yesterday i went to the o’s game. you know it’s a sunday and you’re an orioles fan when your first real meal of the day is an esskay hot dog and a natty boh (i totally got excited when i found the one beer stand in the park that sells natty bohs). we lost the game, though it was funny in the 9th inning when they showed some old man chilling in the stands with the hood of his jacket over his head and they started to play the imperial march from star wars — he totally looked like the emperor, bahahahaha. he didn’t realize that they were showing him on the screen until someone jumped up in front of him and the stadium saw him lift his hood up and look at the screen and take his hood off, haha. afterwards they were doing the brooks robinson high school all-star game, so i stayed and watched that for a few innings before hopping back on the light rail to my car and then up to skateland for open skate.
mibbs breakin’ ribs helped me out some more with my stance while i fought with the rental skates at the putty hill skateland — she came by me while i went around the rink and told me to keep my butt out, and then after we talked about my stance a bit more i told her i think i’ve got it under control and said “just call me ‘mr. new booty’” while i flashed an “OK” sign at her… she cracked up and called me a funny motherfucker and later said that should be my derby name. she even called me “mr. newbooty” in an email reply today. i dunno, i still want to be “the snallygaster”, though!
cynicalscribe was also there at open skate last night, and since my skates should be arriving tomorrow (they BETTER!), we might be able to hit up some other skating rinks on non-skateland open-skate nights.
work today was better than i was expecting, since i was totally expecting i’d be placed on the phone team for a period of time today. i’d been at work for only an hour or two and we had 30-something calls coming in at once — 20 or so calls were being handled, while another 10-15 calls were still in queue. i don’t really like answering the 800-line, even though it is only for federal accounts and not general customer-service.
i saw on the ups tracking page that my skates arrived at the distribution center here in laurel. since that’s practically around the corner from both work and the apartment, i tried calling ups to see if they could just hold the package at the center for me to pick it up today, but apparently since there hadn’t been any delivery attempts yet they weren’t able to do like i wanted. that didn’t stop me from going by the ups customer center after work to see if they would pretty-please let me pick up my package, though. i still didn’t have any luck, and it looks like i’ll have to wait until i can get home after the government symposium i’m taking photos of for work tomorrow to actually get my skates in-hand. even though they arrived in laurel and are scheduled to arrive at my place in annapolis tomorrow, it says online now that they left the laurel distribution center at 8:14 pm. where are they going?? the only place i can think of is the landover distribution center, but i would have thought they’d have arrived there by now, 6 hours after they left the laurel center. if they end up in pennsylvania somehow and i don’t get them tomorrow i’m going to be as cross as mr flibble!
today was the wwdc keynote speech — i had to follow along on my phone, but it seemed interesting enough. when i get a chance i need to watch the actual presentation to see the new developments in leopard.
after work and trying to plead with the folks at the ups customer service center, i went up to skateland to see dolly rocket help train the charm city roller girls. i told mibbs how i almost started practicing my derby stance when i was at the gas station about to drive up to skateland, but i figured that it’s not that great of an idea to stand like i’m about to take a crap in the exxon parking lot. yosemite slam and i talked about derby while we watched the scrimmages, and i mentioned how it’d be interesting if a bout could get on a local public-access channel or something, since roller derby used to be on tv way back in the day.
fun fact — frank zappa’s mom would probably be a charm city roller girls fan:
I couldn’t wait to hear it. My family had a genuine lo-fi record player: a Decca. It was a little box about four inches deep, sitting on short metal legs (because the speaker was on the bottom), and it had one of those clunky tonearms that you had to put a quarter on top of to hold it down. It played all three speeds, but it had never been set to 33 1/3 before.
The record player was in the corner of the living room where my mother did the ironing. When she bought it, they gave her a free record of “The Little Shoemaker,” by some middle-aged white-guy singing group on Mercury. She used to listen to “The Little Shoemaker” while she was ironing, so that was the only place where I could listen to my new Varése album.
I turned the volume all the way up (in order to get the maximum amount of ‘fi’), and carefully placed the all-purpose osmium-tipped needle on the lead-in spiral to “Ionisation.” I have a nice Catholic mother who likes to watch Roller Derby. When she heard what came out of that little speaker on the bottom of the Decca, she looked at me like I was out of my fucking mind. – from “The Real Frank Zappa Book” by Frank Zappa
i mean, he was born in baltimore, you know!
anyway, so we talked about what-if-ccrg-was-on-tv and he said that dundalk high school has their own channel and he knows the guy in charge and he might try talking with that guy to find out more details. we both agreed though that it’d probably need a 7-second delay and no microphone on coach ballbricker, bahahaha!
and then i came back to the apartment and figured out the stuff for taking photos tomorrow. the nice thing about tomorrow’s photoshoot is that i not only get paid as my own business for photographing, but my supervisor approved me for it as overtime. sweet!