Burninating Phoenix

Hello world! I (and possibly several other bloggers you know) am back from skating as a Burninator in a women's tournament in Phoenix this past weekend. I had fun, and mostly had a good time, although we did encounter a couple of bad apples in the usually good-apple batch of players that we skate against. We're fairly sure we haven't skated against these bad apples in previous tournaments, and *should* be able to prevent one of those apples from skating against us again, but we can only hope that the other one got "are you insane?" treatment from her team and won't be encouraged to return.

But my apologies, I've already jumped to the middle of my report. :-) *rewind* (oh wait, that's SO nineties...) *scroll back* (there :-) )

We flew out on Friday, noonish. I'd already played my regular Oasis Thursday game. Packing for tournaments has become almost routine, now, which reduces the usual travel stresses but makes you finish early and think "ok, that didn't take very long, I must be forgetting something" :-) Got on the party flight, which was quieter than usual because we actually (gasp) had assigned seating instead of Southwest-style herd seating, but G and I ended up sitting near Viv (and Oasis teammate Tony, as it happened), so it was still fun.

The Arizona heat gave us a brief sampler as soon as we stepped off the plane (literally), wafting its 90+ degree dry heat at us through the crack between the plane and the flexy-extenda-whatsit...the jetway? Found our bags, Cheddah found everybody's sticks, Cara found us, and off we went to find the hotel. Our ride was a hard-earned bright orange SUV (apparently SUVs were muchly in demand due to the large number of men's teams playing that weekend) that worked fine, although it was just as well that there were only 3 of us plus 2 sets of gear, since it was a *small* SUV. But the bright orange -- hey, it was always easy to find in the parking lot, I'll tell ya that. :-) For my next car, I will see if it comes in orange!

Things went fine; the rest of the hotel seemed filled with young basketball players of various ages, mostly the age where they run around noisily in groups and see what trouble they can get into that doesn't involve getting into a car.

Half the team (including us) went to Waffle House down the street for dinner, since it was a Must Visit for those of us who haven't been to one before. :-) There I learned that there's apparently a difference between "country ham" and "city ham", in that the country one has a bone in the middle and costs $1.30 more for it. I don't know what the city ham was like, but the country one was fine. Alas, I didn't have a waffle, but reserve the right to try one at the next opportunity. :-) As it turned out, I had waffles every day for the rest of the tournament at the hotel, but they weren't Waffle House waffles. Found a supermarket after that, bought supplies (that we mostly didn't use, but were good to have), then rested until the game.

Drove to the game, stuffed ourselves into a tiny locker room with a "Uh, don't open the door, it'll stink up the locker room, I'd use the one in the lobby" bathroom attached, changed, played, we were slow, they won, but it felt like a good practice, in a way -- too bad it counted! With 3 D lines (I'm used to 1.5 or 2) I felt like I'd only played 2/3 of a game, but working with Becky was stress-free as usual, and I felt she and I did ok. Meanwhile, J&L managed to lock their keys in their car, but had AAA come and help out. Our car went with Viv's car, and we Sonic'd (my first taste of Sonic tater tots), I gave Viv my balloon, we tried to find bugs to examine with our kid's toy bug-microscopes, and then we went home.

Saturday our game was at 5pm. We went to the hotel's surprisingly nice breakfast bar, made our own waffles, chatted, then went adventuring to Rawhide, an old west town where much fun was had. I learned to lasso (it's harder than you'd think to lasso a stationary saw-cow), we found guns and pink hats, we learned about stagecoaches, and then decided to take an old-fashioned group together. There were nine of us, and we chose men's or women's outfits from the Old West (sometimes mixed gently with Victorian). I was last in line, and since a lot of us were choosing guys' costumes, and we only had 2 "saloon girls" (Viv & Ellaine), I decided to join the saloon girl crowd. Each of the three of us required two rounds of dressing, the second one courtesy of one of the ladies who worked there, who tied the ties in the back (note that these were only designed to be authentic-looking from the front) for us, and in the case of Ellaine and I, she, ah, made sure we looked suitably saloon-girl buoyant. :-) Having had RenFaire experience on the subject (and being fortunate enough to have a dress that allowed me to wear shorts under it), I decided to take my (d'oh) front-and-center seat in the group photo and my bright purple dress with suitable hammy-ness. Ellaine, alas, was mortified at how she was obliged to fill her little blue dress with yellow tassels. :-) We all laughed and teased her to no end, but the photo came out great, and I suspect we all had a wonderful time. :-)

Back in our streetwear, some of us (not me, and the goalie was forbidden) rode the mechanical bull, and G and I got rather theatrically re-hitched in a Shotgun Wedding, in honor of our anniversary, courtesy of Viv, and performed by Judge Mental, as he called himself. We even got little "gold" rings, which were fun to wear, although G reported that it tended to turn his finger green after a while. Viv took photos, if you absolutely must see an account of the event...though I tell ya, next time I'll check the hang of my clothes, as the photos weren't very flattering. *blush* :-P

After Rawhide we all went to the mall and grabbed some lunch; I think there were still 10-12 of us. Wandered around, picked up our gear, went to the game. Played, it went fine, and we won. We kept up our speed much better this time! We'd called Cousin Jan earlier to tell her that we were in town, and she and cousin Chris were able to come by and watch the game, and the four of us went out to dinner afterwards and caught up. It was great to see them both!

Sunday (after another waffle) G and I kicked around until just after lunch, when my long-time friend Sunita came by to pick us up, and after some driving we found a nice Irish Pub to have lunch and chat at. I hadn't seen Sunita in person for 15 years until a couple of weeks ago when she happened to be in our area, and it was fun to have a second opportunity to renew our friendship. She stayed long enough to watch our third game (which in a way, it was kind of fortunate that she didn't know much about hockey, since the game didn't go so well), but had to dash back home for work. Since she's a doctor now and was already going on only 45 minutes of sleep the previous night, she's certainly forgiven!

The third game was the one with the foulmouthed girl with three penalties; after classily finishing it off by insulting each one of us during the handshake, the ref pointed out that getting further into trouble -- a fourth penalty would mean ejection from the tournament -- would be a bad idea, so she'd better just shut up and go to her locker room, and decline the fight that our hot-tempered teammate Sharon was offering her because she'd just insulted our whole team. Sigh. It was also the game with the obviously overqualified girl who scored all their goals; I heard secondhand that the girl (who was actually on D the whole time) said she only started scoring after "we'd" slashed her a few times. Although this is hardly an excuse, I'll also say that the slashing part...may have happened, though not by me. I'm wondering what their team thought about the game afterwards. How can they think it remotely sportsmanlike to allow either of those girls to play, though? :-/ Even on D!

With that bad taste in our mouths, we went back to the hotel, then everybody went to Joe's Crab Shack for dinner to shake it off. Val got a balloon rocking-unicorn made for her, Thunder got to be sung to and be a green-haired fairy for her birthday, and we enjoyed ourselves 'til closing. Our plane left at 4:30 the following day (Monday), so there was enough time to have another waffle, check out, and eat together at Claimjumper's before we had to make our way to the airport and fly back home, where we discovered a newfound appreciation for moist, cool air and quiet nights not punctuated by the air-conditioner going on and off. :-)

[Edit: spelling Ellaine's name correctly, a minor add about D lines, and mentioning what happened during the handshake]