Caitlin Drummer

Snowboarding is never boring, and you don’t really ever need distracting from what you’re up to, but maybe you have a solo lift ride, or some git is yacking on a mobile phone up a long chair, or you just want to time your kicker pops to a slamming beat. Anyhoo, some snowboard helmets (you do wear a lid, right?) have the facility for slipping some headphones into the liner where they cover the ear.

I have a Giro Grove helmet and it’s got that facility. Where the pad meets the helmet at the top you’ll find a little velcro tab, which peels open to reveal a foam pocket which if you pop out the fabric disc in the center provides a recess for some headphones.

If you fancy shelling out a hundred quid or more there are a few products that suggest they’ll pop right in, but when I was scouting the net I found as many complaints about them failing as people saying “yeh, they’re ok”. I’m not naming any names but I’m sure you’ll find the same as me.

As it happened, I had some Sony MDR Q22LPS lying around from when I used to have a ring in my tragus so I couldn’t use earbuds.

I cracked them open, fully expecting to find some variation of a piezo disc inside them.
The coloured cap just pops off, which lets you get a better grip. Then you can see some tabs where the white plastic part meets the black part, carefully prize those guys open and *taking care* when separating the halves you find you’ve got perfect disc shaped headphones with some VERY THIN wires attached. I had to clip the earphone backs with scissors to get them to release the headphone wire.

I mixed some araldite and being careful not to block the hole in the center of the speaker assembly, I spludged it all over the delicate wires and used more to bond the shielded wire to the body of the speaker assembly. Giving that 20 mins to set, I messed around with my video camera since I got a new follow focus for it.

Slip the headphones into the ear pockets from the back, like slide them *under* the padding so the wire’s far from your ear, and stash the wires under the padded head lining of the helmet, which is just velcroed into the hardshell. Voila, you can stick your iPod on and get on with being crashed into by that skiier you couldn’t hear coming. Choice.

Tonight, with fear in my heart and sweaty feet in my boots I went back to the freestyle at Hemel. Two weeks ago the box chewed me up, spat me out, bruised my arse and made me think twice about the whole sorry sport! I actually shed a little tear and went home an hour earlier than I should have. Grumpy grumpy grump grump.

Of course I then missed the next week of freestyle by procrastinating so long that it got booked out. It is of course now sliding into “the season” so everyone’s coming out of the woodwork and getting back into practise. Oopsie. I’ve booked the next week already so I’m sorted for that.

This week I did everything I could think of to prepare for an epic evening of hard work and fun. Filled up with calories early on, and lighter food later. Stretched lots. Rested well. Then I shot off into the EPIC traffic all the way up the M1 and got there almost LATE! I could hear them calling out for the course attendees whilst I had one leg in my trouser and the other with the velcro hanging off the knee pad. I scampered out with my boots not done up and managed to catch up with the group. After ten minutes and two terrifying runs down the slope I think I got everything done up, and tightened like it should be, not like it is if you do it in a horrible rush.

Anyway, what’s the goss?
Caitlin dun a 180 of a kicker, regular into the jump and switch out the other side. Well sketchy and a few too many 90s to call it nailed, but I’m claiming the one I *did*.
She also dun some mucking about on a rocker, which is a nice feeling. You go up a ramp to a plastic pipe on the top, pause for a moment and go back the way you came, just like a quarter pipe really.
50:50s on the box feel fine and never go wrong.
A little 5:0 snuck in one time.
The bestest most awesomest thing was riding switch into the box, boardsliding through into a regular rideout. That feels *GREAT*.

So, I’m back to adoring snowboarding with all the passion I had at the start, and The two week old washout was nowt more than a “bad day”. WRITTEN OFF.

Now to do some food. I’m ravenous.

I’ve never been one for holidays really. I’m a practical kind of kid and tend to spend my downtime in either collapses recovering from excesses, doing tasks that cannot be avoided or spending the time on some activity that I consider to drive my development as a human through education or experience. Not that much of it isn’t self absorption or hedonism.

That said I’ve been to a few countries: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, America, Mexico, Guatemala; even places as exotic as Scotland. I’ve never been south of the equator though, which is something of note. I think however the thing about all these international visitations is that they’ve all been the result of a direct association with another person, the one or the group who was going and with that cause in place, I tagged along. I had no agenda for going other than company, or curiosity. Mostly I was instructed to go, or had no choice to stay behind. Significantly I’ve never gone alone.

So, it’s a slightly strange feeling to have just booked a couple of plane tickets and some accommodation for a solo trip to some mountains. I’ll be sharing a bunk room with three other humanoids, but I’ve never met them, don’t know their names and have no idea if I’ll get on with them other than the assumption that as the delightful person I am they’ll take me straight under their wing and we’ll be bestest friends for life before the first broken leg happens.

So there we are, the longest winded way I could find to say “I booked a holiday, GO ME!”. Also: SQUEEEEEEEE SNOWBOARDING WOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Bleeding ages till January, isn’t it?