silver

silverflight8 @ 2019-03-13T22:43:00

2019-03-14T02:43:15Z

I started taking skating classes again! It has been pretty good so far. The only thing I do not like is the spinning. Oh my god I'm so dizzy and my brain hurts. Apparently it's supposed to get better. It has been...but it's painful. Also I am amazingly hungry afterwards.

I got sorted into Basic 5 and have mostly regained my edges, though I'm still slipping on the backwards outside left - I had my skates sharpened so I think it's a skill/balance issue, not a skate issue. Before I sharpened them, I slipped on ALL my edges, which is pretty scary. I think my weakness on this particular edge is because every rink I go to apparently is diehard counter-clockwise in skating direction. I have tried to convince people to go the other way, but it's ridiculously difficult. So I don't get to actually practice that one. (Edges - skates aren't a flat piece of metal on the bottom like a ]|, they're more like (|, i.e. in a curve, which is measured by the radius of the circle. This makes two edges. Lots of the interesting things in ice skating is done on one of the edges. There's a R/L front and back edge.)

I finally fixed my 3 turns (well, the easy forward outside ones!) This is how you learn to do one foot forwards-to-backwards (or vice versa) turns. I've struggled with this for foreverrrr and it took pretty much 1 comment from the instructor to fix most of my problems. So I feel that alone was worth the price of lessons.

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ice dance and figureskating, just because

2013-02-03T19:31:32Z

I watched Davis & White's 2010 Olympics free dance, and it was a bit...well, disappointing.

I don't know, it's technically executed beautifully (and dramatically, too; I loved the transitions from the quieter music to the clashing louder one). They're always so very fluid - here's the original dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUzchzkitdQ - but it's just not quite...I can't come up with a better way to say it, because everything is technically so beautifully executed. I love watching them do the movements. But it's not musical, I guess; it's not so much dance as execution, and sometimes - arm movements aside - it looks like they're going through movements. Some of the musical transitions seem to catch them by surprise, or they don't quite pick up on some of the nuances, but perhaps that's just choreography. I guess I like the dance part the best; Davis and White came in second place in the Vancouver Olympics to Virtue and Moir, who had a magical, absolutely magical free dance:

But what I was going to say, before all the movies came up, was that Virtue & Moir have a new free dance, based on Carmen.

Watch the coordination! From 1:42-154 or so, omg. And the last, oh, I don't know, fifteen or twenty seconds is just sdkfl;j, I love their skating.

I mean, look at Baiul jitterbug dancing with Petrenko (singles skater)! I think I grinned throughout the entire dance (and the clothing is priceless too):

She won the 1994 Olympics (as a singles figure skater, not as an ice dancing partner) with a Swan Lake that was more like ballet on ice than anything else [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bH0CAPzef8] but she's so versatile - I'm not the biggest fan of ballet, but I love that she can do so many styles.

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silverflight8 @ 2011-01-16T22:09:00

2011-01-17T06:39:10Z

I went ice skating today. In retrospect, I could have chosen a better day. It was negative thirty with windchill. Oops.

I can still skate backwards! I can still brake! I can still skate, period! It's been a few years. I didn't attempt spins. (I hate spins.) There were perhaps two or three dozen people out today - on a nice day, the lagoon is filled with hundreds of people. The relative sparseness of people worked in my favour, though; I was so bundled up there it was exceedingly impractical to look backwards when I skated backwards, so it was all good. I would like to go skating again. Only on a better day, thank you very much.

Reading through Hamlet again. V. exciting.

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