Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

I’ll make an exception for John, just this once.

The Rules: “Each person posts the rules before their list, then they list 8 things about themselves. At the end of the post, that person tags and links to 8 other people and then visits those peoples’ sites and comments letting them know that they have been tagged, and to come read the post, so they know what they have to do.”

1. Continuing the tea theme, I have an impeccable relationship with tea. Not only do I drink around 5 cups a day of the stuff, without sugar (never taken it), but also my husband is Vice President Sales & Marketing for Twinings USA. Anyone fancy a cuppa?
2. I can walk on my knees in the Lotus position. I guess Becky-the-gymnast does owe some of her flexibility to me after all.
3. Both times I was pregnant my linea nigra eventually got right up to my breastbone. Both babies were girls.
4. I’ve been fired twice. The first time was from the waitressing job I had at 17, officially for allowing champagne to freeze (but actually because I was having an affair with the Head Chef.) The second time was constructive dismissal and I walked out.
5. I learned how to sign the deaf and dumb alphabet in Brownie Guides and I’ve never forgotten it. Of course, since the European one is different to the US one it’s not much use to me over here.
6. I’m currently simultaneously reading Savage Beauty (Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St Vincent Millay) alongside her Selected Poems (which I had to buy a new copy of recently.) I’m also reading Dante’s Purgatorio (the W.S. Merwin translation.) However, on July 21st I will be dropping everything to read the new Harry Potter.
7. Despite the fact that I have had three different family names (Gray, Hagen and Evans) my signatures under all three are indistinguishable.
8. Whenever I worry that I am becoming too Americanized I console myself with the fact that I have not yet attended a Baseball game. Or an American Football game. Or a Basketball game. Or an Ice Hockey game. (And yes, I went to cricket and football matches in the UK, but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.)

OK. Clearly I need to tag Rachel, Don, Kendall, Andrea, Bruce, Jaime (you know why), Fee (checking you’re still out there, young lady) and, hmm, why not, Keba.

I spent forty minutes today boxing with my personal trainer. Now, why, you might ask, would a 38 year old 5 ft 2 woman with a hole in the heart want to box? Some might reply it’s because I’m a scrappy little bitch. Actually, it’s a great workout, combining endurance, cardio, upper and lower body strength. But, furthermore, when you’re mad at the world it’s great to hit something, even if it’s only your personal trainer’s pads.

Then this evening I watched “Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.” I’m not going to call this a great film, but it certainly is good entertainment. Given that I’m old enough to have seen the original three movies in theater, and was busy raising small children when the new ones started coming out, it’s a treat to discover that universe again (prequentially speaking).

So, you see, I can write a post and not even mention poetry, or my kids. Oops. (And I did write a poem WHILE watching the movie, called “Sonnet on a Line from Star Wars.” Oops again.)

Ah well, anyone got any Sith Lords they need beating up?

I love rollercoasters. If you think you know me that might surprise you; if you actually do, of course it won’t.

Anyway yesterday I took my niece (visiting from England) and eldest daughter to Six Flags Great Adventure. This was a momentous occasion as it was the first time I had gone with a full crowd of fellow coaster lovers. (My younger daughter is a tad risk-averse, and my husband just doesn’t like them.) Of course my eldest is only 50″ as of yet, so she can’t ride the big coasters, but she has a certain sympathy with us for wanting to.

Now, should you go to this theme park, I highly recommend the fast pass system. It cost us $90 to get in (We had a Papa John’s BOGOF) and another $90 for two fast passes–one with just one person on it (the big coaster hopper) and one with all three of us on it (the family ride hopper). That might seem a little extreme, but none of us like waiting in line. This way Becky got to do Skull Mountain and the Log Flume twice, while my niece and I took turns on Batman and Nitro (of which Nitro is the better). But after we’d exhausted the family ride fast pass opportunities, we started using that pass as a coaster hopper too, which is how we ended up with 3 reservations on Kingda Ka.

Once I’d explained to my niece that Kingda Ka was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world she was keen to do it, and of course I wanted to do it. The line was 3 hours at that point, but we knew we’d be able to just walk on with our fast pass when our time came around. So, we had a chat with Becky and set her up with a drink and snack in full view of a snack bar and several park security officers, with instructions to tell anyone official who asked that she was 11, and off we went.

Bloody hell. It was a rush. You race vertically up this one hundred foot plus track, crest the top and accelerate vertically downwards, twisting as you go. My body genuinely thought it was going to die twice. Of course there’s a downside: my cell phone, which we’d kept with us so we could be in touch with Becks on her Firefly, shot out of my pocket somewhere on the way down. Also, I just washed up today and discovered a line of bruises under each upper arm, where the safety harness was pressed into my skin by the G-force.

But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’m like that, actually, in case you didn’t know.