Lovely Day!

I had a really lovely day today - even though it was rainy and damp!

I met Jen from Pigeon Tendencies this morning to go skating. However, as my bus pulled up to Ally Pally, I saw hoardes of kids heading towards the rink. Saw Jen and she said it was the third group! Reception told me that there were less people booked in for the afternoon, so we headed off for a coffee and went back in the afternoon.

There were some school kids causing havoc in the afternoon (one brat was shoving his knee in the back of his schoolmates legs to try and make them give way), but one hour in, we heard the magic words from a teacher. "We've got to start getting them off the ice". Good thing too - I was about to explode with 'ice rage'. One boy nearly collided with Jen while she was skating backward and I think I must have given him on of my filthiest looks, as he looked fairly hypnotised and then muttered, "Sawreee". Excellent . . .

It was such a nice skate for me today, cos I just had fun. I didn't worry about not being brave enough to do backward crossovers - I did about ten fairly secure ones on each side near the barrier and left it at that. I did some inside three turns, and didn't get too stressed when they didn't happen. I spent a lot of time doing fast forward stroking, one foot glides on all edges, continuous forward curves, forward crossovers, chasses and anything else fun. I can now do the entire length of Ally Pally in eight strokes, which isn't bad! It is so nice to just go and skate, and remind myself of why I love it, rather than getting all het up about the things I can't do. There was a motive behind this as well - I am hoping that the more time I spend on the ice, regardless of what I do, the more my confidence will build up again.

Jen did well today as well - she is getting some speed up with her backward skating, and started doing some forward crossovers today as well. Good going Jen!

And then we went to buy Jen a Nintendo Wii - but they didn't have any. Hopefully it won't be like my poor manager whose family bought him a Wii Remote for Christmas as they couldn't get hold of the console, and he didn't get the console for a whole three months! I had images of him sitting in front of a television, forlornly waving the remote and nunchuk around . . . he's got the console now, luckily!