home, and of course I had to go!
Us Sistahs stayed at Hotel del Coronado on Coronado Island, a gorgeous historic property. We arrived on Friday night and just crashed. The next day, we all had an awesome spa afternoon followed by a lovely bachelorette dinner with Dana’s sister and future sister-in-law.
On the day of the wedding, we all met at the beach for an absolutely perfect ceremony. Dana’s sister was the officiant and touching words were read by James’ kids. Dana looked stunning!
We then enjoyed the rest of the beautiful day at a beach luncheon and back at the house drinking and being merry.