Help a Derby Girl

So, we have this friend, lasergirl.

I've known her since way back in the peak days of AoS fandom, so... good God, getting on for a decade. She's a theatrical costumer, and a good one, but right now she's not making a living, because, well, it's hard to make a living in Canadian theater at the best of time and this is not the best of times.

So right now she's put her career on hold and she's back living with her parents, trying to get a dayjob, dealing with her debtload, looking into going back to school to improve her employability ...

Her basic physical needs are taken care of. This is Canada, so she has adequate medical care. What she doesn't have is ANY margin at all for nonessentials. She's been doing a lot of rollerderby refereeing this summer - she came up to Ottawa to help ref our May doubleheader - and that is pretty much her only recreational outlet. Doing derby is really good for her mental and physical health; it's keeping her fit and it's helping her stay sane.

But her skates are trying to rip her feet off.

They're an old pair of "budget beginner" derby skates. They're beaten half to death, they're about a half-size too big, and they were never built to withstand the kind of punishment an experienced ref hands her skates in the course of a bout.

Every time she refs a bout - which involves a LOT of hard, fast turns and skating really fast - she gets vicious blisters and raw spots, and that is forcing to cut her practice and exercise skating a lot so as to save her feet for bouts.

My household is totally willing to go pick her up and take her on an expedition to Montreal to try on and buy skates (road trip with lasergirl= YAY), and we're willing to cover a chunk of the price, but as much as I would frankly LOVE to be able to just do this for her, we can't cover it all.

So I'm passing the helmet. Can you help?

She needs an intermediate-level skate, something like this, in a size 5.5.

A pair of those would let her do derby comfortably for several *years* basically without having to find any major amount of money again - officials don't pay dues or travel costs - which means that while she is trying to rebuild basically her whole life she'll have derby to keep life from getting too bleak.

If you can throw some money in, or if you want to signal boost, that would be utterly amazing.

If we end up with more money than we need, we will split the extra evenly between my league and hers to help them continue to support new skaters with loaner equipment and Fresh Meat programs.

Paypal to: fairestcatja@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading this!

ETA: I originally posted the wrong PayPal address. If you sent any money to "fairestcat@gmail.com" please email Cat at the above, correct, address and let her know what happened and she'll help sort it out.

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Fannish Content OMG

1) I recall a couple of years back there were some efforts to find a good replacement for "pimping" a fandom, that never really went anywhere because nothing really good turned up.

Now that All The Feels is a thing, may I suggest referring to the process of enticing someone into your fandom be referred to as Putting Out Feelers?

Being enticed could be referred to as Copping A Feel: "Eh, I wasn't really into Avengers and then Cat did that great picspam and I think I accidentally Copped a Feel".

2) I submit for the convenience of the Internetz two acronyms:

CSCT: Can Spell Can't Type. Useful for that little Reason For Edit box.

RTYI/RTMI: Relevant To Your/My Interests. A common and useful phrase which takes a while to type, especially on a smartphone keypad.

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I screwed up the Help A Derby Girl Post

You'd think I'd know my own wife's paypal by now, Y/N?

It's fairestcatja@gmail.com, not fairestcat.

If you've already donated to the fairestcat address, you can cancel it:

Log in to your PayPal account.
Click the My Account tab.
Click the History subtab.
Click Cancel in the Order status/Actions column of the
transaction in question.
Click Cancel Payment.

Note: If Cancel is not an option in the Order status/Actions
column, the payment has been claimed and cannot be cancelled.

Except that account is not actually real/linked to an email, so that shouldn't happen

If for any reason that doesn't work, please drop Cat a line at the correct address, above. She's figuring out now what you're supposed to do if that happens, and will either sort it out or, if it has to be the donor who does it, tell you what to do.

I am SO SORRY guys. So incredibly sorry. That was inexcusably sloppy of me.


ETA from Cat: I have contacted paypal support and they are AWESOME and have saved our asses. Since that email address is not a valid email/not connected to any paypal account we were able to temporarily attach it to my account. All payments sent to fairestcat@gmail.com should now be going to the correct account.

Thank you to everyone for your patience with this matter. I love you all.

This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth. where there are comments. Comment here or there as you prefer.

On wishing to be in two places at one time

Alas, it's the end of AUGUST that I expect to be in Rossland.

This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth. where there are comments. Comment here or there as you prefer.