Wednesday 30 January 2013

Life on the Ice

I know a place, where I'm happy to be,
A place where kindness does run free,
It's called the ice rink, my friends are all there,
Read on, and my story, I'll happily share.

Some skaters are young,
Some young at heart,
But all of these people,
Do play their part.

They support one another,
Through good times and bad,
And when goals are achieved,
They are grinning like mad

They pick you up when you fall,
Laugh at your poor old bruised hips
They pass on their knowledge,
About learning lutzes and flips

They spin, and they jump,
They dance and they twirl,
They make me realize,
I'm a very lucky girl

Because I know a place,
Where I'm happy to be,
It's a wonderful place
Where kindness runs free.

OK, I know bits of it don't scan, but I felt like writing a poem about skating and for something written off the top of my head, I think it's pretty good. I hope you like it. 

Thursday 17 January 2013

Learning New Things, Making New Friends

OK, first of all I'd like to apologize for my lack of posts over the last few weeks. As often happens real life got in the way and I let the blog slip under the radar, but I'm back now.

So, what have I been up to since the New Year? Well, I've so far had 3 lessons, and all have been good. The first one was while the schools were still off, so was a bit hectic, lots of dodging children. We recapped everything in that one, and I practiced a few things that I was struggling with.

The next one was good, on a Friday when lots of adults come to practice, and we worked on my outside edges on a curve, and began working on turning from forwards to backwards.

Today we continued work on those, and although I'm making small amounts of progress, neither is ready to be signed off yet. This is annoying, as up til now progress has been quite good, but I knew it'd slow down eventually. We also worked a little on my backwards skating, and that has progressed to the next stage, so that's good. 

Anyway, the really great thing is, I've been making friends at the rink, all different ages and abilities, and the atmosphere is great, especially on a Friday. Everyone encourages each other, we have a joke, but we get on with our practicing as well. The annoying thing is, I can only skate every other Friday due to commitments elsewhere, so I do miss out on that sometimes. Today I was lucky that one of my skating friends came for a lesson and we got to practice together, which was nice. 

So, my plans for this week are; wear socks on our tiled floors to practice certain elements off-ice, do stretches to help open my hips off-ice and hope that we don't get too much snow!

Yep, apparently we're in for up to 10cm of snow and I for one am not happy about it. Luckily today the roads to the rink were clear and the bus could get through, but my next lesson is next Friday, so I'm hoping the snow forecast to start tomorrow disappears by then!