This decision, 31.5 years in the making, has taken a lot of thought.  I opened a bulletin on Myspace the other day and it held the most glorious of surprises.  The Arizona Derby Dames are having tryouts!! Tonight!

I have been dreaming of being a roller girl for the last month or so, so I am taking this as a sign from the heavens.

Although tryouts are tonight, I am not going.  It says on the flyer that in 3 months time they will be having tryouts again.  Thus the beginning of my extensive RollerGirl training.

I want to keep a well documented account of my progress in roller badASSiness (it really should be a word), and anything I can do to inspire those to follow in my footsteps - I am a great role model *spits*.

Welcome to the RollerGirl Diaries!

I will keep you posted on my training, sparring, and roller etiquette.  Check the video below to see what is possibly in store for your good friend, 2mara…. me.

AZ Derby Dames Season One Highlights

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You read that right.  No point wasting time rereading it.  I think that of all the possible scenarios this is my favorite.  Can you imagine walking down the street or even in the mall, packed full of hundred of people, and then just… POOF? 

I could be having a nice dinner with my husband, discussing important life changing events and then just burst.  Would anyone in McDonalds notice? Would Chris be able to recount the event in therapy for years to come, or WORSE, would he ever be able to eat a Quarter Pounder with Cheese again?

“What if” I combust while sitting in the principal’s office, dealing with my son’s discipline problems, while Mr. Anderson turns to reread the number of days my son has been in the Responsible Thinking Center.  The look of disgust on his face as he sees the number 59, he then turns back to a pile of ash delicately blobbed in the seat that use to contain… me.  I am sure at that moment he would realize where all these problems originated.  I mean, how rude to just combust in the middle of a conference.  

A scary thought would to spontaneously combust while sitting in traffic with kids in tow.  Would the car careen out of control off a bridge plummeting the whole Armstrong clan to their untimely end?  Who would live to tell the tale? 

“Mom just exploded… wasn’t me!”

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In the time of Beta Max, we were latch key kids.  I, of course, was a scientist and my loyal assistant, age 6, was not always good at following directions.  We were on the verge of discovering a new fuel to power our time machine which was still in the prototype phase.

We had been working on this project for what seemed like weeks, when the brilliant idea came about to unlock the key hidden deep inside a bright yellow super bouncy ball.  I am still vague as to how this theory evolved, being over 20 years ago, I get confused as to which experiments were actually mine and which are my sons more recent attempts at science.

We stood there, the two of us, in our white lab coats.  My assistant was quickly making notes on her clipboarded pad of paper.  I glanced over to see what exactly she was jotting down, since I wasn’t in dictation mode, and couldn’t make out anything but pictures of smiley faces and a bunch of scribbled nonsense, “Cassy!” I shout, “What are you doing?”

“Making important documented notes,” she stated.

“You can’t read.” I pointed out

“Yes!” she exclaimed, “I can!”

“No, you can’t,” I repeated calm and PROFESSIONALLY.

“I’m telling…” As she began to pout, I decide it best to look past our slight differences and move on toward the important task at hand.

“Fine… fine.  Let’s go over the important facts that we have discovered about this magical fuel cell.” I point to a cup in front of the window dangling from a bit of yarn we had confiscated from mom.  In it held the glistening key.  Earlier we had rigged a very sophisticated pulley system, interweaving a bit of yarn and various household products throughout the entire upstairs of our old house on 5th street.  Such a weave made it almost impossible to walk over to the window and actually touch above mentioned dangling cup.  This type of yarn configuration was repeated quite a bit during this Beta Max period, although commonly referred to as spider webbing, it usually had to be cut away with scissors to clean up.

“Well,” stated my assistant, “your magical ball…”

“Fuel cell” I corrected.

“Sell what?  I thought we were going to use it downstairs to see dinosaurs”

“We are going to use it in our TIME machine.  If we can figure it out.” She always seemed to forget the important details.

“I’m thirsty; can we have some kool-aid?” Cassy whined.
 
I let out an irritated sign and exclaimed, “Cassy!  We are on the edge of science discovery…  VERY important stuff.  PAY ATTENTION!”

“GEEZ, it’s just a ball.  I want to go play outside,” she said.  Perfect delivery and timing easily swayed this scientist to the great outdoors. Experiments quickly discarded to roam unexplored lands in the great vastness that was our backyard. Magical fuel cells buried and forgotten, and today we still have yet to travel back and forth through time.  Geez, where were our priorities?

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Back in the fall of ‘98 I had some bad luck with my health and was hospitalized with gallstones which lead to pancreatitis and extraction.  A week to the date of the removal of my gall bladder, I totaled my mother’s car.  I was driving to my grandmother’s house (about a 2 hour drive) to see my son who I had seen very little of the previous month.  It was during finals in college and I didn’t want to wait until the Monday after my last test to see him.  The plan: I was going to drive down for the day and see him, drive back to finish my last test, and then my friend Mary was going to take me back to Lawton where I would stay until my mother came down for Christmas.  I rolled my mother’s car with the cruise set at 70 mph.  I hit no one and stopped right side up in a very grassy median.  Since that accident, I have had quite a bit of anxiety on the road.  I had managed to wreck a car on the flattest of surfaces in perfect weather, so it’s easy to see chaos almost everywhere.

I consider myself a very positive person, but in the back of my mind I am always trying to avoid a possible calamity.  Walking down the stairs I imagine tumbling with child in hand, or even alone.  Who would find me?  Where would my kids be?  Who would pick them up from school?  Who would call for help?  Would Brynn run into the road, or would someone take her?  So I guess there’s this dark “what if” always in the back of my mind.

SO…

I thought it might be cool to blog these out.  Turn something that actually causes me quite a bit of distress into something more… I don’t know… humorous.  There are several sites out there where people bet on the death of others, kind of sick in a way, but some are incredibly ridiculous and quite funny… so I am going to term these incidents, which I hope to write about weekly, “My Death Pool” Series.  Although not all situations could possibly end in death, still lies the question: “what if?”  There are also sites out there where you can reserve to write obituaries for certain people…. so reserve mine today!

A thought crossed my mind in the shower yesterday as I was contemplating my building layout: how structurally sound is my apartment building? “What if” while showering on the third floor, in the bathroom off the master suite, those extra pounds that I have put on since our move to AZ were the straw that broke the camels back.  Maybe those small cracks in the grout around my shower had allowed just enough water to weaken the skeletal system that holds my tub in place.  Imagine soaked and soapy plummeting to your death, to be found naked and covered in suds in the bathroom of your neighbor.  They would have to call in extra emergency service workers because I would be too slippery for the two-man job.

Maybe 10 feet wouldn’t kill me, but falling from the heavens all “nekkid” and bubbly while Bob OR Sheila sat quietly on the toilet reading their morning paper… would be worse than death.  The only thing I could imagine that would be worse would be to actually keel over whilst on the pot.  I can see it now, the emergency service workers trying to pry my Nintendo DS out of my clutched hands, as my alter ego stared on, tapping her foot in front of Nook’s shop.

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Here is a photo update from the other day’s post.  I suggest if you have a heart condition or asthma, you refrain from looking.  I will not be held responsible for the effects of the photos posted below.

At first glance the bathroom is a bit of a shock.  Upclose it doesn’t get any better

Really if you notice the patterns in Brynn’s art, you will see she is quite brilliant… I would feel better about above mentioned art if I weren’t renting.

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Lately I have been promoting ritualistic behavior, as if something dark has been my driving force.  I’ve noticed a parade of days with similar patterns, and a eerie fog lingers in my little world.

 It is something dreaded and fierce has entered my perfect family portrait; something that makes most “sane” men and women scream out in the middle of the night… the terrible twos!

At the crack of dawn, my sweet angel, Brynn wakes (that’s about 5am here in Arizona).  She doesn’t wake happy and smiling.  She wakes screaming for me and requesting that not only I carry her into the other room, but I should gather everything that is precious to her in the first trip.  With multiple blankets and pillows, as well, as my beloved two year old, we trek into the living room to settle on the couch and begin our morning ritual. 

Starting out with chocolate milk, which she insists screaming at me for… if we so happen to be out of chocolate, she will scream juice and stomp her feet.  We have made some progress in this area; she has begun to ask me instead of yelling at me… well unless we are out of chocolate, which just pisses her off.

Most days I am fairly alert, but in the last week or so I have been feeling like I am getting sick; congested.  Fearing the worst the last couple of days, I have taken a bit of benedryl before bed to ward of this ever creeping allergy/cold.  Benedryl helps me sleep, but it lingers in the morning making it difficult to really wake up when needed.

Brynn takes full advantage of these groggy opportune moments.  Her favorite has to be the cereal dump and crunch, which covers the living room rug with bits of whatever she was screaming for half an hour earlier.  What started as a small amount of nutritious goodness, easily transformed into a substance quite like shards of glass to the bottoms of my bare feet.

The other day as I was arousing from a somewhat sleep-like state on my comfy couch, I noticed Brynn wasn’t close by.  I immediately sat up and looked around… nothing.

“Brynn,” I said, not shouting for the other two were still asleep, “Brynn.”  I heard a noise in the kids’ bathroom and carefully walked the long hall, and peered inside.  There she was by the toilet, smiling at me.  In her hands were several colorful sticks, which looked a lot like crayons.  Oh they were crayons, thankfully they were bathtub crayons which she retrieved from her cabinet under the sink.

Now don’t make the mistake of thinking that bathtub crayons make this alright.  She hadn’t only colored the bathtub.  She colored the toilet, the cabinet, the floor AND the bathtub.  I believe she even managed to scribble some on that MOST heinous toilet plunger.

ANYway, I managed to clean up most of the mess. Bathtub crayons are meant to be used IN a bathtub full of water, so there is a lingering stain on the outside of the tub, which will require bleach…. keep your fingers crossed that it will take care of it, otherwise when we move out of this apartment the end of the month…. well… I don’t want to talk about it.

(I managed to snap a few photos of the above stated incident…. I will post them later. ) 

I know my mother will read this, and I hope she feels bad for wishing this on me :-P.

~2 

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