Tricking your friends into ROLLERDERBY

So I realized a long time ago that I am waaay beyond just having rollerderby as a hobby, I never really seem to do very good with just having hobbies, sicne I tend to totally go overboard with it. SO BE IT! I also realized that I had lots of friends that did not do roller-derby... and this was a problem, because they just did not really appreciate the drunk conversations about wheels, positional blocking vs. big hits and just all those things that I enjoy... So I decided that those people were either lost (I still ove them and spend time talking about other things) or people I could trick into coming over to the dark side (aka ROLLERDERBY).

I deemed my friend Trish and Em lost before I even tried, even if Em acctually LIKES to rollerskate, she just don't seem to be really into the competative element of it... and Trish.. well Trish probably just rather watch it and drink red wine. And I am FINE with that - but I have mede them both get on skates and go skating with me... but I leave them at that.

 (HussInsane having a summer jam on skates, picture stolen from Facebook)

My friend Jenny (aka HussInsane) was a different story, we used to live together back in the snowboarding days and compete about EVERYTHING, and now she was playing floorball... And I KNEW she would LOVE rollerderby, if I JUST got her on a pair of skates and too a practice. So I finally go her a pair of heavy cheap skates on e-bay and dragged them all the way from New York to Sweden and made her come to a Stockholm Rollerderby practice. And yeah... the rest is history... the rest is history... She is now a part of Stockholm Rollerderbys travel-team and very hooked, and now we have dragged Jessica (derbyname to come) into it too, it's like a drug mMmOHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(Shamelessly stolen from Ponys Facebook)

But then there is my other friend Mirijam (aka PinkPony) who I lured in with kitch, beer, friendship and white skates. And I am slowly working her into the derby grid... I actually bought skates on e-bay for her, to make sure she would continue...   She also lives here in Malmö and skates for Crime City, and she is also one of my friends from snowboarding. I really think that ex-snowboarders make great rollerderby-players - we like to look kool but are quite fearless at the same time. And Pony has some of the most awesome tattooes that I have ever seen - she will be great - when I start to kidnap her for practice... MOHAHAHhahahahahahHAhahaha

Yeah... there are so many things that are luring about rollerderby, the friends you make, how much you get in shape, the strategy, the funny and bad jokes people tell, the silly outfits people come up with, the parties, the dinners and just rollerderby itself... it just never sleeps... yeah...

Let's all go skate now... because it is GREAT fun!

Dinner and a broken knee

 

During scrimmage I got tripped and my knee got exposed to the lovley floor... not even ice could save it from looking like a blue and red tender mess...  So I spent the night saying aaaaaooooo everytime anything touched my knee... with advil and ice... yeah...

Da Fisty, Loony and Fenix made dinner together with me yesterday... First an amazingly healthy vegetarian dinner... and then for desert we had something very Swedish we like to call MarängSwiss - it is whipped cream, maurenges, vanilla ice-cream, bananas and chocolate sauce... yeah... and then you mix it all together and eat it... MMmMmmMMmmm... 

Stockholm Rollerderby beats Kallio Rolling Rainbows (Helsinki)

(Picture shamelessly stolen from Facebook)

HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to Stockholm Rollerderby to their first win of the season! Way to go girls! Their next stop is here in Malmö on the 12th of March, to play my beloved Crime City Rollers! Oh JOY!
We are currently making the MVP (Most Valuable Player)-awards for the game on the 12th of March. Oh, and it sold out in ONE hour... but to be honest, our venue is tiiiiiny...  

And I was supposed to play here this weekend...

Sometime life just don't let you do all the things you hope for and want... I just can't leave Sweden right now for numerous reasons... but it makes me really sad, like REALLY sad...

I have so many great friends in Gotham and I miss them... Not that I don't love Crime City, CRime City is AMAZEBALLS, but I miss Gotham... I really do... change is painful and hard...

I should be going to LA

I was planning on going to LA this weekend, to play with Gotham, it sort of have been the light in the dark... and I realized I couldn't. I just don't have money and my mind is walking a fine line of crazyness right now. It is just sucky... SUCKY... did I tell you guys it is sucky?

AND on top of all that I gotten sick.. yeah... FML

Back in Crime City - home?

(Photo by Mike Emery)

Sometimes moving home is not moving home, sometimes defining home is hard and confusing. The past 13 month I have had mail sent to five or six different addresses, makes my head spin and makes me lost, just a little. I left Seattle to drive crosscontry with OMG about a year ago, to New York, where I slept on her and Bonnies floor for a six weeks, I moved into my own NYC pad, when leaving USA I sort of lived in Stockholm and Copenhagen, with an emphasis on Copenhagen, and due to the damned hippies we were renting from we moved to Malmö two months before we planed on. We currently live on 27 square meters (290 square feet) and it makes us happy to have a place to live together, but it is too small for two grown adults.

And changing leauges is really hard, it was superhard a year ago when I left Rat City for Gotham, I cried and cried and missed Rat City, and I REALLY REALLY miss Gotham, I miss Manhattan Mayhem, and I miss the Allstars so much it hurts at times. Not that I don't love Crime City and the girls they are just as amazing as many of the New York girls... but I miss Bunny, Bonnie and OMG, just drinking mimosas at the store... I miss Fisti and Justin taking me to muesums or trashy beaches... I miss drunk Fisti and Pie, and Cheese, and Mayday and everyone... I miss them because they are my friends... I miss being asked to do things and being included without it all being a workload.

Sooo different

(A little group of girls that are still standing)

Today I coached 10 girls... well, they were in the beginning of practice, but in the end there where only 6... sooooo different from Crime City where we ALWAYS have at least 12 girls in the end of the practice...And Gothenburg have the best floor I have been on in Europe so far... ahhh sportscourt how I have missed you...

And then we went and had a beer and I was tricked into singing karoeke... It has been a while... I think I might have entertained... well at least myself and the other rollergirls... DAMN that MadFist girl!!!

IN Sweden it is folkligt to be gäj

Oh yeah... sometimes it strikes me... I am JUST like everyone else! It is kind of cozy, I think I really like it!

Reflecting over rollerderby in Sweden

(This is what I look like when I say COOONCENTRATE)

I am in Gothenburg, skated on a supersticky floor in my Stingers yesterday, I been promised that the floor tomorrow will not be as sticky. The girls did a great job, and they seemed to gain one or two pointers from my practice... I am very much about basic skills, you just cannot skip basic skills, and I have done three freash meat periods, so I have done so much basic skills I can puke, but it have made me a better derby player. Rollerderby is best played if you don't think about your skates anymore, it should just be like wearing sneakers... and then when that level is achived there is hella lot of derby to learn... but remember to always know where your partner is... 

About Rollerderby in Sweden, it is on very different levels, I so far have not seen or skated with Umeå, or Lule, I know Visby has a leauge but it is my understanding that they are only four or five girls currently.  I have coached Stockholm Rollerderby, Malmö (Crime City Rollers) and Gothenburg Rollerderby (Göteborg in Swedish). Stockholm is by far the oldest leauge (2007) and also the leauge with most developed skaters, Gothenburg (Fall 2009 -Winter 2010) is a little older than Malmö (Spring 2010), but Malmö have been more fortune in their recruiting and managed to build a larger leauge with the monetary ability to bring in guest coaches in addition to having Vix Viking who had skated with the London Girls for a while. Stockholm now has a coach with a very long experiance and I think that is going to benefit them very much. It will probably bring the leauge together - but even before he came in, Stockholm was a very hardworking leauge brining in speedskaters to teach them strides, going to bootcamps and also having a structured training committee. 
Having a driven coach or two, seem to be very important, or a coach with previous derby experiance, this seem to be really important to lots of starting up leauges, ot it tend to end up being ''a blind leading a blind''. Who knows, I can only speculate - because the girls I saw in Gothenburg yesterday was working their ass off, and that is a quality I really, really value, hard work. Even if you are the best skater when you start derby, does not mean you will become the best derby-player... it is a HUGE steppingstone, but if you don't learn the game, you will be that lonely girl skating cicles around yourself.

So concentrate and think for yourself why you do things, and sometimes we do things because our coach tells us so, and then we do that to... some drills are used to work on your skills or muscles and not directly transferable into derby... and that is ok... just be aware of it!

 

Off to Gothenburg

This time no car accidents, since I am NOT driving, I am taking the train to Gothenburg, the second largest city of Sweden. They have a nice little team there, that I am going to spend a few hours coaching today and tomorrow.... yes, it will be good times and good fun!

(this is what I looked like 2004 when i was in the Gothenburg area)

Cooking on national TV

 (bilden stulen från QX.se hemsida)

So it finally aired, the TV-show I was shooting for a few months back... yeah... that was what it was all about... to be honest I haven't even seen it myself yet... I guess I have never seen a single episode of it, and the one with myself would be the first. So I am thinking about maybe watching the episode tonight and then watch the one of me afterward.

Oh, for all of you who are not Swedish, the show is basically a four day cooking show, so you are the host that cooks for one day and the other three days you just go home to the people that were your guests and eat what they cook for you. And then you rank each other on the hosting, the food and all that... I was the first person to host, and I had NO clue who was gonna come for food... so let alone say that I was overly nervous... yeah... ehhhh...  but it was a good time and a great experiance... ha ha ha... you know all those things you say after playing a blowout game and you are on the loosing side... but I always feel like a winner...

And for you who missed it and wanna see me on TV, Swedish speaking, probably with a dumb hint of American... (it was shot a week after I cam back from US) you can find it on TV4 PLAY.

Berlin weekend

We color block

We roll in STYLE

We travel in packs

We party with Bombshells

Somewhere between the photos we managed to practice and scrimmage... I am very proud of the CCR girls that got to skate their first fully reffed scrimmage! You girls are looking great, even if we still have lots of hard work ahead of us!

Boutfit from Berlin?

)=

 (the front)

 (the back)

I spent the weekend in Berlin with a large portion of the Crime City girls, and I found an amaaaazing outfit at the thriftstore... for ONLY five Euros it could have ben mine... but since it smelled really questionable I was fine with wearing it and then leaving it behind...
But I am looking forward for Maloony making me something along the lines of this.... she laughed uncontrollably while taking those photos... I am shocked that she thought this was entertaining... I am VERY serious about this outfit, and would love for us to bout in it... Berlin makes SEXY outfits! (Next time I will wear NO underwear for added excitement!)

Living in Sweden again

(Vix at the makeover show)

I moved to Sweden, to Malmö, together with Loony, yeah, we are moved into our tiiiiny apartment. We have visited IKEA, we have fought against walls that will not let things stay in them (yeah IN them) and we are amazed by the lack of interest the dude whom lived here before us must have had in the apartment. It is nice to be closer to the leauge I am currently coaching together with Loony. This week we also picked the team that is bouting against Stockholm on March 12th in Sweden's first full-length bout with a full reff-crew and NSO's. It is exciting times for Swedish derby, we are also submitting our WFTDA application...
The other excitement of the week was when Vix Viking was participating in 'Trinny and Susannah making over Sweden', a Brittish TV-show making-over people, and Vix day culminated in a catwalk in a local mall... and Crime City came to cheer foor her, with flag and everything... She for sure had the loudest and largest cheering section of all the girls that gotten cut, painted and dressed....

Showering in a storm

 (Picture shamelessly stolen from here)

There is a perfect storm outside, the windows are shaking and have done so all night. Malou got up this morning and went back to Denmark to go to school, she will have to do that every morning, take the train over the sound. So today I'm getting a few things, but foremost I'm taking a shower. I have a hate/love relationship with the shower.... I love being squeaking claen, but I HATE to shower... it is boring and a waste of time and maybe water too...  but then I really do like the shower liquid soap I have... It's mentholy and strong... makes my skin tingle, so I guess that makes up for some of the boring.

Eh, by the way, I just surfed into American Appearals homepage (because I wanted to find a picture of my tingeling soap), and there is a topless girl on a donkey. I really don't know how to react to this one... please tip me off...

This is how it looks in Malmö

So Crime City Rollers practices in a sports hall in a school in Malmö, the floor is slick, but my Stingers have made the skating a little easier. Even if I still slide when I try do speedlaps. We are very lucky, since the hall has allowed us to tape out a permanent track on the floor. I think that is really important for a leauge to have. Without a track it's very hard to coach track-awareness... I've played derby long enough to know EXACTLY where the track is, and it is a good thing to know, because if you don't know where the track is, you will cut it, unintentionally... During a game the reffs don't care if it's intentionally or unintentionally... a cut is a cut....

Copenhagen - Malmö - Copenhagen - Malmö ... all weekend long

(sometimes Victoria Secret really spits out something....)

Well, three days of coaching... well, two days of coaching and a third day of generally helping out... Had a very long but fruitful meeting with the training committee... Purple and Yellow it is!

Back home in Copenhagen, but soon to move

 (Me and Loony)

So while I was gone the people we are subletting from decided to come home, premature from their snow-bumming experiance... and wanted to move back into ''our'' apartment... This lead to me and Loony looking fro a place with desperation, desperation, desperation... and we turned up a 27m2 apartment in Malmö... we decided to move to Malmö since we coach Crime City Rollers and I am having my budding business there. So on Monday we are moving into a shoebox... me and Loony and no cats... (not that we ever had cats, and I think we both might be slightly allergic)

My first European Scrimmage

(I'm white on the backline looking for the jammer.... suprise... suprise... )

I am no longer a European virgin, I now have been hit and hold in Europe, and I enjoyed it. I went to EROC and held a strategy workshop with Bloody Mary and held a workshop in advanced skating. It was amazing to see how many leauges there is in Europe there is, and how hard they work. I had the joy of skating for the white team, and we won... and as I said in my workshop winning is fun, but that was really not the most important of this scrimmage. I loved to skate next to a Finn, a Swede, a German and a French, whipping an ex-pat American, while being hit by a Belgian and a Britt.

It is hard to say where Europe will be in two years, but considering how much will and hard work there is here I hope for our own WFTDA tournament... Oh YEAH baby...

What makes Europe so interesting is all those women come together, speaking all those different languages, different cultural references and at the same time they are just you GOD OL' DERBY GIRL...

And a big thanks to the Berlin Bombshells for putting on this amazing event, making it possible for so many girls to get together and share that thing we like to call derby loooove...

EROC is over

European Derby is growing.... and it is great to be a part...