Eat your heart out, east coast derby

So if you’re on the east coast, you know that you have to essentially beg, borrow, and steal to get a place to play roller derby. Even temporarily. It’s actually borderline ridiculous.

I got to see a Los Angeles Derby Dolls game this weekend. This building and production is jaw-dropping. I am dedicating a whole post just to it, as east coast people might be interested. Especially if you’ve ever been involved with trying to pull games together over here.

First of all, there’s parking. AND it’s not in a shithole neighborhood. Just imagine! And tons of security people. We got there about and hour and a half early so we could get good places to stand. More on that later.

The entrance is a huge ramp. You make your way up, and there is a large table on the right that takes tickets and checks your name against the “will call” list. I suppose they also sell tickets there. Directly ahead of you is a merch booth.

Spoiler: everybody lives

Fair warning: heavy family crap.  No promises as to this being the least bit interesting.

I act like a rock, but I am not one.  Well, maybe one of those “fool’s gold” rocks that flakes apart.

Shit-tastic Weekend

Gretchen (now 19 months), woke up on Friday with a puffy, pink left eye.  Took her to the doctor, and found that it is periorbital cellulitus.  It’s not serious as long as it is treated, and she is on an oral antibiotic for 10 days.

Yesterday, at the MiL’s house… Gretchen was coming down a flight of carpeted stairs (backwards).  She was doing AWESOME on her own, but I stayed behind her the whole time.  At the 4th step from the bottom, MiL comes over and squeals about how well she is coming down the stairs.   Gretchen twirls to look at her, lost her balance, and swung head-first into the iron railing at the bottom of the staircase.  I couldn’t even react fast enough to catch her.  She now has a huge cut and goose egg on her forehead.  We tried to ice it, but that met limited success.  She cried for like 15 minutes straight….and so did I.  MiL tried to take the crying baby from me… I almost pushed her.

Like my baby wanted to be held by her instead of me.  Ninja, please.  I wouldn’t even give her up to Justin until she started to calm down a bit.  So now I am kicking myself for not holding onto her as she came down the steps.

BTW, we were at the doctor today anyway for them to check on her eye (looks cleared up already but we need to continue the antibiotics) and they said her head is fine….and that they see that all the time.  Even knowing that, I still would have spent last night haggard and nauseous.