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Friday was a holiday in Gainesville.  Most of the city gets Homecoming off, even elementary school children.  The Gainesville Roller Rebels were participating in this year’s parade, so I got up early and drove in the rain to the severely parking-restricted University of Florida campus.  There is apparently a rule about parade participants arriving by 8:30AM.  Since the parade doesn’t begin until noon, that’s a pretty long time to be standing around…in the rain!  We realized that one of us could have shown up at 8:30 to check in, and the rest of us could have slept until ten o’clock.  I think that’ll be the plan next year.  But the GRR girls are great, and the Wendy’s at the Reitz Union was (surprisingly) open, so I had a Frosty and chatted it up with the team.

It was neat to see the way the Homecoming parade is put together, having only seen it from the sidewalk in years past.  All the floats and marchers line up in the O’Connell Center parking lot, or on North-South Drive in front of the stadium, and then, one by one, each contingent makes their way out onto University Avenue and walks east down to Main Street, turns south, and heads back down SW 2nd Avenue. The whole route (on skates for the girls, on foot for me) took less than a half hour.  In spite of the rain, there were still thousands of people sitting on the curb of either side of the street, on lawnchairs on the sidewalk, on the low brick wall in front of campus, at tables in front of restaurants, and even from windows of the Seagle Building.  It was delightful.

The sad part about marching in a parade is that you don’t really see the parade.  I was sad to miss the Pride of the Sunshine.  But a couple positions behind us was an old Studebaker truck, on the back of which was a brass contraption which proclaimed it to be the “world’s largest calliope”.  I cannot verify that claim, but it certainly made a glorious noise!

When we got downtown we ate together at Big Lou’s, then Karla and Ryan drove us back to our cars.  This was my first parade, and it was a delight.  And it was fun to see Patsy Clothesline and Ms. Rebel in their costumes.

The winds seem to have calmed quite a bit tonight, though not completely, and the rain has finally stopped, after more than 24 hours of constant downpour.  At this time last night I was lying here listening to the wind and the rain, and it was actually relaxing, in spite of the outside chance of our many trees experiencing limb-jettison.

Driving downtown this afternoon to return some books to the library (closed), I found streets everywhere covered in twigs and Spanish moss.  In front of two houses in the Duck Pond there were downed trees, one of which was substantial, though it fortunately fell in such a way that it missed striking any structures.  This was a special relief, since, had it hit any building at all it would have been a house which Miriam and I particularly like.

Our street escaped entirely unharmed, save for our one small branch on the cedar tree, which is insignificant.  Fay mostly meant rain, and I’m eager to see the totals for the storm.  I’d also bet that Paines Prairie and Devil’s Millhopper are flooded.

Wooooo!  Wooooooooooo!  Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!  Woooo!

I am notoriously fond of free time.  I enjoy having things to look forward to, but am far less enthusiastic about having such limited down time, as is my current condition.

Nevertheless, I must take a moment to congratulate the Gainesville Roller Rebels on an important milestone.  Yesterday, before a crowd of several hundred, GRR held their first intra-league bout in the sweltering heat of the Alachua County Fairgrounds.  The amount of planning and preparation for this event–the first ever roller derby exhibition in Gainesville–was phenomenal.  Let’s just say it rivaled the 2008 Olympics.  It’s not true, but let’s say it.

The team was split between “Sinners” and “Saints”, and they faced off against each other for three 20 minute periods, augmented by a few Jacksonville Roller Girls to make up for the GRR girls on the disabled list.  The costumes were adorable, the makeup fantastic, the energy was infectious, and the crowd was enormous.  It must be considered an unqualified success, even if the score was rather lopsided in the Sinners’ favor.

I took hundreds of photographs, of course, but those will have to wait until my many papers and reading assignments are behind me.  In the meantime, check out the Gainesville Sun’s article on the exhibition.  They had reporters and photographers there, as did TV-20, whose report aired on the 11 o’clock news last night.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Alligator had an article tomorrow.

This is a great time for GRR.  I just wish I had more of a chance to enjoy it.

Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, and I look forward to it every year because we generally do something fun, like travel.  This year, however, we were home for the holiday, and I went to work. 

In the evening, however, Kathleen picked me up and we went up to the Alachua County Fairgrounds, where the Gainesville Roller Rebels now have practice space.  It is just about ideal.  The building is enormous–many, many thousands of square feet–with a smooth, polished concrete floor.  The lighting is excellent, since there’s a garage door the size of a house on one end, and a wall of windows on two sides.  At the other end are bathrooms described as adequate.  Really, the only thing missing (and it’s kind of a big thing) is air conditioning.  The openness seems to keep it from being a furnace, but I wasn’t on skates.  The girls who were, obviously, were drenched.  We may have to get one of those big fans that have wheels.

Following the abbreviated practice, run by Ms. Rebel, GRR held a meet and greet, and a bunch of girls came out to watch the practice and sit in on the information session.  They asked good questions, and seemed genuinely interested, which I suppose was already obvious from their coming in on a holiday.  Some of them were acquainted with GRR players, but some were randoms, i.e., girls who had just seen a poster at Big Lou’s, for example.  Even if a quarter of them turn out to make the team, that’d still be good.  Patsy Clotheslineshowed me the article about her that was just published in a glossy magazine, complete with a photo of her I tookduring GRR’s bout with Jacksonville in April.

Some of the derby widows (the husbands and boyfriends of the players) had set up a barbecue out back, and there was chicken and hotdogs and hamburgers and assorted chips and soft-drinks and beer.  When everything was finished we went outside and chowed down, and it was awesome.  I declare hotdogs to be the ideal barbecue food, and here’s why: you can make underwhelming chicken, and you can botch hamburgers, but unless you burn them, hotdogs are always good. 

So, my Memorial Day came to the same conclusion as millions of other Americans’, with food and friends.