Temporarily Homeless? Try The Hotel Lobby

Just a quick PSA here. If you find yourself in a strange city, with time to kill and no particular place to go, don't overlook the advantages of the lobby of a random hotel. I currently write you from Bloomington, Indiana. We still have a couple hours till we hit the stage, and our hotel is up the road 50 miles or so in Indianapolis.

I don't really want to hang out awkwardly in the venue, which is not equipped with a good green room. No particular place to sit, trying awkwardly not to look like I'm hoping somebody's looking at me. So what's a weary boy to do?

Well, make himself comfortable in the Hilton Garden Inn lobby, of course. Here you have only a partial list of the luxuries afforded the person bold enough to avail himself of them:

1) clean (pristine, in fact) and unpopulated restrooms;
2) lightning fast, complimentary high-speed internet;
3) air conditioning;
4) comfortable seating.

Okay, maybe that doesn't sound like a little slice of heaven here on earth, but compared to the alternatives, it kinda is.

Here's a few tips you can file away, should you need them later:

- Choose a nice hotel, and make sure it's fairly big, but not super high-end. You don't want your Best Western, cause first of all it's just not that nice so what's the point. Secondly, the staff tend to be a little gruffer, which means you're far, far more likely to get a "Can I help you, sir?" And finally, the lobbies are small enough that even if you don't get direct unwanted attention, you might feel kind of uncomfortable lazing about.
- You don't want your Ritz Carlton either, cause you probably aint getting free wi-fi. And a hotel lobby with no free wi-fi is just a parlour room.
- When entering, just smile and nod at the front desk and then sit yourself right down in the lobby, like it's the most natural thing in the world. Nobody will give you any grief. Like, ever.
- Don't give up too quick on the wi-fi. There may be an obstacle or two, but you will almost always be able to get on (as long as it's complimentary for hotel guests). You should know that a lot of the 'passwords' are actually charades. For instance, here at this location, you can enter absolutely anything in the required fields of 'name' and 'room number' and find yourself posting a blog mere moments later.

Change Your Mind

If you got fourteen minutes to spare I highly suggest getting "Change Your Mind" from Neil Young's "Sleeps With Angels" album and giving it a spin. Bob Lefsetz would suggest you lie on your floor and play it on your turntable, but I'm not near so particular.

If you don't particularly like Neil Young you might not want to bother. This is hardly the song to alter your opinion (I was going to say it's hardly the song to 'change your mind', but that's just too cheap). But if you don't mind him, and you can still yourself in this ADD world for a quarter of an hour, I think it's time well spent.

Came up randomly on the iPod during one of the numerous long drives of this past week, and I guess I was just in the mood for it. What an incredible song. Legend has it that it's written for Kurt Cobain, whose death occurred at the same time this record was being made. Cobain's suicide note quoted Neil Young. Already a big fan of Cobain's music, being mentioned in the suicide note purportedly hit Young hard and affected the recording sessions.

As far as I have been able to learn, only the title track was actually written after the event. The fact that the whole album seems to have death as its central theme is only an accident. A happy accident, I guess, for the sake of the art, but it feels unseemly to think of it that way. Of course I don't know what songs were written when for sure, but this is the best info the internet has coughed up so far.

So "Change Your Mind" was probably not written for Kurt Cobain, but man would it have made sense were it so. The song's 'message' being the most obvious reason. But stylistically, it's a great tribute to Nirvana.

The lyrics are more literal than Cobain's tended to be, but they share his emphasis on emotion and rawness over craft (they both are definitely more John than Paul).

As for the actual music? It seemed like Nirvana had this inner battle between wanting to be punk, almost musically subversive, and wanting to present the incredibly tuneful, essentially pop, hits songs that Cobain couldn't seem to stop himself from writing. I mean, they wanted to be the Melvins, but ended up selling umpteen million copies of a record that after it was mastered one of them (can't remember who, but it's true; you can look it up) opined sounded like a Def Leppard record. And really, if you had to choose one or the other, it probably does sound more like Def Leppard than Black Flag.

But at the same time Nirvana was a fierce rock band. Especially out of the studio (except when they were cello-ing it up for their MTV unplugged set), they seemed to love making an unholy racket. Even the studio records tend to have pretty challenging moments (with the exception of Nevermind, which never really gets too crazy). So their reputation as a perpetually unhinged punk rock band survives, and is deserved, despite magnetized evidence to the opposite.

"Change Your Mind" to me has the same sort of dichotomy. If you took out the endless jamming you'd be left with just a beautiful pop song. One of Young's prettiest, impossibly catchy. But he ensures it can never be a radio staple, and that impatient listeners won't give the song it's due, by stretching it to 14 minutes and 40 seconds. The bulk of which contains his singular lead guitar playing. If you allow yourself to really get inside it, the whole track is perfect. But if you've got in on in the background, it's pretty much just noise.

Helluva tribute. If that's what it was.

When you get weak,
And you need to test your will
When life's complete,
But there's something
Missing still
Distracting you from this
Must be the one you love
Must be the one whose magic touch
Can change your mind
Don't let another day go by
Without the magic touch

Distracting you
(change your mind)
Supporting you
(change your mind)
Embracing you
(change your mind)
Convincing you
(change your mind)

When you're confused and
The world has got you down
When you feel used and
You just can't play the clown
Protecting you from this
Must be the one you love
Must be the one whose magic touch
Can change your mind
Don't let another day go by
Without the magic touch

Protecting you
(change your mind)
Restoring you
(change your mind)
Revealing you
(change your mind)
Soothing you
(change your mind)

You hear the sound,
You wait around
And get the word
You see the picture
Changing everything
You've heard
Destroying you with this
Must be the one you love
Must be the one
Whose magic touch
Can change your mind
Don't let another day go by
Without the magic touch

Destroying you
(change your mind)
Embracing you
(change your mind)
Protecting you
(change your mind)
Confining you
(change your mind)
Distracting you
(change your mind)
Supporting you
(change your mind)
Distorting you
(change your mind)
Controlling you
(change your mind)
Change your mind
(change your mind)
Change your mind, change your mind
(change your mind)
Change your mind
(change your mind)

The morning comes
And there's an odor in the room
The scent of love,
More than a million roses bloom
Embracing you with this
Must be the one you love
Must be the one
Whose magic touch
Can change your mind
Don't let another day go by
Without the magic touch

Embracing you
(change your mind)
Concealing you
(change your mind)
Protecting you
(change your mind)
Revealing you
(change your mind)
Change your mind, change your mind
(change your mind)
Change your mind
(change your mind)
Change your mind, change your mind
(change your mind)
Change your mind
(change your mind)
Change your mind, change your mind
Change your mind
Change your mind, change your mind
Change your mind
Change your mind, change your mind
Change your mind, change your mind

More Thoughts On Marginal Situations (in poker)

It's a blog explosion. Three in like 12 hours.

Anyway, I watched a poker video by the oft-maligned, pee-bottle-using, and massively successful Leatherass. I enjoyed it. He talks in an everyman sort of style, definitely gives you the feeling that if he can do it, so can you (which of course is probably an illusion, but whatever). He talks about how he gives up a little easier on hands than some other successful pros, cause he prefers the lower variance style that comes from avoiding those spots. I'd really like to adopt at least some of that approach, but I just find it somehow difficult.

Here's an example.

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/775255

I call the 3-bet cause I'm in position, we have full stacks, and I still get hung up on set-mining odds (forgetting other factors, like times I pay him off, and times I hit but don't get paid). I call the flop bet cause this particular villain is firing almost all the time and he could have very easily missed with his overcard type hand. I call the turn because I now have a double gutter (and could of course still be good). I call the river cause I'm getting a billion to one + he bet really fast + wouldn't he at least some of the time slow down with his overpairs. The thing of it is, sometimes he does show up here with AsKs (or worse) and I'm King Of The World. But if you had asked me, preflop, do I want to get it all in with 66 unimproved? Well, not really, no . By making a marginal (some might say just bad) preflop call, I set myself up to ship a whole stack with a fairly crappy hand. I'd like to stop doing that please.

Do Only Geeks Write Letters To Editors?

I bought the new Rolling Stone cause it had the Beatles on the cover, and it purported to tell the 'inside story' of 'why the beatles broke up'. I'll admit, first of, that I really enjoyed reading the rather long (by magazine standards) article. Cause I was such an enthusiast in my younger years, I probably enjoy the mythology of The Beatles story even more than I enjoy the music (though it's close).

But at the same time, I found it pretty irritating cause there was not a single new significant fact. There was the occasional snippet of conversation I hadn't heard before, but nothing that remotely shed new light on anything. And you know, I was a pretty big fan, but I was hardly a scholar. So I just found it kind of cheap that they presented it like, 'here's the never before told story'. So I wrote a letter to the editor saying just that. And now I'm trying to decide if, on the gazillion-to-one chance it gets published, I'll find it more cool or embarrassing.

Not unlike the only other time I made a quasi-appearance in the magazine. Not me, individually. But the band's "After The Flood" album was reviewed. The reviewer didn't like the album, which of course kinda sucked. But my band's album was reviewed in Rolling Stone magazine. Which was bizarre, in a good way. Sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad.

Marginal Situations

Got an email from somebody the other day who wants to bring the band to India for a concert in December. Just in the early stages of discussing it, and of course it would be logistically challenging to say the least, so who knows what will come of it. But at the very least I'll see where it leads. If we do undertake it, tho, it'll be fraught with risk, myriad ways for something to go wrong. At least relative to a gig in, say, Seattle. But we might do it anyway, because of a belief the potential upside justifies those risks. Plus, you know, the sweetest fruit is on the highest branch, or something like that. Right?

I've been trying to cut down my 'marginal situations' in poker, especially as I aim to continue increasing the number of tables. And unless I am extremely focussed, 100% on my 'A' game, I find it difficult to do so. At least by a significant margin. I keep making the same marginal calls I always do. And I think part of the problem, psychologically as it were, is the idea of avoiding the marginal spots seems to run counter to how I'd like to live my life otherwise. I'd like to think I go after things, take chances, don't mind hitting a wall (or worse) once in a while in pursuit of adventure or achievement.

But it's ultimately a flawed analogy. Because most of the mistakes I make in poker are of the passive variety, which is just not the same thing as going after it. And when I do make aggressive mistakes it tends to be reckless, unreasoned aggression. Which will work some of the time, but ultimately be pretty costly in the long run. Same as in life.

So what then have I learned? Isn't it obvious? Calling in the blinds? No. 3-betting IP? Yes. Going to India? Maybe.

Is Breakeven Too Modest A Goal?

That's part of the appeal of the SNE idea, of course. If you break even in the games and make SNE you end up with a not bad annual income. The appeal extends beyond just imagining that result. On a day to day basis, I find it much easier to endure the ups and downs, knowing I don't have to post a big win rate to have a good year.

I have had some tough sessions over the last couple weeks and found my play much less affected than it has been in previous downswings. Not that I play my "A" game (such as it is) 24/7, but getting full-on tilted by variance is an increasingly are occurrence.

That has to be a positive. But I'm still left to wonder if it's a mistake to think of breakeven as the goal. Will lowered expectations lead to accordingly lowered results? Is it taking it too easy on myself?

First thing is that breakeven isn't actually breakeven of course. Breakeven means you are beating the games by the amount the house is raking. Read in someone's post on 2+2 that he did the math in his db and he is raked as follows:

At 200NL 5.4bb/100
At 100NL 7.4bb/100
At 50NL 9.4bb/100

It's not really anything I didn't already know, but somehow those numbers written down still seem staggeringly large. If someone had, say, a 3bb/100 long-term winrate while 20+ tabling 100NL I'd consider that pretty good. What the 3bb/100 winrate really represents is beating the other players in the game by 10.4b/100 (allowing for that rake figure). So when you breakeven, you are beating the players by 7.4bb/100, which means at breakeven your winrate before rake is over 70% of what your winrate is when you are post-rake beating the game by the aforementioned 3bb/100. My point is just that the difference between breakeven and a modest, but not insignificant, winrate is relatively small.

But while the above is important to remember, especially when it comes to self-esteem and whatnot, it's ultimately neither here nor there. What this blog is supposed to be addressing is the positive and negative effects of having breakeven results as the goal. The positives are mainly what I previously mentioned. Not being so stressed about bad days, or even neutral days. Which leads to less tilt, and also maybe less general life stress. Actually, not maybe on that less one. For sure, less general life stress.

The negatives? Well, I wonder if putting less pressure on myself to perform well will result in worse performance. I split this into two categories. Performance at the table, and work away from the table.

I am fairly confident I will not perform worse in the moment as a result of modest goals. Like most poker players, I'm fairly competitive about my results. In the moment I'm definitely not going to be sitting there hoping to chop a bunch of pots. Of course I wanna win. And as the reduced likelihood of tilting is hugely positive, I give the first category a no.

As for work away from the table, I have little doubt that feeling okay about breakeven results will make me a little less motivated to work on my game during off-times. There's nothing like a downswing to get you studying videos, posting hands on the forums, doing extra review of sessions in HEM, etc. Downswings are surely the most productive times for self-improvement. So this is the biggest drawback to the breakeven goal, imo. It's intensified by the fact that if am going for SNE I'm going to want to spend as much of my allocated poker time grinding as possible. It'll be more than easy to put study on the back burner.

Hopefully being aware this could be a problem will help me combat it. I need to figure out how to fit study into life downtime (most noticeably long band road trips, flights, etc), and giving up a little bit of my time on the tables when necessary.

Otherwise, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, so you heard it here first. My official goal for 2010 (and the rest of 2009) is to breakeven at the tables while amassing copious vpp's from the good people at Pokerstars.

Stars 100NL Is Too Good For Me

I don't blog that much about poker (some might disagree, but w/e) considering how much mental energy I give the game. The main reason is I feel like my poker blogs are kind of a broken record. Like, how many different ways can you say 'Man there's a shit ton of variance in poker'? And whenever I go to blog about the game, that's what usually comes out, whether I'm currently running good or bad. Truth be told, I have written a few poker blogs and then just not bothered posting them. Cause even by the low, low standards of blogging, they strike me as pointless meanderings.

If you're reading this, by the way, it means I indulged and published this one, but as I write it's touch and go.

I actually do enjoy reading other poker players's variance blogs (and no, I don't think I've come across a semi-regularly updated poker blog that didn't at times turn to the swongs). I find them comforting in the extreme. Cause the struggle to fully accept the swings is at least as frustrating as the variance itself. I've seen the charts of what my results graph should look like, given my presumed winrate and standard deviation, and it's swingy as a key party.

Yet, when my (relatively) short-term results are good, I feel like I've had a breakthrough and now have the game licked. And when they are bad, I feel like I'll never win again. I give lip service to more rational viewpoints, but that's really the way I feel. Lately I don't think my play suffers that much in deference to those feelings (I have in the past seen my play deteriorate in reaction to both hot and cold streaks). And that's probably the most important thing. It'd be nice to get to a point where I really don't feel affected by 20+ buy-in swings one way or the other, but I doubt very much that's gonna happen. At least anytime soon.

Anyway, this is all to say I'm getting crushed at 100NL. I still feel it's a level I can beat. In fact, I hope to be up to 200NL by the end of the year. But right now over a 50k+ sample I'm losing at about 1bb/100. It's actually worse than that, cause for the first half of those hands I was up a fair bit. Meanwhile, over around the same sample size at 50NL, I'm up around 9bb/100. I do think there's a decent jump between those two levels, but nowhere near enough to justify that much difference (especially when the higher relative rake of 50NL is considered).

If I really felt like 50NL was the best game I could beat while mass tabling, I could accept that. I don't think I'd hit SNE (maybe if I wasn't traveling with the band so much, but even then it'd be a challenge), but any kind of decent win rate combined with still getting to say 800k VPP's would make for an okay year. It's just that, this blog's title notwithstanding, I don't think 100NL is really all that tough. Problem is I don't know for sure. I know I'm not as good or as bad as the extremes, but where exactly I fall between them is impossible to know. All I can do is keep following my bankroll rules (I'm one more bad session away from playing 50NL anyway), try to plug my leaks as best as I can (playing this many hands does seem to help me recognize them quicker), and just see what happens.

Oh. And try not to blog about it too much.

Putting Backpack Gate To Shame

Faithful readers may recall Backpack Gate was when I practically zoomed to the top of the Grouse Grind, ahead of my pregnant wife. And when she reached the top I remembered she was carrying the heavy backpack. She was none too pleased. Well, friends, if you think letting my pregnant wife carrying a backpack up a mountain made me an asshole, you aint seen nothing yet.

Next week, while I gallivant about the country living the dream, my seven-months-pregnant wife will move all our earthly possessions from our Richards Street condo to our Cambie Street condo. Can't you just see her now, trying to carry the couch on her back out to the elevator? Hopefully a neighbor will take pity and grab half. I mean, she's pregnant. Have some manners, for fuck's sake.

Okay, obviously I'm being hyperbolic. The actual heavy lifting will be done by trained professionals. And we're gonna get her some help even with non-heavy non-lifting type tasks. But fact of the matter is, she still has copious amounts of work to do over the next week or so, not even counting her day job. And while she does that work, I will in fact be gallivanting. I had to give her power of attorney last week, cause I can't even be expected to sign papers myself.

In my defense, the whole thing just came together so fast there was no possible way I could have scheduled road trips around it. We knew we were going to need a bigger place soon, what with a child en route and all, but we figured we could last a while in our shoebox. But still thought we may as well look around at what was out there. If we could go from our 600 sqft to, say, 800 or so, it might be worth the effort. But the way over-list price we got on our place, combined with the under-list offer that was accepted on our new place, made a move make sense. The new spot is 1100 sqft, which is obviously going to be hugely different. It's actually imaginable that we could stay in the new place fairly permanently.

At least, it will be imaginable once we reno the place. It had been tenanted out, and it's pretty dirty. To the point of kind of gross. We're gonna do it in stages, the first of which will happen immediately after we take possession September 1. Which means when I come home from this tour it will be neither to my old home nor my new home, but rather to the furnished condo we rent for a few weeks while our place is de-grossified.

Man, there's a lot going on at home right now. In addition to all this, my mom just got home from the hospital, my dad's still there, and my parents are trying to sell their restaurant and their house. Meanwhile, I'm in a bar in Spearfish, South Dakota. Seriously, what the fuck? It's hard to imagine this is where I'm supposed to be.

The District 9 Aliens Sound Like The Billings, MT Taco Bell Trash

It's true. When you put your taco wrapper in the garbage the little door there swings back and forth and makes this croaky noise that is a pretty good impression of the 'prawns' in District 9. A pretty inconsistent movie, but certainly not completely lacking things to recommend it. I enjoyed it more than my travel mates, I think. I though the first half was quite good, fairly brimming with original ideas. Second half got kinda boring, which is not necessarily what you would expect seeing it became an action movie. Just sort of got generic, villains and heroes, you know?

Two things bugged me in particular (besides it just getting kinda long). The mix of the documentary approach and a 'normal' style was kind of off-putting sometimes. Brought to mind those cheesy documentaries you'll see on A & E or some such channel where it'll be interviews with the real-life people interspersed with reenactments.

And maybe I'm being too PC here, but I just kind of found it weird, especially considering the filmmakers are being hailed for their clever (obvious) Apartheid metaphors, that most of the black people in the cast were in the Nigerian gangs. Though there were certainly plenty of other scoundrels, the gangs took the film's villainous cake. They would laugh heinously (and kind of inexplicably) right before doing something particularly cruel, often in the name of witchcraft. Actually most of the time it was right before 'attempting' to do something particularly cruel, because their most devious acts were often thwarted in the nick of time. The thwarting became a common occurrence amongst all races (human and otherwise) over the last reel, which was an unfortunately hackneyed development in a movie that started out as anything but.

Unbiased Reporting?

There was a recent thread on 2+2 about how poker bloggers are only active when they are on upswings. And of course there was all kinds of discussions about that, examples of when guys did in fact blog their downswings (hello? Sample size?). It did give me cause for reflection. I would like to think that you could count on me for, not necessarily a thorough, but at least a truly random account of my poker exploits; that I would blog the ups and downs equally. But notice that my last poker entry was just over a week ago, when I was in the final stages of one of my more memorable upswings. And since then, I’ve had some miserable results, and lo and behold no blog entry.

Of course my opinions on this topic are inherently flawed, but it is my belief that is just a coincidence. I think I have blogged more about downswings than upswings, in fact. That’s an assertion that could easily be substantiated with a little effort, but I’m too lazy/not really that interested. I’ll just go by my best recollection. And also admit, based on the most recent evidence, that my best recollection may be flawed.

Actually I’ve continue to book mainly winners over the last week, it’s just that three particular sessions were monumental losers and all the winners were of the marginal variety. So I’m a big loser for the whole period. The good news is I think I have handled this downswing better than any other significant one I’ve ever had. I do not believe my play has been affected by negative results, and whether that belief is delusional or not, is the first time I can say it with a straight face. As I’ve probably said before, I think handling downswings is at least as important as any other factor in having a somewhat successful poker career. So this particular downswing kinda feels like good news. Though good news doesn’t normally suck quite as hard.

Outlet Pass

I have a recurring waking dream, where I'm playing floor hockey. I pick up a loose ball deep in my own end and there's a teammate sneaking behind the opposing defense in the opposite corner of the gym, and I hit him with a tape to tape pass. Most of the time that's where it stops, although occasionally my teammate is allowed to finish the play (he always scores, top shelf). The scene often pops into my head when I'm trying to sleep, and also just during general daydreaming. Probably average about 10 viewings a day. It's like getting a song stuck in your head, only not quite as maddening. Not pleasant either, just kind of whatever. I guess I find it kind of peculiar, when i reflect on it.

Also, the number 52,463 pops in my head all the time. Normally with a dollar sign.

A Dirty One

Wanted to post one hand, but decided to leave my CD-eulogizing blog alone. So here, two blogs in the span of mere minutes.

I like posting hands where I suck out terribly because it makes me remember them all the more clearly, which in turn helps me to tilt less when it happens to me. This guy must have kicked his cat. He had a 3bet number through the roof and I decided to flat and then check/shove innocuous flops. I didn't think it through at all, and in retrospect it's not a good plan for myriad reasons (not just ROT). Bit of a brain cramp, really. But regardless, that was my determined strategy, however foolish it may have been. Here's what happened.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 5 players - http://www.thehandconverter.com/hands/218156
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

CO: $100.00
BTN: $100.20
SB: $129.05
BB: $124.50
Hero (UTG): $101.50

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is UTG with 5d 5h
Hero raises to $3.50, CO raises to $12, 3 folds, Hero calls $8.50

Flop: ($25.50) 9s 4d 2c (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $18.00, Hero raises to $89.50, CO calls $70 all in

Turn: 2h

River: 5c

Final Pot: $201.50
CO shows Ah Ad
Hero shows 5d 5h
Hero wins $199.50
(Rake: $2.00)

Anyway, it kick started what had been a sluggish session, and the PokerStars upswing continues. I've been playing a little bit at FT just to clear a bonus, and it's been going as bad there as it is good at Stars. Man, those bonuses are marketing genius, cause there's no way I'm not clearing it, even though I'm down more than it's worth.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Sold my entire CD collection to a rank stranger from Craig's List for less than a buck a CD today. If you have told me a few years ago that was going to happen, I would have laughed in your face. "Ha!", I would have said.

But things have changed. I've taken a (quite possibly permanent) shine to condo living, and massive CD collections take up more space than you might think. And my iPod, which fits in my pocket, can hold every last song that I chose to retain from said collection. Sure, the sounds a little bit worse on the iPod, but I'm no audiophile (as opposed to Evan Fraser, who is, in fact, a Celtophile, but that's a different story). I don't mind the iPod sound at all. And sure, it's fun to look at CD covers and read through booklets. Hell, I used to pore over those booklets with a fine tooth comb (it's a metaphor). But fact is, they've all been sitting in storage for a few years now.

I want to get rid of my storage space, and in general I just want to have less things to keep track of, so I sold 'em. Besides, the value of CD's gets less and less every year, I was probably lucky to get the price I did. Guy owns a used CD store in Maple Ridge, so my discs will get scared all over the Ridge/Meadows area.

I'm definitely a little sad about it. CD's used to be my main currency. One of the most terrible days of my life came years ago when Cameron Thomson and I were roommates in New Westminster, and our place got broken into, and all my CD"s were stolen. I had a big collection then, but my current collection eventually came to dwarf the original. I used to go into CD stores and if I had a vague sense something was supposed to be good, I just bought it. Found a lot of my favorite music through random purchases, and also ended up owning CD's that I never ever listened to.

It hasn't been an obsession in quite some time, and ultimately the passion was for music, not for shiny discs, and I still have the music. Plus, it was such a monumental task to organize the CD's, make sure discs and cases and booklets matched, and load anything into the computer that I wanted and wasn't already there, that I was almost relieved to see 'em go. Still feel obligated to be at least vaguely wistful and reflective for a day or two. Maybe I'll walk down to the seawall tomorrow and stare out at the ocean with the hint of a tear in my eye. After Subway, of course.

Probably Moving

You might say definitely moving, on account of we accepted an offer to buy our place. But you know, never say never and all that. Of course, by that logic you could kind of put yourself in a spot where you could literally never say anything was about to happen, no matter how certain it seemed. I don't think that would be all that terrible a spot to be in. But conversationally, at least, we are definitely moving.

After opening our home to the public (and the public's realtors) this weekend for a couple two hour stints, we met down at our particular realtor's office (a mere two blocks from the homestead) this morning to consider offers. I misunderstood what this entailed. I thought we would sit around there and she would show us what offers had come in, and we would leisurely discuss our next course of action. But as it turns out, the real estate agents for prospective buyers actually turn up in person and make their pitch.

I didn't realize this until the first such agent was well into his presentation. I assumed, until a light slowly went on somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, that he was an assistant to our agent. In my defense, he was very young and kind of nervous. And, also in my defense, nobody told me who the hell he was one way or the other, so how was I to know? Anyway, I was kind of embarrassed cause I was kicking back with my supersize McDonald's beverage and fruit and yogurt parfait (I had, naturally, risen at the last possible minute for this meeting so this was breakfast). I would have gone for at least a slightly more serious vibe, had I realized how it was all meant to play out. Oh well, hopefully my casualness encouraged them to try harder.

We accepted one of the numerous offers, with a possession date of September 1, which leaves us less than a month to find a new place to live or hit the streets. It's further complicated by me being out of town the whole last half of the month. But it'll work out. It's very likely we'll buy something new in time (we do have an offer out on a place right now, tho they turned us down once before and we didn't make the offer that much sweeter, so I'm not counting on a 'yes'), and if not we'll just have to decide whether to put our stuff in storage and infringe on parents while we look, or go ahead and rent something decent, putting off buying till next year. I'm loathe to be out of the market, especially as it soars right now, but that's better than buying a place we're so so about.

In poker I only got in about 75 minutes, but I collected about 600 VPP's (which I know means nothing to most people, but it's my blog so whatever). That bodes well for the Elite pursuit (because I'm still only playing 100NL and probably only about 60% of the tables I'll play when I get my new computer set up, so that rate of accrual is encouraging), but what does not bode well is the fact that I could only get in 75 minutes. It does seem like extreme times around here this week, in terms of not being able to get the hours in, but next year I'm going to have to find a way to get them in even when life is crazy. It was a tremendously neutral session. I would have booked a semi-decent win except on the very last hand my nut flush got it in on the turn against my opponent's set of tens, and he filled up on the river. I ended the 1500 hand session up exactly 60 cents.