Pale moon rising over the cake of an incredible weekend...

There is an absolutely almost full moon (tomorrow) hanging out in a clear cloudless sky with the Cascades acting as a back drop. I finished an hour in my garden (amen!) pulling out mint that had taken over everything, and freshened up the soil with some compost before planting some more lettuce that I know will be happy with the turn of the season this week.

I saw three trees with orange leaves and I have been told repeatedly that Wednesday is the last day of summer - I'm just happy it last three weeks longer than I expected. There was a cold snap a bit ago and I thought our summer was going be only 6 weeks long (&!?#^#%@) - luckily it has lasted a couple of weeks longer - all bright, beautiful, clear (sometimes cool) sunny days... just gorgeous and one of the many things that Seattle is reputed for - and all coming to an end on Wednesday when rains comes rolling in and the low sixties.

Today was a long day - I was at a work event from 9 a.m. to almost 1 p.m. and then actually went to work for a couple of hours. (I had a work event on Friday that was super successful and fun!) I scooted home and headed to Discovery Park for a two hour hike before heading to my P-Patch. It was great to tear up the plot and plant new things. I was rather happy and relieved.

However, the icing on the cake this weekend was the Dockyard Derby Dames (DDYD) and Jet City Roller Girl Bout on Saturday. It was a match-off a year in the making and it was great! Each JCRG team played one of the DDYD teams for a 30 minute mini-bout (two-15 minute mini halves with a 5 minute break that served as half time). We were ranked pretty closely by our rank within our leagues. We were squared off with Mollys - I had been on the Mollys for about a month when I first got involved with derby (and was driving 103 miles round trip to skate. As my carpool buddies dropped off, it became impossible for me to keep it up.) I was thrilled to play the Mollys - as it was like coming back home or at least to your sister's house. We both had purple and black uniforms. Both our teams had a hard time winning though we always put up a great fight. Yeah, we were perfect matches!

We were at a serious disadvantage as our injured list is longer than our healthy list! A few people were out of town but we had a group of gimps who called themselves the "CC"s - Carnie Cripples. So a standard game day roster has 16 - 14 of which are playing and 2 others are on the roster "just incase"... we had 9 healthy skaters and no "just incases". And just as life would have it, we lost Vibe Raider, one of our up and coming blockers, 30 minutes before we were going to go on (dislocated knee cap) and had to rewrite line-ups. Everyone played 2 or 3 times in a row (read: exhausting). There were only three jammers and when you weren't jamming you were out there with the blockers smacking people around. It was great, exhausting and incredible!

We were up by 10 points as the half, even with only 8 skaters but the points slipped out of our hands and we found ourselves TIED (see on of January postings for an idea of what that was like) and as history would repeat itself - I was jamming (but in the box!) It was a total nail-biter! I skated out of the box, like hell on wheels, and tried desperately to grab more points than the other jammer (taking her out along the way!) but she had the advantage of catching my point (while I was in the box) - I scored 8 points - she scored 9. We lost by one. It was devastating and though thrilling at the same time to have played so low in numbers, have some questionable calls, and only lose by 1 point. It was also thrilled to play the Mollys. And if I hadn't been so exhausted and PROUD at the same time, there might have even been some tears.

There will be a rematch! There will be more long weekends. There will be a weekend trip to Denver to see the most beautiful girls in the world. There will be financial intuitions that will fail. There will be cases won (yeah, two last week!) and lost. There will be more friends that will lose their jobs and others that find better ones. There will be more injuries and more tie breakers. There are so many more things to anticipate. But tonight there is a huge pale white moon in the sky over the Cascades and the thrilled of such a weekend.