guess who won a hawaiian shirt at work today! apparently the next “president’s circle” award trip for the high-performing sales representatives in the company is going to be a trip to hawaii, and to get people into the spirit over the upcoming months, the northeast area marketing team is giving away 10 hawaiian shirts per month to the first 10 people who answer a trivia question correctly. last month the question was “what’s the longest-running detective tv show?”, and based on a quick google search on my phone i said “law & order”… apparently the answer was “hawaii 5-0”, go figure. the question this month was “what numbers can you push on your phone to get wave conditions and beach forecasts?”, so after a quick search in the company’s intranet i replied with “#7873 (#SURF)”, and i’m one of the winners! they’re going to make an official announcement to the northeast area tomorrow of who the winners are, and i guess they’ll mail me my hawaiian shirt. now all i need is a beach, something cold in a coconut and a girl in a grass skirt!

today is day 1 of 2 for the major league baseball draft. some guy who was a freshman (i guess — i don’t have the yearbook on me at my apartment to look up for sure, but it’s likely enough unless he transferred in) when i was a senior has now been signed by the toronto blue jays. neat!

today was also open skate in dundalk. i had to still use the rental skates, but at least the rentals at the dundalk skateland don’t try to throw you under a bus or anything like that. i think i did pretty well — i fell twice when i was starting out and getting used to the skates, but at least i fell when i was challenging myself by trying to maintain a crouched stance while i zipped around a turn at speed.

(it’s funny, when i was doing my photojournalism project, i asked mistress may eye and berzerker about roller derby injuries and they said that they actually enjoy getting bruises and that it’s the broken ankles / dislocated shoulders / etc. that they don’t like. i thought they were nuts for enjoying getting bruised up, but now after falling during practice i found myself looking in my mirror to see how my bruises turned out, and getting upset that though i fell on the same spot on my ass twice tonight, there’s not a single bruise there for me to admire! no fair!)

after that i worked some on maintaining my stance in the straightaways, and then straightened up and flew right worked on my crossovers in the turns, and then after that i could combine the two a bit better. by the end of the open skate i was feeling pretty confident — a lot of skating and actually wearing pads this time contributed to that.

i had ordered from sin city skates (motto: “we give a fuck!”) one of their deluxe rookie packages where it gets you the skates, pads, helmet, outdoor wheels, tools, and even your mouth guard. unfortunately, the skates won’t arrive until tuesday, so i’ll miss out on the group practice(s) this weekend. then again, this might be a good thing since i’ve got other stuff i need to get done this weekend anyway.

cynicalscribe was also there for open-skate; there’s some skating rink in columbia that she goes to, so i told her to let me know if she’d want any company at that rink to let me know once i’ve got my skates — even though it costs $7 for non-members to use the facility, it costs about that much to go to open skate when you include tolls and skate rental, and it’d save some time and gas to go to this closer rink too, so hey! bonus!

after open skate i went to see parker at her karaoke. usually there’s maybe about a dozen folks in the bar, but this time there wasn’t a single other person in there. well, i lie — parker’s friends keats and jenna (who works the front desk at howl at the moon on saturday nights) were there, and then i was there, and then one of the regulars showed up, but nobody else was there. so, karaoke stuff was packed up and then we all skeedaddled after i had a beer. i needed a shower after practice and i had to put out a fire with the metrocollective site, so it worked out that we all left the bar early.

so why am i excited for the 16th-17th (besides it being troutman‘s birthday — and yes, john, there’s going to be a cake for your birthday, just keep on reading…)?