true blog revival!

OK, so it's the end of August, and most days it's horrid and sweltering out. Actually, I think that's great. I love hot weather, but it is very lazy weather and makes it hard to actually do anything. I'm distressed that I've been trying for a week to make it to any Fringe Festival show at all and have been prevented by subway malfunctions, over-scheduling, or heat-induced fatigue. (I WILL succeed tomorrow night; there is no other option!) I STILL have to make it to the beach this summer. My academy has added several new class options in the morning, which is ideal for me, but I haven't managed to increase my training frequency yet despite a couple weeks of good intentions. (Again, this WILL happen this week; I'm determined.)

However, some very good things HAVE happened lately. Somewhat in order they are:

My vacation at the beginning of August. I swung south to Wildwood on the Jersey shore for a couple of days, where I had fun strolling the boardwalk, witnessed a fantastically impressive storm sweep in off the ocean, and was able to watch some live MMA at a Reality Fighting event there. Then I proceeded out to western PA for my yearly trip to Pennsic, a giant medieval festival. I spent a week camping and sword fighting (well, I personally use a polearm rather than a sword) in huge armored battles with a 1,000 people per side. I got a bit carried away buying belly dancing costumes even though I can't belly dance – although I did take a class while I was there. Unfortunately, it was a fairly advanced class focusing on the particular art of balancing things on your head while belly dancing. So now I know more about balancing than the basic dancing. Oh, well. Also went out to a few excellent parties around campfires. The best one was the Ladies’ Night Party, which featured ungodly amounts of wonderful food and drink and (mostly) attractive shirtless male servers being indecently harassed by the feasting ladies. And, yes, this too was done around a campfire. Great night ;) And great trip.

Next, I confirmed that I’ll be travelling up to Montreal again this year for the Fetish Weekend there. I’ll be doing sessions and shooting wrestling videos with Pamela and judoboy while I’m there, but enjoying the city and the fetish galas will be a big part of the trip. I’m having fun planning for the high fashion scene at MFW (designing Rococo Masquerade Domina wear!), and in anticipation (and as a result of actually not having the past few weekends at home) I’ve been getting out to New York parties again. Dropped in at Suite Abyss the other weekend, and I must say that club dancing is a good time. Planning on much more soon!

(Other upcoming travel notes – I won’t be going back to Atlanta in September after all, sadly. But I will be going to Indianapolis later that same month. Should be an interesting trip – I’ve got family out that way, and they’ll get to meet some of my wrestling colleagues. Worlds will collide.)

Also, there was lately the Grapple Den Two-Year Anniversary Party. We had a summer beach theme and an arena rock soundtrack. A lot of good matches – we’ve had great talent over the past few months. I continue to believe, though, that more people need to be brave and try oil wrestling at the beach theme parties. Sure it’s a little disgusting, but it’s great fun. Cloberella was game for it and, of course, Tony, who’s always game. Props to them.

Also a good news/bad news note – I had such an utter hell of a time putting together the party music on my dying laptop that it finally convinced me to get a new laptop. Alas for hellacious difficulties. Yay for the new laptop! I’m composing on it now.

Finally, there was the afore-mentioned video rematch with Kim on Sunday. That girl is so much fun to fight and really frikkin’ good. I’m thrilled with my takedown performance this time around, but I also nearly died in one choke… It was an even closer fight than our last December battle, and our highly critical video editor has been raving to me about it. A good sign! And best of all, it will be available very, very soon. [ETA: It is available NOW: VeVe vs. Kim REMATCH Video] This should be the start of a good run of video production – besides the Montreal matches, I’ve got a mixed competitive video and a second (and maybe third?) spandex match lined up. Good stuff heading into September; stay tuned!

catching up!

It's been forever since I posted a blog, and I blame two things for that --

1) My extremely busy and travel-filled summer

2) My laptop, which has gradually been dying a slow, painful death, making it really unpleasant to get online.

So let me just throw a few things out here to get a little bit caught up.

First, an exciting announcement for this weekend. I'm going to be taking on Kim in a video rematch this Sunday, and we're opening up the match to a live audience. Kim and I faced off back in December, and it was an excellent, very close, very technical, very intense and exhausting submission grappling match! Now we're both just that much better -- we were both blue belts last winter; Kim's actually been promoted to purple belt since then. I don't plan to let that make a difference, but it's going to be a hard fight!

So if you want to get a front row seat at the live event, follow this link for all the details: Live Taping Tickets

And if you want a preview of the action, or if you want to get caught up on the full drama of our first battle, you can check out these links:
YouTube Trailer
VeVe vs. Kim I in the Doom Maidens Video Store

Damn it, now I've run out of time for the rest of the updates I wanted to make, but I vow that they're soon to follow. Stay tuned for tales of my fantastic summer vacation, the latest Grapple Den Party, and my upcoming travels!