Long Overdue Skating Update
A lot of things have happened, but I'll keep it short especially since I don't remember all of the details, lol.
MONDAY OIC PRACTICE
I honestly don't remember a lot about this except I worked on T-stops and it was a whole lot of fejl. Talked to David for a bit. No Micheal Bolton although Cookies lady was there. My Monday practices tend to be a bowlful of disappoint, especially if I feel like I've made a bit of a breakthrough during Saturday lesson and practice.
WEDNESDAY GG PRACTICE
I went home for thanksgiving afterwards so my skating schedule was a bit screwed up and I didn't go to Saturday class. I did, however, manage to skate a public session Wednesday afternoon at my "home rink", Glacial Gardens. I have skated at YB and OIC (and even just YB, which I go to less frequently) a lot more times than I ever have in GG even counting my non srs-bsns public skater days, but I still call it "home" for whatever reason, in the same way that Southern California is my home despite living in Berk-a-derk around nine months out of the whole year.
My brother and Lyosha came with me, which almost always means that any expected productivity I would've had was shot down to nil :D. GG pretty much has the worst rental boots ever--they've probably had those crusty old brown Risports since at least the Harding-Kerrigan scandal. Lyosha and my brother struggled with uncomfortable boots and dull, chipped blades. If you ever just went to a rink for fun and complained of severe ankle pain and blisters just thirty minutes into it, be assured that skating is not like this at all (though you will encounter boot discomfort for other reasons), and it is the crappy rental boots' fault. A particular splat from a chipped blade on rentals three weeks into my first LTS lesson finally forced me to drop some $ for my modest, intermediate level stock Riedells. Best investment ever.
Glacial Gardens has three sheets of ice. For most of the summer, they held public sessions at Rink B, which is pretty much a generic rink. Rink A, as far as I've noticed, was mostly used by high level freestylers, hockey, and the speedskaters on certain days. Rink C was a converted roller rink and was under renovation.
I guess they had started using Rink C for the public sessions because it is dingier and crappier. The ice seemed dangerously thin and you can actually see the cement floor of the old roller rink through the ice in some spots. The ice was also harder, as my hips and ass learned later. Lyosha and my brother spent a lot of time finagling with their crappy skates but they eventually joined me on ice.
My brother has an annoying habit of making anything ghetto, so he kept distracting me by trying to dougie on ice all the while damaging my self-esteem irreparably by yelling out "look, that six year old is better than you" every five minutes. It's already degrading enough when you happen to be practicing the same elements next to a toddler but when a little girl is busting out salchows and flips while you're splatting over T-stops....no. I don't even know why I invited him. To make matters worse, he decided to engage Lyosha in a little "jumping" contest, in which they both decided to do what can roughly be described as a "two-foot waltz jump". Being the little jump-wuss that I am, I did not engage in their little spectacle, much to my brother's derision.
I decided to instill in him some *respect* for the fine art of figure skating, so I told him to try T-stops. He couldn't even get his foot in T-position, and made the rookie mistake of just trying to scrape the ice with the inside edge of your back foot. I was trying to show him appropriate form next to the wall and before I knew it, I was going splat on my hip and butt and Lyosha was behind me trying to catch my poor little head from hitting ice. LOLWUT. I fell next to the wall. Seriously.
Falling was my biggest accomplishment of the day, sad to say. I don't fall very often mainly because my skating tends to be timid and excruciatingly slow, and I actually want to fall more often just so I could get used to the feeling. It actually doesn't hurt too much but it's the "out-of-control" feeling right before you hit ice that is the absolute worst.
Afterwards I went to the pro shop and got my right boot checked out. I've been having problems with my foot wobbling inside the boot because I had the ankle punched out too much when I first had the skates. The intern on duty didn't seem to know what to do with this but my skate fitter was there too and he heated the leather to pop it back in as much as he could to the original shape. I also had my blades sharpened. I was a little alarmed that the intern guy just sharpened them right away and not warmed them up like the OIC lady did, since apparently if you sharpen them cold with the machine the blades could shatter. It turned out fine though. My fitter only charged me for the sharpening and not the boot adjustment. I love that pro shop!
And then we went to the batting cages. That's another story.
FRIDAY OIC PRACTICE
I didn't get to skate again until a week later. I spent Thanksgiving eating for seven straight hours, Black Friday wide awake from 2:30 AM accompanying my mom and brother to the Target sale, Saturday watching HP7 with my mom, Sunday bro-ing with Lyosha, and Monday on a bus from downtown LA to SF. I don't have any opportunity to skate midweek due to class, so Friday was my first time on ice for more than a week.
In contrast to YB's almost inviting warmth, OIC is always freezing (it's an ice rink, I know, but still) so I always find myself counting down the minutes until PS is over so I can actually warm myself. OIC's ice surface is a little bit more conducive to actual productivity due to its size (Olympic size v.s. YB's NHL) so I could easily find corners to claim even with a denser than usual lunch crowd. Both Cookies lady and Micheal Bolton were there, but the rink was playing Christmas music so all were gratefully spared from their program music.
I mostly focused on reacquainting myself on ice and testing my right boot. My flexor hallucis muscles were aching due to lack of use for the past week. I decided to work on CW FXOs when I realized that I was actually putting the wrong edge down (inside vs outside) as I am crossing over the foot. This makes the weight-shift a lot harder but one must be able to turn their body into the CW direction more first to facilitate this on the outside edge. CW FXOs have been the bane of my existence ever since I started. I could fool a beginner into thinking I could do them, but it is definitely not the same as my CCW. Even my backwards crossovers look less disparate from each other than my forward CW/CCWs, primarily because I drilled CCW BXOs (my bad side) for hours more than I did the CW.
I tried T-stops too, with not much progress. I couldn't even hold the inside edge while gliding slowly in T-position. Frustrated, I just returned to working on edge exercises, which I haven't done in a while. I talked to this lady who is taking the Friday LTS class in that public session with her kids who was practicing going backwards. I often see her looking at me with perhaps envy (lol idk) but assuming she just started skating when that LTS class started (well after I started practicing regularly at Oakland) she is doing a lot better than I did. I told her that it took me a long time to learn how to go backwards and that she's doing really well.
I went home and thought about how long I've actually been skating. There was that whole month of March in Skøjte Klub København and the two weekends in Sweden, and you can count my occasional visits to the outdoor rinks in February too, I guess. And yes I actually skated once in Latvia too, though not with Morozov unfortunately. So yeah, a month and some odd days. I returned to the US mid-July and took that four-week LTS, but I did not make any serious progress until enrolling in the YB classes mid-September. It's the beginning of December now, so that's what--five and a half months? Five and a half months and all I could do is backwards crossovers? Arguably my pace increased considerably since starting classes at YB, and I probably would have progressed faster if I had regular lessons right in the beginning, but what can you do? It's not all about speed. Not all of us can land an axel in a week.
SATURDAY YB LESSON
I usually get into SF about 40 minutes early because of the Transbay bus schedule. I spent breakfast and coffee in the Yerba Buena gardens looking at the fountain and the birds. This large seagull was right behind me and I thought it wanted to poke my eyes out or drill a hole in my head with its beak. I live with a girl who is really scared of birds for reasons like that, so that kind of explains it. Other than that though, it was relaxing.
Well, I wasn't going to be relaxed for long. I walked into the rink and my friend C tells me that it's test day. FML. She was the only one who went to class last week because I was home and presumably the other members in our class had other engagements. I normally would not freak out since I have reconciled myself to only passing Alpha this session quite a while ago, but I decided to "rework" my CW FXOs, which is an Alpha element.
The adult class gets to use the corner of the rink that the little hockey kids have abused the session prior, which makes reacquaintance with the ice even more touchy. This week was the worst week to test because I had a long break with skating due to Thanksgiving and I was just getting used to my right boot again, not to mention I just had my blades sharpened so it was a little more difficult to even snowplow. FFF.
It turns out that everyone else in my class has a name that starts with C. I killed that trend. So there's C, the ladies FS stan who I've befriended, the other girl C, who has been sick for a while, and C-dude, who transferred in from Monday class. I don't know any of their last names aside from my friend, so henceforth I will call her "CJ" and the others as "C-girl" and "C-dude". Not even exactly sure what C-dude's name is aside from that it starts with C. I'm horrid with names!
Coach comes and tells us in her usual cheery way that it's TEST DAY. None of us aside from CJ knew this until today, of course, so we're all FMLing like crazy. Since it's an Alpha-Beta class, it covers the range of both classes although you can test Alpha or Beta depending on your level and just repeat the course. CJ has already passed Alpha, while C-girl, C-dude, and myself still needed to test it. C-dude apparently was bumped up from Pre-Alpha just this session.
Coach asks us which level we're testing at. C-girl, having been sick for a while, is still working on her Alpha elements but it's like she had a choice on whether to test or not, just the level of the test. C-dude, having shown some adeptness at a variety of things (backwards crossovers in particular!) during warm-up, said he wanted to test Alpha but would give Beta a crack just for experience if time permits. Since I didn't have my T-stops down satisfactorily, I said I was testing Alpha too, but coach was like "No missy, you're testing Alpha and Beta!" Of all days to display some confidence on my abilities, lol!
We had a five minute warmup before the test. My CW FXOs were shaky and I didn't even practice BXOs much since I wanted to get some last minute work on T-stops. Surprisingly, my T-position glide before putting my foot down has gotten a lot better since yesterday though putting the foot down is still a problem as I'm still making more of an L than a T. The ice was crappy as hell and I kept catching edges and almost splatting on every other T-stop attempt. Then the time of reckoning came.
Forward stroking. Check. Forward Crossovers. CCWs were good. I blanked out halfway through my CW attempt and it was probably the most natural my CWs have felt in my life. I don't know if I was doing them incorrectly or not since I was just on autopilot but Coach didn't say anything bad about it. Snowplows were the only oopsie, as I had to repeat them. Stopping was always my weak point.
C-dude and I had some extra warm-up time as CJ took her test. Oh, Beta. I had C-dude test first because I'm a wuss and his backwards crossovers, goddamn! They weren't entirely fluid yet but he had a very deep outside edge lean and amazing upper body posture. I skate with a perpetual hunchback and a barely discernable edge lean. Figure skating is irritatingly paradoxical this way. Everyone tells you you shouldn't compare yourself/your progress/whatever to others--but in the end, that's the whole point of the sport, is it not? Comparing one skater against another. Although of course, you can also skate recreationally forever and never compete...
My BXOs were hesitant at first and nothing remarkable, but I guess they were okay since they didn't elicit any comments whatsoever from the coach. She said my backward stroking was "beautiful" and well, let me tell you, that's the product of hours and hours and hours of work. The only reason that I am a marginally good beginner adult skater is all the practice time I have forced on myself. All those practice sessions of frustration and tears and near-splats all reduced to one word: beautiful. I wanted to cry Torino!Stephane tears right then and there...
But knowing my life, what goes up must come down within the next second. T-stops. I knew I wasn't going to pass this element and I had no business doing so since my body didn't understand its mechanics yet, and didn't know what it was supposed to do. I screw up my CW FXOs but I know what I'm supposed to be doing to fix it. With T-stops, I didn't even have that.
I pushed off from T-position and found that I was holding the glide pretty well, and found it easier to put the back foot down if I kept it basically hovering next to the back of my skating foot to begin with in a sort of "pre-T" position. I have never been able to hold this position previously. I put my foot down and hoped for the best and I actually stopped. My coach kept saying "fight for it, use those leg muscles!" and I *finally* figured out what she meant by that. It felt something like contracting your quads and glutes (aka dem thighs and dat ass, respectively) while pushing your blade into the ice. It was one of those "aha!" moments.
My T-stop, however, is still in need of further work since my "T" still ends up being an "L", since apparently the coach noticed that I tended to cheat it by putting the part of the blade closer to the toe down first (easier because your hips aren't so open) and eventually sliding into the "T" position to correct when I've already got my blade on ice. It's a bit akin to (by a long shot, lol) underrotating your jump by completing the a fraction of the revolution on ice instead of the air.
It turns out that she's allowing us to "retest" next week too, though I don't know if this means redoing all of Beta or just the dreaded T's. All of us had something to work on, but my enemy isn't anything I already didn't know about. T-stops, t-stops, t-stops....
Afterward, CJ and I windowshopped a bit at the Westfield Shopping Mall 4 blocks from YB, where I found my legwarmers! We also ate a late lunch (neither of us had a proper meal that whole day and it was already around 3 pm--it's not a "figure skating diet", it's called getting to our respective buses early and in time for class) at a favorite place of mine, Mel's Diner. It's amazing how many people I am becoming friends with because of figure skating! I generally am very shy and have a hard time talking to people but having skating as a common denominator just makes things so much easier.
So, Monday. T-stops in my legwarmers. Looking forward to it!
MONDAY OIC PRACTICE
I honestly don't remember a lot about this except I worked on T-stops and it was a whole lot of fejl. Talked to David for a bit. No Micheal Bolton although Cookies lady was there. My Monday practices tend to be a bowlful of disappoint, especially if I feel like I've made a bit of a breakthrough during Saturday lesson and practice.
WEDNESDAY GG PRACTICE
I went home for thanksgiving afterwards so my skating schedule was a bit screwed up and I didn't go to Saturday class. I did, however, manage to skate a public session Wednesday afternoon at my "home rink", Glacial Gardens. I have skated at YB and OIC (and even just YB, which I go to less frequently) a lot more times than I ever have in GG even counting my non srs-bsns public skater days, but I still call it "home" for whatever reason, in the same way that Southern California is my home despite living in Berk-a-derk around nine months out of the whole year.
My brother and Lyosha came with me, which almost always means that any expected productivity I would've had was shot down to nil :D. GG pretty much has the worst rental boots ever--they've probably had those crusty old brown Risports since at least the Harding-Kerrigan scandal. Lyosha and my brother struggled with uncomfortable boots and dull, chipped blades. If you ever just went to a rink for fun and complained of severe ankle pain and blisters just thirty minutes into it, be assured that skating is not like this at all (though you will encounter boot discomfort for other reasons), and it is the crappy rental boots' fault. A particular splat from a chipped blade on rentals three weeks into my first LTS lesson finally forced me to drop some $ for my modest, intermediate level stock Riedells. Best investment ever.
Glacial Gardens has three sheets of ice. For most of the summer, they held public sessions at Rink B, which is pretty much a generic rink. Rink A, as far as I've noticed, was mostly used by high level freestylers, hockey, and the speedskaters on certain days. Rink C was a converted roller rink and was under renovation.
I guess they had started using Rink C for the public sessions because it is dingier and crappier. The ice seemed dangerously thin and you can actually see the cement floor of the old roller rink through the ice in some spots. The ice was also harder, as my hips and ass learned later. Lyosha and my brother spent a lot of time finagling with their crappy skates but they eventually joined me on ice.
My brother has an annoying habit of making anything ghetto, so he kept distracting me by trying to dougie on ice all the while damaging my self-esteem irreparably by yelling out "look, that six year old is better than you" every five minutes. It's already degrading enough when you happen to be practicing the same elements next to a toddler but when a little girl is busting out salchows and flips while you're splatting over T-stops....no. I don't even know why I invited him. To make matters worse, he decided to engage Lyosha in a little "jumping" contest, in which they both decided to do what can roughly be described as a "two-foot waltz jump". Being the little jump-wuss that I am, I did not engage in their little spectacle, much to my brother's derision.
I decided to instill in him some *respect* for the fine art of figure skating, so I told him to try T-stops. He couldn't even get his foot in T-position, and made the rookie mistake of just trying to scrape the ice with the inside edge of your back foot. I was trying to show him appropriate form next to the wall and before I knew it, I was going splat on my hip and butt and Lyosha was behind me trying to catch my poor little head from hitting ice. LOLWUT. I fell next to the wall. Seriously.
Falling was my biggest accomplishment of the day, sad to say. I don't fall very often mainly because my skating tends to be timid and excruciatingly slow, and I actually want to fall more often just so I could get used to the feeling. It actually doesn't hurt too much but it's the "out-of-control" feeling right before you hit ice that is the absolute worst.
Afterwards I went to the pro shop and got my right boot checked out. I've been having problems with my foot wobbling inside the boot because I had the ankle punched out too much when I first had the skates. The intern on duty didn't seem to know what to do with this but my skate fitter was there too and he heated the leather to pop it back in as much as he could to the original shape. I also had my blades sharpened. I was a little alarmed that the intern guy just sharpened them right away and not warmed them up like the OIC lady did, since apparently if you sharpen them cold with the machine the blades could shatter. It turned out fine though. My fitter only charged me for the sharpening and not the boot adjustment. I love that pro shop!
And then we went to the batting cages. That's another story.
FRIDAY OIC PRACTICE
I didn't get to skate again until a week later. I spent Thanksgiving eating for seven straight hours, Black Friday wide awake from 2:30 AM accompanying my mom and brother to the Target sale, Saturday watching HP7 with my mom, Sunday bro-ing with Lyosha, and Monday on a bus from downtown LA to SF. I don't have any opportunity to skate midweek due to class, so Friday was my first time on ice for more than a week.
In contrast to YB's almost inviting warmth, OIC is always freezing (it's an ice rink, I know, but still) so I always find myself counting down the minutes until PS is over so I can actually warm myself. OIC's ice surface is a little bit more conducive to actual productivity due to its size (Olympic size v.s. YB's NHL) so I could easily find corners to claim even with a denser than usual lunch crowd. Both Cookies lady and Micheal Bolton were there, but the rink was playing Christmas music so all were gratefully spared from their program music.
I mostly focused on reacquainting myself on ice and testing my right boot. My flexor hallucis muscles were aching due to lack of use for the past week. I decided to work on CW FXOs when I realized that I was actually putting the wrong edge down (inside vs outside) as I am crossing over the foot. This makes the weight-shift a lot harder but one must be able to turn their body into the CW direction more first to facilitate this on the outside edge. CW FXOs have been the bane of my existence ever since I started. I could fool a beginner into thinking I could do them, but it is definitely not the same as my CCW. Even my backwards crossovers look less disparate from each other than my forward CW/CCWs, primarily because I drilled CCW BXOs (my bad side) for hours more than I did the CW.
I tried T-stops too, with not much progress. I couldn't even hold the inside edge while gliding slowly in T-position. Frustrated, I just returned to working on edge exercises, which I haven't done in a while. I talked to this lady who is taking the Friday LTS class in that public session with her kids who was practicing going backwards. I often see her looking at me with perhaps envy (lol idk) but assuming she just started skating when that LTS class started (well after I started practicing regularly at Oakland) she is doing a lot better than I did. I told her that it took me a long time to learn how to go backwards and that she's doing really well.
I went home and thought about how long I've actually been skating. There was that whole month of March in Skøjte Klub København and the two weekends in Sweden, and you can count my occasional visits to the outdoor rinks in February too, I guess. And yes I actually skated once in Latvia too, though not with Morozov unfortunately. So yeah, a month and some odd days. I returned to the US mid-July and took that four-week LTS, but I did not make any serious progress until enrolling in the YB classes mid-September. It's the beginning of December now, so that's what--five and a half months? Five and a half months and all I could do is backwards crossovers? Arguably my pace increased considerably since starting classes at YB, and I probably would have progressed faster if I had regular lessons right in the beginning, but what can you do? It's not all about speed. Not all of us can land an axel in a week.
SATURDAY YB LESSON
I usually get into SF about 40 minutes early because of the Transbay bus schedule. I spent breakfast and coffee in the Yerba Buena gardens looking at the fountain and the birds. This large seagull was right behind me and I thought it wanted to poke my eyes out or drill a hole in my head with its beak. I live with a girl who is really scared of birds for reasons like that, so that kind of explains it. Other than that though, it was relaxing.
Well, I wasn't going to be relaxed for long. I walked into the rink and my friend C tells me that it's test day. FML. She was the only one who went to class last week because I was home and presumably the other members in our class had other engagements. I normally would not freak out since I have reconciled myself to only passing Alpha this session quite a while ago, but I decided to "rework" my CW FXOs, which is an Alpha element.
The adult class gets to use the corner of the rink that the little hockey kids have abused the session prior, which makes reacquaintance with the ice even more touchy. This week was the worst week to test because I had a long break with skating due to Thanksgiving and I was just getting used to my right boot again, not to mention I just had my blades sharpened so it was a little more difficult to even snowplow. FFF.
It turns out that everyone else in my class has a name that starts with C. I killed that trend. So there's C, the ladies FS stan who I've befriended, the other girl C, who has been sick for a while, and C-dude, who transferred in from Monday class. I don't know any of their last names aside from my friend, so henceforth I will call her "CJ" and the others as "C-girl" and "C-dude". Not even exactly sure what C-dude's name is aside from that it starts with C. I'm horrid with names!
Coach comes and tells us in her usual cheery way that it's TEST DAY. None of us aside from CJ knew this until today, of course, so we're all FMLing like crazy. Since it's an Alpha-Beta class, it covers the range of both classes although you can test Alpha or Beta depending on your level and just repeat the course. CJ has already passed Alpha, while C-girl, C-dude, and myself still needed to test it. C-dude apparently was bumped up from Pre-Alpha just this session.
Coach asks us which level we're testing at. C-girl, having been sick for a while, is still working on her Alpha elements but it's like she had a choice on whether to test or not, just the level of the test. C-dude, having shown some adeptness at a variety of things (backwards crossovers in particular!) during warm-up, said he wanted to test Alpha but would give Beta a crack just for experience if time permits. Since I didn't have my T-stops down satisfactorily, I said I was testing Alpha too, but coach was like "No missy, you're testing Alpha and Beta!" Of all days to display some confidence on my abilities, lol!
We had a five minute warmup before the test. My CW FXOs were shaky and I didn't even practice BXOs much since I wanted to get some last minute work on T-stops. Surprisingly, my T-position glide before putting my foot down has gotten a lot better since yesterday though putting the foot down is still a problem as I'm still making more of an L than a T. The ice was crappy as hell and I kept catching edges and almost splatting on every other T-stop attempt. Then the time of reckoning came.
Forward stroking. Check. Forward Crossovers. CCWs were good. I blanked out halfway through my CW attempt and it was probably the most natural my CWs have felt in my life. I don't know if I was doing them incorrectly or not since I was just on autopilot but Coach didn't say anything bad about it. Snowplows were the only oopsie, as I had to repeat them. Stopping was always my weak point.
C-dude and I had some extra warm-up time as CJ took her test. Oh, Beta. I had C-dude test first because I'm a wuss and his backwards crossovers, goddamn! They weren't entirely fluid yet but he had a very deep outside edge lean and amazing upper body posture. I skate with a perpetual hunchback and a barely discernable edge lean. Figure skating is irritatingly paradoxical this way. Everyone tells you you shouldn't compare yourself/your progress/whatever to others--but in the end, that's the whole point of the sport, is it not? Comparing one skater against another. Although of course, you can also skate recreationally forever and never compete...
My BXOs were hesitant at first and nothing remarkable, but I guess they were okay since they didn't elicit any comments whatsoever from the coach. She said my backward stroking was "beautiful" and well, let me tell you, that's the product of hours and hours and hours of work. The only reason that I am a marginally good beginner adult skater is all the practice time I have forced on myself. All those practice sessions of frustration and tears and near-splats all reduced to one word: beautiful. I wanted to cry Torino!Stephane tears right then and there...
But knowing my life, what goes up must come down within the next second. T-stops. I knew I wasn't going to pass this element and I had no business doing so since my body didn't understand its mechanics yet, and didn't know what it was supposed to do. I screw up my CW FXOs but I know what I'm supposed to be doing to fix it. With T-stops, I didn't even have that.
I pushed off from T-position and found that I was holding the glide pretty well, and found it easier to put the back foot down if I kept it basically hovering next to the back of my skating foot to begin with in a sort of "pre-T" position. I have never been able to hold this position previously. I put my foot down and hoped for the best and I actually stopped. My coach kept saying "fight for it, use those leg muscles!" and I *finally* figured out what she meant by that. It felt something like contracting your quads and glutes (aka dem thighs and dat ass, respectively) while pushing your blade into the ice. It was one of those "aha!" moments.
My T-stop, however, is still in need of further work since my "T" still ends up being an "L", since apparently the coach noticed that I tended to cheat it by putting the part of the blade closer to the toe down first (easier because your hips aren't so open) and eventually sliding into the "T" position to correct when I've already got my blade on ice. It's a bit akin to (by a long shot, lol) underrotating your jump by completing the a fraction of the revolution on ice instead of the air.
It turns out that she's allowing us to "retest" next week too, though I don't know if this means redoing all of Beta or just the dreaded T's. All of us had something to work on, but my enemy isn't anything I already didn't know about. T-stops, t-stops, t-stops....
Afterward, CJ and I windowshopped a bit at the Westfield Shopping Mall 4 blocks from YB, where I found my legwarmers! We also ate a late lunch (neither of us had a proper meal that whole day and it was already around 3 pm--it's not a "figure skating diet", it's called getting to our respective buses early and in time for class) at a favorite place of mine, Mel's Diner. It's amazing how many people I am becoming friends with because of figure skating! I generally am very shy and have a hard time talking to people but having skating as a common denominator just makes things so much easier.
So, Monday. T-stops in my legwarmers. Looking forward to it!