spoiled chinese girl

So today was basically freestyle, freestyle, freestyle at NAUCC. Loads of groupings of people in all sorts of configurations. There’s solo routines, pairs routines, group routines, club routines… my head was spinning.

I also slept in because of the late night of chatting and boozing with my roommate (Jamey) which I remembered now was amusing in the fact that I swear, I was the only person to not have a clue who this dude was. Every time someone asked me who I was rooming with I’d say “Jamey something something” and they’d go “Oh Jamey! I know him!” and prattle on for a few minutes. I found it amusing.

Anyways, around 10am there was lots of loud knocking at my door. About 3 rounds of it. I gave up trying to get out of bed because I was just not about to do so. Then the phone started ringing. And ringing, and ringing.

And finally I gave in and answered the bloody phone. So now at least everyone knew I was alive, but not much in terms of being awake. That was fine with me. I was being requested to help configure a letter of recommendation for Jeff for his USA scholarship application. So I’m off to the races (not litterally) in showering and driving to the school to write up this letter and… the laptop bearer isn’t there. Ah well.

Finally we get to writing this letter and I don’t write very well in such a structured format. Rob asked me to write because he reads this blog and knows I can prattle on about near anything, but it’s what I’m interested in writing about and what can be flowed freely through my fingertips. Letters of recommendation require time and patience neither of which we had since these letters were required in mere hours where if it were me I would have taken days.

To add to our hurried approach, the Toronto freestyle group was performing soon and we all obviously wanted to watch! The Toronto Unicyclists club has been in existance for over 20 years, and this was the FIRST time the Toronto club had ever had a freestyle group/routine at any unicycling convention. To say it was a big deal is an understatement.

Our team had 6 members performing (plus two alternates) and because there were 6 people on the court it was considered a large group. (The absolutely smallest of the large groups however!) And I learned this day what I would carry with me throughout the convention.

Canadians, by nature, are LOUD. No matter where we went, you could always tell when there was a Canadian in competition, and you could always tell where the Canadian spectators were sitting. The group did AMAZING and I was extremely proud of them.

The expert routines blew my mind. The amount of gravity-defying that I witnessed was awe-inspiring, even though I really have no interest in freestyle riding. It still looks damn cool. Took as many pictures as I could cram in while still watching the event and wishing I had a longer lens.

At some point was back at the hotel to change or just relax for a bit, I’m sure I took a nap somewhere in there because I’d been not sleeping at all so far. The public show that night was awesome. Lots of unicycling, as to be expected, the MC’s were jugglers and comedians which was kind of cute. And the Flying Aces with their frisbee routines and hackey sack (I’m sorry, I just can’t call it foot-bag no matter how much you decide to hackey me for it later) And no matter who you are, Sem & Theresa’s show is pretty fantastic. Who knew the tops of bleachers could get you away from the dangers of the splash zone, and also safely ontop of a 14ft unicycle?

Back to the hotel for birthday parties, marshmallow catching and stuffing contests, and drinking a whole lot of seriously watered down coolers. (3.5% is NOT alcohol!)

So I hauled my track bike out of it’s winter storage.  Notice how it’s early June.  I’ve been otherwise too lazy, too busy, or generally just too… to actually go riding.  Boy it hurt.

My crotch hurt within seconds.  My lungs hurt within minutes.  And a half hour in when I finally gave up and went home, my leg muscles cramped so much I couldn’t get off my bike like a normal person.

As in my legs wouldn’t move to get my feet out of the toe-clips.  So to get off the bike I just fell over, attached to the bike, onto my right side, and onto the lawn beside the road in front of my house.  Then kicked and crawled my way out from under.

But man that was fun.  Phil promises that we should go riding the Lakeshore.  And the excitement in that is the fact that it’s FLAT GROUND.  Everywhere in the residential area I live in is hills.  Many quite steep hills, some not so steep, some barely noticable.  But everything is an accent or a decent.  And nothing is really flat.  Ever.  Flat riding will make me speed up so much more which makes me happy.

Although the hills I currently ride all over in big wide circles do nothing but make me more awesome for when I finally take the bike onto a flat surface.

Can’t wait for this summer to truly begin!

Work.  The girl at work who is leaving, she is super into Chinese food.  Surprisingly enough, I’m Chinese.  And I eat food.  Anyways, over the weekend I ended up making a big batch of pork fried rice, and brought a tub of it in on Monday for her.  I made note that she wasn’t allowed to add soy sauce to it when she eats it.

She added it anyways.

So for her last day, I am returning this massive tub that she leant to me while she gave me this large amount of chicken fingers from last week.  Tis my plan to stuff this container (I would say at least 12 inches long, five or six inches wide and at least 3 inches deep) to the brim with fried rice.  And this time I won’t add soy sauce to it.

One task down.

I went to unicycle club after my hideous amounts of cooking.  We were at the track today, and after parking I realized I couldn’t carry two unciycles, a helmet, shin pads and my bag all at the same time.  The helmet and pads get strapped to my body whilst I walk unciycles to the track from the lot.

Rode around the track once, also participated in some straight-away races, just did some random fooling around before heading to the Groves for ice cream.  Twas fun.  At some point Phil had started complaining about a lot of stuff he’s got going, and I decided to rub his back in the “Aww poor baby” type of way, when he commented how hot my hands were.

I haven’t been noticing.  I have, however, been noticing the accumulation of pimples and the like, over the past two weeks.  But it’s been deemed that Phil, who normally is a heat generator, was cold and my circulation has been ramped up since the start of my yoga practice and 30 day challenge especially which was making me run hot.

Then later Phil told me I’d been looking healthier than I had in a long time.  I don’t see that either.

I don’t see a lot of things though.

I was supposed to go to unicycle club on Thursday, and Phil was also supposed to take me lens shopping beforehand.  So after driving from work to my house to pick up my camera, the driving from my house to his house, I had been in the car just about an hour and a half.  Rush hour is not fun.  Even if it’s the beginning of rush hour.

But I call Phil when I was five minutes away from him, same as I always do, and he’s saying how we probably won’t make it to the store in time, which was closing in about half an hour and with traffic, and the store being across town, I agreed.

Only problem being he didn’t want to go to unicycle club because he wasn’t feeling too thrilled.  Which I understand, he’s under the weather.  Problem being he also wasn’t up to the idea of having visitors.  And I was by now passing by his building.

So he asked if I was still going to club, which I planned on going to, but when he said he didn’t want visitors I had nowhere to go.  I realized there were very few, mainly… no one, I could call to hang out with for two hours.

I had no intentions of hanging out with myself for two hours downtown before club started.  So I did what I would do in such a situation, drive in a wide circle, and start heading back.

Took me an hour to get back home.  2 and a half hour drive, for nothing.  Thrilling.  I had to put gas in my car at some point as well cuz it sucked not having gas.  Anyways, that was most of my night.  I ended up at Brandons playing Guitar Hero on my PS2, and falling asleep on the couch.

Yesterday I went on my first trail ride on my Rachel Rossin track bike.  It wsa fun and exciting, but that’s for another blog entry.

I wanted to write about something different.  I was at Bisegal (they’re custom bike frame builders, they build all of the wheels for Bedford Unicycles, and generally are very VERY nice people) before the ride to put the pedals & toeclips onto my bike.  Something that was desperately needed.  And there’s a rehearsal studio down the hall that always has bands rehearsing in, and it’s not sound-proofed at all so you can hear everything that’s going on.

So going away from the shop there was some death metal band playing, I’m not sure what death metal is supposed to sound like so it’s really hard to figure out whteher or not to call it good.  But it’s not really my kind of music so I couldn’t really enjoy it.  We were leaving anyways.

Coming back there was a different sound altogether.  It was pretty pop-ish, and sort of pop-rock, not so much the punk-pop that’s going on right now, much happier and upbeat.  My kind of thing that I wouldn’t mind listening to all day long.  And I was really getting into what they were working on.

Of course I had no way of figuring out who they were.  I wasn’t going to go knocking on the door saying “Hi, I’m Angela.  I really like you’re music. Who are you?” because I’m much to shy for that.

So instead I decided I was going to write a note.  That basically said exactly what I wrote above.  And leave it under the door.  And my friends Phil and Kelly laughed at me.  Because they even played out that I would run over to the door, really quietly shove it under the door, and run back giggling.

Of course now I have this senario in my head about how I’m going to do all this.

And that’s pretty much exactly what I did.  And Kelly was watching out the door while I ran back from the studio’s door.  And Kelly announced to the bike shop “There’s the giggle!” which of course made me giggle more at what I’d just done.

Anyways, not knowing who on earth was in there I sort of just left it at that.  Figured if no one wrote back I could go back next Saturday and see if it’s the same band playing again.  Maybe catch them coming in or out or something, I don’t know.  I don’t want to sound like a stalker, but I’m at the bike shop a lot so it wasn’t THAT out of the ordinary.

But someone wrote back.  The band I had the pleasure of hearing rehearse is a band called The Drop Joys (http://www.thedropjoys.com/) Dude who wrote to me was named David.  He says he didn’t think they sounded all that great, but I’ve yet to find a musician who REALLY liked how they rehearsed.  They’re perfectionists, but I guess it makes sense.  I’m out to enjoy music, not nit-pick at it.

Anyways, been at their website, grabbed the mp3 that was available and I’m honestly really looking forward to hearing more from these guys.  They seem to have done lots already which is awesome.  And it’s just fun that I can learn about a new band in such an obscure way.