…all my stuff is in my house. All the boxes in the kitchen and the furniture in the garage.
The painting isn’t done yet, so I can’t move in. I’m in the Extended Stay for at least a day or two. I’m really not too upset (or surprised) about this. As Russ said, it’s like I’m on a vacation and then I come home to a nice new place.
At least they have wireless here.
No, I’m not going to work for Full Tilt.
The news is that I bought a house. I own property in West Santa Barbara Goleta. I closed escrow today. Tomorrow, I’m meeting with a general contractor to figure out all the work that needs to be done:
I think that’s all. I’m pretty excited about it, and can’t wait to move… or at least can’t wait until I’m finished moving. I will post pictures of it when I can get to it. Right now, the gallery just has pictures of it tented for fumigation.
Unrelated to all of that, I finally got my pin up in the case at the bowling alley. Click the image at the left for a bigger picture. Now I’m just waiting on the ring.
Not much to report on the poker front. Really, I’ve been too busy to play much lately, and when I have had time haven’t really felt like it.
Dammit.
Vertical Horizon is touring this summer with Pat McGee Band.
Are they coming anywhere close to California? Of coourse not.
Tendonitis
The trackball at home didn’t seem to help. I rearranged my desk, and started using my mouse again, and so far so good. The SmartGlove seems to be helping a bit. I picked up some stress balls from Staples. Get ’em while they’re on clearance. I’m taking glucosamine and chondroitin. I still haven’t been playing much online poker, but my wrist feels much better. I played softball for the first time since I got hurt this week. I did fine, but we still got killed. Next week, I’m going to try to start bowling again. We’ll see how that goes. It has been almost two months now.
Poker
While I haven’t been playing online poker much (I played – badly – in the WPBT WSOP Satellite last night), I did manage to make it up to Chumash last Friday. The game there is now $100 or $200 (not in between – weird) buyin NL, $2/$5 blinds. I played for around 5 hours and made $215. I didn’t play any terribly exciting hands, and was never all-in. Just won a few decent sized pots and stayed out of the way with my junk. It was good to play live again after my horrendous play in Vegas last month. I actually felt like I played well this time.
I really do want to get back into playing online poker again, but don’t want to reinjure myself. I rearranged my desk so my keyboard and mouse are on the desk instead of in the keyboard drawer, and I think that will help, but there’s not enough room on the desk for it. So… I just ordered my second 2001fp (for $352.90 after crazy coupons and the $150 Dell gift card I got from ECD), and it will replace my CRT on my desk. That should free up enough space to leave the keyboard and mouse up there permanantly. Then I can get back to playing online again, I hope. ECD and PSO have so many new rooms that I need to do (Noble Poker, Superior Poker, Poker Rewards, Paradise Poker). Plus, I’m letting Party skin bonuses slip away because I can’t play. On top of all that, I actually want to play. It’s frustrating not being able to.
For the record, I just bought a 20.1″ LCD monitor for my health.
Spam
I recently installed a plugin for WordPress to force comment previews. Hopefully, it’ll be a while before spammers catch on to this one. It seems right now they just submit and then ignore whatever comes back. I haven’t gotten any spam since I installed it, and you should be able to leave comments now without getting redirected elsewhere. You’ll just have to preview it first, which I like having there anyway.
Baseball
I’m heading to New York this weekend for a Mets game wedding, and will be going to my first game at Shea in a few years while I’m there. The Mets are in second to last place in the NL East, but they’re really not too bad. Well, they have the best offense in the East, I think, but their pitching sucks. Only Philly in their division has given up more runs. Anyway, they’re still over .500 (barely – by one game), and only 3.5 games out of first place. There’s still plenty of baseball left to play, plenty of time for them to drop out of the race entirely. Or replace the entire bullpen, starting with the closer. This will be my first baseball game of the season.
I’ve been seriously neglecting this place for quite a while now, and I don’t really know why. Serious lack of motivation, I guess. It’s certainly not that I have nothing to write about. Since my last post over three weeks ago, I’ve been to Vegas for a bachelor party, been to Tucson for Passover, and… uh, that’s it, I guess.
I haven’t bowled at all since the week I threw my 700 series. The “tightness” in my arm got worse when I bowled twice more that week, and I just had to stop. It wasn’t easy to get myself to, though, since I had just thrown a 720, and then three days later threw a 174-262-205 for a 641 series, through the pain. In the 262, I had ten of twelve shots for strikes. I knew I couldn’t keep bowling, though, if I ever wanted it to get better. The doctor said it’s tendonitis, and I should take 6 weeks off, and had me take prescription level Aleve for a while. That happens to coincide with the end of the regular season leagues, so I get to rest it for another month before the summer leagues start, which is probably for the best.
I don’t think bowling was the cause of my problems, however. I definitely made it worse by continuing to bowl when I knew there was a problem, but I think the root of it is, of course, online poker. Before I started playing online poker a ton, I didn’t really use the mouse on my computer all that much. Not enough to create any problems. While playing poker, I’m pretty much contantly using the mouse. For unrelated reasons, I hadn’t played much online poker for a while after I got hurt. My arm was getting better, which I attributed to just resting it and not bowling. Then last week, I played again for about a half hour, and it immediately started to hurt a little again. All this time, I had still been working and using computers, just not playing poker, with no problems. I don’t know if it’s something about the way I sit when I’m playing, or just that I use the mouse so much more, but poker was definitely the problem. I think it’s specifically Party Poker that does it, too, as I’ve just relatively recently started playing a lot at the Party skins. I’m going to blame it on the fact that I have to click buttons 8 times for the clicks to actually register, so I have to keep the mouse in one place when I do it. They need to fix this.
So, I got myself a Logitech Trackman to use instead of a mouse, and an IMAK Smart Glove, which seems to be helping. I’ve been playing online poker again for a few days now, clearing the latest Party bonus, and I don’t seem to be having any problems. I’ve got about 100 hands left for that, and made around 27BB/100 hands while doing it. I love $100NL 6max at Party.
Vegas was a ton of fun. One interesting thing that came out of it is that I think I now have a new signature card protector: A bottle of Aleve. I’ll probably fill it with Penguin Mints or something, and pop a few every time I lose a big pot. 🙂
That happened to me a lot that weekend, in the $2/$5 NL game at the Rio, but it was all entirely my fault. I just played terribly. The game itself was great, with lots of easy money to be made, myself included.
Last weekend in Tucson, I finally got out and did some more photography. I’ve set up a new gallery, but only have one picture there at the moment. More will be added as I find time to go through them and clean them up. I do love my 20D.
Hopefully, I’ll start actually posting here fairly often again. No guarantees.
Oh, I almost forgot (actually, I did forget, and I’m editing this post): Congrats to Bob on winning the blogger satellite to the $1500NLHE tourney at the WSOP. Everyone should go sign up for the next one this Sunday. Unfortunately, I again can’t make it because I’ll be in Pittsburgh at my brother’s graduation. Good luck to everyone who plays!
For quite a while now, I’ve wanted to get a good digital camera. I don’t use my 35mm a lot, mostly because I never bother to get the film developed after I do go shooting with it. Digital would solve that problem for me. I still wasn’t sure if I would be able to pull myself away from the poker or laziness, and actually get myself out using a camera. So my father sent me his old one (Sony DSC-F717) to see if I would.
And I did. Enough that I convinced myself I would really use a good digital camera if I had one. The one I’m borrowing from my father is good, but there are a lot of things about it I don’t like (and he wants it back, anyway). The fact that I did go out and shoot, and enjoyed it despite not liking the camera (can’t stand the electronic viewfinder!), and actually got some nice pictures out of it, convinced me that it wouldn’t be a waste of money to buy one. It won’t sit around collecting dust like my 35mm camera does now.
So, here’s a small gallery of the pictures I took with my father’s camera. I may add more to that in the future. And the 20D is on the way. 🙂
Softball
My company softball team had our last game (I think) of the season last night. We were 1-6 or so, and the only game we won was the game I wasn’t at. Last night, we played against the one team we beat. They had a double header that night, their first game against the only undefeated team in the league. That team now has one loss for the season. I walked in the first inning. I don’t like walking in slow pitch softball, but only one of the pitches was even close. I ended up scoring, and after one inning we were up 6-4. Our second inning started off with two quick outs. I followed with a two out single, and we went on an 8 run two out rally. I got two hits in the inning. My next time up, I grounded into a double play (I woulda beat out the throw, but I thought there were two outs), and my last time up I lined out hard to left center. I didn’t botch anything in the field, and almost made a really nice play on a ground ball off the third baseman’s glove (I was at shortstop) to get the runner at first. Almost. We won the game, 22-9. It was a good way to end the season.
Baseball
Stupid Marlins. They signed Carlos Delgado, which means the Mets didn’t. The Mets traded for Doug Mientkiewicz instead. If he can return to his 2003 or 2001 numbers, I can deal with that, though he’s certainly no Delgado. If he hits like he did last year, they’re gonna need to get someone better. At least he’s solid in the field.
Poker
I’ve been working off another promotion through PSO, this time the Golden Palace one. I should be finished with it tonight. I’m down around $25 there, after being up around $90 my first night. I’ve just had a string of really bad luck, but I’m perfectly happy with how I’ve been playing. Last night I had AAx4, KKx2, QQ, JJ, TT and none of them held up. I think my last 7 pocket aces have been cracked there, mostly playing 6 handed. Amazingly, I’ve really gotten to the point where I can just shrug it off and move on. I’ve also gotten to the point where I can lay it down when I know it’s beat, even at 1/2 limit, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lay down my AQ to the A379T board with a lot of action. I was beat by both A3 and A7. I think that was the only hand I really misplayed and cost me more than it should have. I should have folded to the flop action. Overall, I do like Golden Palace’s interface and software, though it only wants to let you play at two tables at a time. You can trick it by getting on the waiting list for a third, which will then pop up when your seat is available. I’ve read that it’s a real pain to cash out from there, though, but I don’t want to do that yet.
I also did something last night I thought I’d never do: I signed up at a regular online casino (not a poker room) similar to คาสิโนสด UFABET. ECD has a promotion through Music Hall Casino for 600 ECD points. The EV of meeting the wagering requirements at 50 cent blackjack was around -$6, and 600 points is the equivalent of $60, so it’s a +EV move. I had to make some changes to the autoplay strategy (check the ECD forum for details) to make it play perfectly, and then just set it to autoplay enough hands to clear the requirement. The variance worked out in my favor, and I made $75 doing it, too. I busted out my bonus money, but overall it was a good first experience at a regular online casino. I’m not against signing up for more, but will only do it when its +EV, so there needs to be a bonus or promotion that makes it worth signing up.
I got my complete set of chips through ECD and PSO now. I don’t know what I’m going to spend the rest of my points on, but I’ll figure it out. Those cards in there weren’t the ones that I got with the set; those are my Binion’s Horseshoe Kems I got in Vegas.
I went up to the singles tournament at Ocean Lanes in Lompoc again last night. It’s a handicap tournament, where you bowl four games and get to drop the lowest one. I went in with a 173 average, and shot a 247, 214, 188, 189. With the lowest dropped, that’s a 650 scratch series, and with my handicap, 776. That was good enough for fifth place, or $32. I also won the first game sidepot, worth $34, and four outta my five brackets for $60. Overall, $91 profit ($20 tournament entry+sidepots, $15 brackets). I really shoulda been able to do better my last two games and move up a couple of spots in the tournament, but overall I’m pretty happy with how I did, and amazed that those last two games held up for my brackets.
Somehow, I managed to avoid the urge to go to Chumash and play some poker afterwards. Instead, I just drove straight home, in the downpour. It’s pretty crazy driving in as much rain as was coming down last night. The PCH (Pacific Coast Highway, CA-1) was closed, so I had to take a slightly (10 or 15 miles) out of the way route to get there and back. On the way back, while I was driving along in the left lane, I passed a huge boulder just sitting out there in the road in the right lane. Apparently, there had been a mudslide or rockslide, probably similar to what closed highway 101 a few weeks ago (Search that page for 101). In fact, I passed it in pretty much the exact same spot that happened, just north of the Gaviota tunnel.
It’s still raining today, though not nearly as hard. Makes it really annoying for me to do my laundry in another building. Unfortunately, the constant three weeks of rain has led a a big pileup of dirty clothes, and it needs to get done. Damn laundry.
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