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On Saturday night, we headed out to the All American Sports Mall for some roller derby action. The Arch Rival Roller Girls is roller derby league comprised of four local and two travel teams. One of Bethany’s colleagues plays for ‘The Stunt Devils’ local team, as well as the ‘Saint Lunachix’ travel team.

We watched the first half from up on the balcony to try and figure out how things worked, then headed down on the floor for the 2nd half to cheer on Mighty Mighty Boston, here on the left:

It was cool to be able to get pretty close to the action, and there was certainly a whole lot of bumpin’ and bangin’ going on, along with more than a few tumbles:

I guess like with hockey, not only do you have to pretty good at playing the game, you pretty much have to be a natural at skating too:

It really was a team game – here’s Mighty Mighty Boston getting a little help from one of her teammates whilst keeping the opposing team’s jammer behind:

Unfortunately, ‘Rebel Skate Alliance’ won the bout by 3 points, with the game staying really close for the last 20 minutes. It was still fun to watch, especially since it had been so close and engaging.

Photographing indoors at an event like this was a different challenge, and I was definitely casting a wishful eye over the Canon 70-200mm f2.8L-IS I saw another photographer wielding. I struggled to get much below 1600 ISO even with the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS I have, so I was left quite noisy shots at times. But, hopefully next time I’ll be able to do a little better, as although I’ve been good, I don’t think Santa is bringing me a 70-200mm f2.8L this year

My VMWare training course the last couple of days has been going really well. It’s nowhere near as technical as I thought, in a good way, and I’ve picked up a lot so far on the storage options and integrations given I’ve done nothing with iSCSI SAN’s before. The next couple of days have some good labs in them too, so can build up a nice playground before I try it back in the office!

Tonight I headed to the Alaska Aces hockey game which was really cool. They won in a shootout, so I really got my money’s worth. This may well have been the winning Aces goal as I think Victoria’s 5th then missed after this one:

I was in the 2nd row, and I much prefer being right down by the ice than a little further back where you’d maybe get a better view of the whole rink Great fun when players get bodychecked into the screen right in front of you or the puck slams into it!

Another couple of days of training then back to Bethel on Friday evening. Got all my shopping sorted as I’m being taken out for dinner with the guys from GCS that are hosting the training and provide our VMWare equipment and engineering support, plus I need to finalise a few loose ends on the K300 website tomorrow evening since the races then start on the Friday!

Given that there were almost 45,000 people at the Stadium of Light today, it felt a little weird given that’s probably double the population of the entire Lower Yukon + Kuskokwim Delta’s! Although the game ended 0-0, the atmosphere was great, had definately missed it. Even posed for a photo, very unlike me:

I would explain what the big red wheel is, but likely to just raise more questions from people stateside Ask me to explain it sometime. Used to be a good view of the stadium itself when walking up to it from Southwick, damn big aquatic center there now, so here’s the front side of the Stadium of Light itself:

After squeezing inside and getting to the bar for a pint and a sausage roll (making the most of getting them whilst I’m here!), headed up to our seats in the Kronenbourg stand, just off from behind the goal. Good atmosphere, though was surprised how much swearing there was.

Then there was fun of getting back out the stadium, dodging along the road between cars, and then edging our car along the road back to the A19, all whilst listening to the local radio with phone-in’s bemoaning the referees – some things never change! All in all, a good afternoon. Really enjoyed it, and the consolation of only walking away with a draw was that Newcastle lost to Wigan!

NFL opening Sunday today, Kat’s thrilled Seahawks lost big time, but looks like it might not be a great season for them anyways. Some other good games though, and also got the Formula 1 and GP2 recorded this morning to watch the next couple of days when back in Bethel.

After the chaos at Yute Air on Friday, I bumped into Carl yesterday who offered to give me a ride back into Bethel this evening. He’d planned to go moose hunting straight out of town on Friday for the weekend but it fell through, so I’m glad I don’t have to deal with Yute again today! Means I have more of a rest here too, otherwise I’d have been flying back out again around 2p.m.

Packed up a few things to take with me to the new apartment, enough to get through the next week I guess. I’ll be able to look things over and figure out if I need to pick anything else up or bring from here next weekend. Least Swanson’s is really close to bring back anything I need to buy. Tried calling up GCI to get phone, TV and internet sorted, but you have to go to the Bethel office to do it – probably as the address given wasn’t showing up in the Anchorage call center! So, I’ll try to get that done tomorrow lunch time and hopefully they can get it hooked up sometime this week. Kat is due to come into Bethel the following week, so better have TV working by then

Hopefully tomorrow’s opening kickoff of the 2008-2009 Premiership season will be as entertaining as my virtual game in Fifa ’08 on the Xbox 360 this evening – final score was Sunderland 4 – Liverpool 1 Somehow, I think it’s still being slightly optimistic to expect a similar result tomorrow!

I’m going to try watching the match via foxsoccer.com which holds the broadcasts rights over here in the US – our pitiful satellite can’t pick up the actual Fox Soccer Channel, but I’m going to try streaming it online. The first three Sunderland games of the season are being broadcast, and the lads at safc.com have also just fired up the podcast again after doing nothing last season Providing the internet doesn’t disappear in the morning, will almost be as good as being at the Stadium of Light with dad having a pint at half time…

Okay, maybe not. But I will have the new strip on that my parents brought over a couple of weeks ago!

I know Fernando Alonso often complains he’s quoted out of context, but on the issue of the racism shown towards Lewis Hamilton during testing in Spain he responded with (BBC Sport):

“It was an isolated incident and the FIA or anyone saying that the Spanish fans are racists is laughable.

“Last year, they called me a dog in a few races. Niki Lauda said those things about me, and no-one came to me to show me their support.”

Think someone needs to explain to him the different between ‘racism’ and ‘criticism’. He was probably called a dog due to the fact he had some terrible races. Sure, he looks a bit rough, but I doubt anyone was insinuating he’s actually a dog. Christijan Albers and Sakon Yamamoto were regularly called worse, again, because they were driving badly. For someone paid millions of dollars per race, you’d think he’d be able to take a bit of criticism and maybe learn from it – I mean, it’s not like Lauda has ever done anything in Formula 1 so might know what he’s talking about, is it…?

Still, here’s hoping Renault make a balls of a car like last season

The locals should be starting to drill proper jigging holes downriver in the next couple of weeks, and chatting with Jason yesterday he’s looking forward to getting his snowmobile back from Bethel to go hunting too, so I figured I should get all legal and purchase a hunting & fishing licence:

Never had a hunting licence before Not sure whether I’ll get to use it, but at least riding out with people hunting covers me in case the jobs worths arrive in the middle of no-where to check up on us (highly unlikely after the last time they turned up in Tunt a few years ago…). Was only $48 for the combined hunting & fishing licence for 2008 since I’m now officially an Alaskan resident, and could go king or silver salmon fishing around Kenai next summer too if I got a chance!

On the final day of the regular season, I ended up winning the fantasy football league! I was a bit concerned when we lost power as I couldn’t make changes to my team even I’d wanted to and figured some of my guys would be rested, but in the end I only missed out with Roethlisberger not playing and still had 20 points more than anyone else in the league. Picked up the 25 points I needed to catch up with Coleen and have won by 20.23 points which isn’t bad for only making two team changes through the season and being about 200 points behind the leader and at the bottom of the table after four weeks Also won a Rotohog cap after being in the top 5 of week 9′s biggest mover contest.

But, we’ve got a quiet New Year’s Eve coming up. Our neighbor Georgette did make a bunch of Chinese food for us, but we don’t have much else planned. Hope no-one gets too drunk tonight (I can think of a few likely suspects..) – I know we won’t

After helping Mark replace all the light bulbs and strip lights at home with new energy-efficient bulbs, he showed me how to change the throttle cable on my snowmobile. Wasn’t that hard, but I was glad Mark was there to adjust the carbs as it was revving way too high after we first attached the cables. But, after it they were adjusted, he commented that “it feels just like it’s got a new throttle cable on”… I got some coolant from the gas station and refilled + bled the system, so just hopefully it stays cold this evening with a bit more snow and I’ll try taking it out tomorrow.

I also got my prize from Rotohog today for my fantasy football team – it was a pretty cool cap, though is a weird shape so doesn’t fit too well! But, better than nothing, and I’m now nicely sat in 2nd place in our league with another 21 points from tonight’s game to come. Am ranked about 37th overall after the weekend, and hope to climb higher once they recalculate the points tomorrow

After 8 weeks of nothing to get excited about with my fantasy football team, everything seemed to fall into place last weekend. I never paid much attention to trading players as I had the mentality from fantasy soccer in England where you only have two or three trading windows. I didn’t realise people over here were trading players every week to score maximum points against weak opposition and to avoid players being out on bye weeks.

Regardless, my points score last weekend ranked 37th in the entire RotoHog league and I was ranked 5th biggest overall mover. Not too shabby. This afternoon I then got an e-mail asking me to confirm my postal address to receive a prize for being ranked in the weekly 25 biggest movers! Think it’s only going to be a t-shirt, but better than nothing