Last night I went and traded dinner and drinks for a homemade customized hula hoop almost five feet in diameter. My friend Holly gave me a “fitting,” where she brought a bunch of hoops she’d made out into her yard, and I “tried on” each one to see which felt the best. I ended up selecting one of her fatter hoops (thick tubing) in the largest diameter she had — big enough so that when I put it over my shoulder to carry it, it only clears the ground by a couple inches.

While fiddling with all those big huge hoops, I tried a couple little tricks just to see how badly I would fail, and realized that my little hoops have left me at a strange advantage: they rotate so fast that by comparison the big hoop almost seems like it’s going in slow motion. That meant that I was able to pop a shoulder underneath the hoop, get it up around my neck, and then grab it and swing it over my head all in one relatively graceful swoop! Amazing! I still, however, could not get it back down from my hand…the hoop whacks into my face, where my geeko-specs get in the way. I knocked them off a couple times (inducing that lovely “I dropped my cafeteria tray” feeling), but was undeterred. Bigger hoops rock. And now I have one of my own!