Charismatic Gordon

As has become my custom of late, I went to the Saturday public session after my yoga class. It was the usual crowd. I'm starting to know several people at most of the sessions, and today was no different. Besides Lisa and her friend Alicia (adult skaters) there were the four skating sisters -- Kira (oldest), Mariah, Veronica, and Heaven. Veronica is 7 or so and attaches herself to me pretty regularly in that way that kids sometimes do. She's about at the same level as me, too, so we sometimes trade tips and so forth. I took a moment to introduce myself to the sisters' mother and grandmother (Bonnie). Bonnie noted how the girls seem to flock to me, and I said it's a compliment. I guess I just have charisma that way :-). Of course it's too bad it doesn't work with girls my age! I spent a fair amount of time talking with Veronica, she's a great kid. Kids that age are very open and talk about anything and everything. While we were talking and skating she stuck out her hand and we skated hand in hand for a bit (my first time :-)). It's nice to be an "uncle" figure once again.

I spent most of my time working on my problem areas -- right foot glide, backward left-foot glide, two-foot turn and 3-turn. I did try a couple of RFI mohawks with only moderate success, and I'm still avoiding working on crossovers. My two-foot turn is really pretty good right now, and I did manage several good LFI 3-turns, including a couple where I actually managed to hold the backward edge for a little. That was very gratifying. On the right-foot glide I managed to get it much more stable and was able to get some good extension on my free leg. I didn't get to work on the backward glide as much as I would have liked due to the crowd, but I did manage to make a little progress, including one that was about 6 seconds and relatively stable (left foot of course).

There was a quite good skater there doing some nice spins etc. I asked her if she was there for the testing tomorrow, and she said yes, she was testing preliminary. She asked me if I was a judge :-) and of course I laughed and said no. I wished her luck and told her I would be watching the tests in hopes of learning some stuff.