Wow, what an unbelievable year it's been. I left my job as a valet and decided to give poker a try. Good choice. I was considering putting up a long post recapping everything but I decided to be lazy. The short version is that I went to Europe 4 times this year, went to Japan and Hong Kong for my first ever trip to Asia and was lucky enough to win a decent amount playing poker. Unreal.
I'm really excited for 2006 and hopefully it will be the best year of my life. I really feel like each year has been better than the year before and I'd like that trend to continue. It'll be tough to top 2005 and probably won't happen financially but I'm thinking hard about other things that could make me a happier person, possibly rekindling an old relationship or setting out to find new ones. I have a lot on my mind and a lot of issues running through my head. I really feel ready to "grow up". My New Year's resolution will anger some people but I want to quit drinking hard alcohol. I'd really like to eventually eliminate all drinking from my life but I need to take it one step at a time. It won't be easy but I think I can do it.
The last few days have been a lot of fun. We found a Korean Karaoke place in Lynnwood that "didn't serve alcohol" as a rule but was very accomodating to our demands for booze. I went crazy and sang a ton of songs. The ones that worked were "Separate Ways" by Journey, "My Way" by Sinatra and "Forgot About Dre" by Dr. Dre and Eminem. The flops were "Stan" by Eminem and "Paradise City" by Guns and Roses. Stan is really hard to do because it's so off-beat and conversational AND it's depresing as hell. Paradise City was just too long. It looked great in Can't Hardly Wait but I guess William is a bit cooler than I am.
Last night I got really drunk and had a lot of fun at the bar. I can't divulge all the details so you know that means I had a good time. Tonight we're going to Davis' condo to prefunk then probably heading down to Pioneer Square. We're a pretty wishy-washy group though so we might just hang out in the condo. Either way, I'll be sad to see 2005 go but I'm very optimistic about 2006. I hope you all have fantastic years and I'll talk to you again soon.
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Children
Today was a great day. Cliff, Mom and I went to see little Noah, the coolest one-and-a-half year old you'll ever meet. I took a buttload of pictures like every proud uncle should and here are some of my favorites.
Learning is Fun!
Just Chillin
Too Cool for School
Air Noah
This is how WE roll
He really is an incredible kid. He loves smiling, reading and sports. Sounds a lot like a big-headed Asian dude I know pretty well. The circumstances are pretty tough and I don't feel like explaining everything here but I realy have to applaud my brother for how he handles everything. I was thinking today about my Dad's message and just how much potential I see in Noah. I'm sure he saw that same potential in me and had visions of me changing the world. Well, I'm still 25, Pop, and I promise to try my best to make a positive influence on this earth. One step is spoiling the crap out of Noah!
Tomorrow we're going to the mall to take professional photos and then we're headed back to Seattle. A group of us want to go to a real Asian karaoke place but I can't find a place that serves alcohol. The only places that have karaoke and alcohol are just public bars and that isn't how true Asians roll. If anyone out there in blogland knows of an Asian karaoke bar with alcohol, I'd be very much obliged. I have no problem singing my heart out to "I Think We're Alone Now" and "My Way" (Old Blue Eyes, not Usher) but I think that others don't come out of their shells as easily.
My grandma bought me the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and I hope it improves my punctuation. I have no clue how horrible I am at punctuation but I'm sure it isn't pretty.
Tonight's our last night at Amerisuites Pasco. *sob*
Learning is Fun!
Just Chillin
Too Cool for School
Air Noah
This is how WE roll
He really is an incredible kid. He loves smiling, reading and sports. Sounds a lot like a big-headed Asian dude I know pretty well. The circumstances are pretty tough and I don't feel like explaining everything here but I realy have to applaud my brother for how he handles everything. I was thinking today about my Dad's message and just how much potential I see in Noah. I'm sure he saw that same potential in me and had visions of me changing the world. Well, I'm still 25, Pop, and I promise to try my best to make a positive influence on this earth. One step is spoiling the crap out of Noah!
Tomorrow we're going to the mall to take professional photos and then we're headed back to Seattle. A group of us want to go to a real Asian karaoke place but I can't find a place that serves alcohol. The only places that have karaoke and alcohol are just public bars and that isn't how true Asians roll. If anyone out there in blogland knows of an Asian karaoke bar with alcohol, I'd be very much obliged. I have no problem singing my heart out to "I Think We're Alone Now" and "My Way" (Old Blue Eyes, not Usher) but I think that others don't come out of their shells as easily.
My grandma bought me the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and I hope it improves my punctuation. I have no clue how horrible I am at punctuation but I'm sure it isn't pretty.
Tonight's our last night at Amerisuites Pasco. *sob*
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Pops and Pictures
I've been at my grandparents and haven't felt like dealing with their dial-up connection. Pops logged on and left a masterpiece. If you missed it, here's the link. Basically, what he's saying is that I, and all peoples, should focus all our efforts on trying to improve the world for future generations. I agree with him, children are the greatest thing in the world and there are many out there who need our help. I never wanted to post this publicly, but I'm donating $50K this year to different education programs in Africa. I completely agree with his point that none of us do enough and that we all should try to do more.
What I don't agree with is his hypocrisy. He admits that he was young once, made mistakes and wonders why he did things. What he doesn't say is how those events shaped who he is today and how he's become a better person through fucking up. We all need to live and learn at our own pace and just because he's reached a point of clarity in his life, he can be condescending toward those who haven't gotten there yet. I'm sorry that I'm still growing up and I'm sorry that you see what I am today as a waste of talent. Clifford told me that you wished you had never taken me out of private school. That you had made sure I stayed on track and didn't take 6 years to graduate with some bullshit degree. If I had 3 Graduate Degrees but couldn't hold a social conversation, you'd be really proud of me. To me, life is about being a well balanced person. Clearly, I've erred on the side of being too social but that's the side that's more important to me. Look at the geniuses of the world, Bobby Fischer, Mozart, etc. Most were severly crippled socially and really fucked up in the head. Jesus was indeed a genius and his philosophy was simple: be kind to your fellow man. That's all I try to do every day. He had some incredible social understanding and that's what made him great.
Some might read the above and think that I'm angry, but I'm not at all. I just think that it's important that we all focus on doing the best that we can and try hard not to judge others too harshly. Just because I value my friends and family over anything else doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about those less fortunate. I agree that the drinking I do hurts me and kills brain cells but I don't see how poor kids are victims because I go out for drinks. I'm seriously considering quitting drinking alcohol after New Year's but that's besides the point. The point is that it's foolish to assume through my blog of my day-to-day routine that I don't give a fuck about anything but my own enjoyment. Phil Gordon, a professional poker player, has the following mission statement: To improve the world while having as much fun as possible. It's not exact, but that's the gist and it pretty much sums up how I feel. I'm a guy who likes to have a good time but I also feel like I have a good grasp on what's important in the world and I'm still growing up. I look at who I was last year and I laugh. I'll probably look a who I am now, next year, and laugh again. The point of this entire rant is that we all need to try our best to acheive what we can every day without losing our minds. I think it's awesome that you, dad, are trying hard to impart your wisdom on me but there are some lessons that I need to learn myself. I love you and I miss you a lot. Thanks for being so great.
Here are some pictures that I took over the past week. We have witnessed the death of the jafro. Everyone, a moment of silence if you could.
Tina, the best trivia partner ever
Three Generations of Femininity
The Jafro's last stand
The sellout
Twins?
What I don't agree with is his hypocrisy. He admits that he was young once, made mistakes and wonders why he did things. What he doesn't say is how those events shaped who he is today and how he's become a better person through fucking up. We all need to live and learn at our own pace and just because he's reached a point of clarity in his life, he can be condescending toward those who haven't gotten there yet. I'm sorry that I'm still growing up and I'm sorry that you see what I am today as a waste of talent. Clifford told me that you wished you had never taken me out of private school. That you had made sure I stayed on track and didn't take 6 years to graduate with some bullshit degree. If I had 3 Graduate Degrees but couldn't hold a social conversation, you'd be really proud of me. To me, life is about being a well balanced person. Clearly, I've erred on the side of being too social but that's the side that's more important to me. Look at the geniuses of the world, Bobby Fischer, Mozart, etc. Most were severly crippled socially and really fucked up in the head. Jesus was indeed a genius and his philosophy was simple: be kind to your fellow man. That's all I try to do every day. He had some incredible social understanding and that's what made him great.
Some might read the above and think that I'm angry, but I'm not at all. I just think that it's important that we all focus on doing the best that we can and try hard not to judge others too harshly. Just because I value my friends and family over anything else doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about those less fortunate. I agree that the drinking I do hurts me and kills brain cells but I don't see how poor kids are victims because I go out for drinks. I'm seriously considering quitting drinking alcohol after New Year's but that's besides the point. The point is that it's foolish to assume through my blog of my day-to-day routine that I don't give a fuck about anything but my own enjoyment. Phil Gordon, a professional poker player, has the following mission statement: To improve the world while having as much fun as possible. It's not exact, but that's the gist and it pretty much sums up how I feel. I'm a guy who likes to have a good time but I also feel like I have a good grasp on what's important in the world and I'm still growing up. I look at who I was last year and I laugh. I'll probably look a who I am now, next year, and laugh again. The point of this entire rant is that we all need to try our best to acheive what we can every day without losing our minds. I think it's awesome that you, dad, are trying hard to impart your wisdom on me but there are some lessons that I need to learn myself. I love you and I miss you a lot. Thanks for being so great.
Here are some pictures that I took over the past week. We have witnessed the death of the jafro. Everyone, a moment of silence if you could.
Tina, the best trivia partner ever
Three Generations of Femininity
The Jafro's last stand
The sellout
Twins?
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Home Sweet Home
Again, I'm sorry for the infrequent blogging but I'm out having fun with my friends and that's probably more important anyway. I hope you're ready for a monster post because I have a lot to retell.
Dave and Tasha picked me up on Friday night and we headed straight to Marcus' apartment to get our drink on. Marcus has a sweet place in Queen Anne with a good view of the Space Needle and Puget Sound. The apartment is called Athena, a name that will always be dear to my heart. We drank a few Coors Lights and PBRs then moved on to the airplane bottles of booze. It's hard to take shots directly out of those things but I figured it out eventually. You have to hold it at a 45 degree angle to allow air to flow into the bottle and push out the liquor. If you have the bottle straight up and down, obviously it's harder to get the liquid out and if you hold it parallel to the ground, the booze comes out too slow and no one likes sipping on Cuervo. All of this may be old hat to some of you but I'm slower than most. Gonzalez showed up eventually as did Renee, Amanda and Steph a short time later. Steph hates the Jafro but Amanda thought it was really cool. I guess Steph just has no appreciation for true art. She went home after Marcus' place but the rest of us headed out to Tia Lou's. Tia Lou's is a club in Belltown that's pretty popular. It's not really my cup of tea since I prefer a more laid back atmosphere but there were so many close friends there that I couldn't help having a great time. Tye's shot exchange was in full effect and I bought double shots of tequila for Tye, Quang and myself. Quang is a short Vietnamese friend and he always makes the best faces after consuming tequila. At the end of the night, Tasha drove Dave and me back to their place in Auburn. Dave and I were planning on heading down to Vancouver, WA on Saturday morning but I was skeptical that we would actually wake up on time. I flt really bad for Tasha, driving our drunk asses 40 miles, so I tried my best to stay up and make idle chit-chat. Dave just passed out and only woke when we skidded though and icy intersection. He barked at Tasha, "Why are you driving so fast!" even though she was driving really carefully and the road was just really messy. Nice guy, Dave. After we regained control, we saw tires marks up onto the curb and tearing up part of someone's lawn. I think those people may have been the ones driving too fast. We got to bed around 3 AM and set our alarms for 9 AM.
Miraculously, we woke up on time and got on the road at a decent hour. Jimmy was only in town for a few days and we really wanted to see him. I had to drive Dave's car because he thought that he was still drunk. We stopped off at McDonalds and I got an Egg McMuffin meal with orange juice. Dave didn't think that he could hold down any food so we just got him a to-go bag that we would use as a barf bag if needed. He fell asleep pretty quickly and I powered though to Vancouver. He has one of those Nissan Z things and it's a really nice ride. I hadn't driven a stick in a while and it was an adventure getting used to the power but I picked it up after nearly making Dave puke a few times with my jerky shifting. We got to Jimmy's house around 1 PM and decided to head to Portland to do some tax-free Christmas shopping. We walked through Target and saw some cool stuff but didn't end up buying anything. Dave, the sweetheart that he is, shopped for some jewelry for Tasha but they didn't ever come over to help him so he left disgustedly. I told him that it looked like he was casing the place for a robbery, not shopping for his wife. He was hungover as shit, had a dirty beard working, and smelled a little like alcohol...or a lot like alcohol. We tired of shopping pretty quickly and headed to BJ's pizza to watch the Giants-Chiefs game. The Giants are a damn good football team and I hope they get the #3 seed in the NFC so that they'll have to meet the Bears in Soldier Field in round 2. I think the Bears are beatable when they have to go on the road but they're pretty damn near invincible with that defense at home in January. The perfect scenario for the Hawks would be to clich home-field throughout and have the Bears and Giants beat up on each other in their 2nd round game while the Hawks hopefully take care of business agaist the Panthers/Bucs. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let's clinch homefield throught first. I can't wait for the game on Saturday. Go Seahawks! Where were we?....
At BJ's Pizza, Jimmy and I ordered the combo pizza and Dave got a calzone. The pizza was really good but Dave felt liek his calzone was a little small. We're all spoiled by the monster calzones from Varlamos. I used my Treo to look up directions to the nearest Costco and we headed out there to see if we could spend some money. It was windy as christ(but how windy is christ, really) and Dave's car kept getting blown all over the road. We walked in and they had a Karaoke machine going and a tall lanky white guy was singing "Hero" by Enrique. Enrique is one of my faves so I instantly started serenading Dave. "Am I in too deep? Have I lost my mind? I don’t care... You’re here, tonight. I can be your hero, baby. I can kiss away the pain. I will stand by you forever. You can take my breath away." I'm obviously a loud singer so when I turned around it was no surprise to see everyone in the store staring at me and lughing their asses off. I needed a new camera so I headed to the camera display, right next to the Karaoke machine, and they teased me a bit about my love for Enrique. I ended up buying a Kodak 5.0 megapixel camera because it came with an extra battery that I'll be able to use while traveling. It was $339 originally but had an instant $40 dollar rebate AND was tax-free. I like the camera a lot but I left it in someone's car and I'm not going to get it until tomorrow. I should have a lot of pictures to unload by next post. So here are my best purchases of the year:
1) Treo
2) Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Noise Canceling headphones
3) New desktop computer and 2nd LCD screen
3) Magellan Navigation System
4) Digital Camera
5) Usher live in Atlanta DVD
6) Hooker in Barcelona
The Treo is amazing and I love having the internet at my fingertips everywhere I go. If I ever get into using the planner/contacts features it will be even more amazing for me. The headphones were really expensive but they are so awesome to have on the airplane. I love them. The computer works really well and having the second screen really helps while multi-tasking. The Magellan Navigation hasn't been used too much but I've really liked it when I've used it and I think that its value will truly come out during the baseball roadtrip. I've had the digital camera for less than a week so the jury's still out but I like it so far. The Usher DVD has been watched 3 times in the last 2 weeks, a sick amount of use. I didn't really buy a hooker in Barcelona but you could imagine how great it would be if I had! The only bad purchase is my laptop. It's very powerful and very fast but I wish I had focused more on portablitlity. It's a little bigger and heavier than I want it to be and it only has 2 hours of battery life because of the more powerful processor. If I had to do it over again, I'd spend more money and get something smaller and better. Oh well.
After Costco, Dave and I drove back to his place in Auburn. This time I got to sleep while he drove. I always feel bad when I do that to people on road trips but I was really damn tired. The original plan was to drive me back to Seattle on Saturday night but we were both so beat that we decided to head up there Sunday morning. It was really great seeing Jimmy, even though we had to drive about 5 hours to see him for about 4 hours. I slept really well on Saturday night and ended up getting about 9 hours of solid rest.
We woke up Sunday morning at 8 AM and headed up to Seattle. I had to pick up my luggage from Marcus' apartment because I had changed there before going to the club and couldn't find him again Friday night before going down to Dave and Tasha's. If you're paying attention, I wore the same clothes for 3 straight days. Sue me. Davis had mentioned on Friday night that we should watch the Seahawks game at his place so we headed over there. Unfortunately, Davis had a rough night and passed out somewhere else so we didn't get to watch the game with him. Luckily, his roommate Gough was home so we watched the game with him. I love Gough even though he isn't quite as crazy as the rest of us. My brother, Cliff, came over and we got to see a good game. At one point, the Titans scored 24 unanswered points to take a 24-14 lead so I went to brush my teeth to change our karma(if you're keeping track, I didn't have my toothbrush all weekend, you do the math). With fresh breath, I was able to rally the Seahawks back and we got an important road win, 28-24. I kept saying "who brushed his teeth?" as I high fived Dave, Cliff and Gough. After the game, Cliff and I headed to his ex-girlfriend Alex's place and we ate a nice lunch at Jai Tai in Belltown. We had the swimming rama, garlic pork, tofu phad thai and fresh spring rolls. It was the bomb.com. After lunch, Alex drove us to our mom's house where I got to take my first shower in Seattle. It felt glorious and Cliff and I did a bit of Spring Cleaning downstairs. We ended up getting rid of 5 large garbage bags of clothes and freed up a lot of space for our poor mom.
Monday was pretty uneventful. I went to Costco to buy groceries and Bellvue Square for more shopping but again didn't buy anything. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. I always procrastinate like a mofo and can never decide what to get people until the night of the 24th. Oh well. Tuesday night I went out to trivia with Morgan, Cliff and Cliff's friend, Laurie. Laurie is really cool and we had a great time with her. She was kind enough to DD so Morgan, Cliff and I went a little bonkers. We had few pitchers of PBR, an insanely big double shot of jager and an Irish Car Bomb. What do you think they call those in Ireland? Surely not an Irish Car Bomb. Maybe they just call is "A shot of Jameson and Baileys, dropped into a glass of Guinness." That sounds about right. I ended up leaving my camera in Laurie's car at the end of the night so I have to wait until tomorrow to get it back. Boooo.
On Wednesday, Morgan woke up on our couch and we all had fairly wicked hangovers. Morgan caught a cab home then drove back here to take us to Yoshino's teriyaki. They have an incredible tofu teriyaki dish that is one of my favorite foods in the world. For some reason Cliff and Morgan got a pork/chicken combo and both immediately regreted it after they saw my tofu bombness. After lunch, Morgan ran some errands downtown while I napped in the back of his car. He dropped me off at home around 2 PM and I hung out for a while before Renee came by to pick me up for Happy Hour at Pesos. I had the chopped cobb salad with avocados and bacon and a delicious dressing. The plate that it was on was too big and the salad would look better if they used a smaller plate. I also had some really good calimari and shared Nachos with Tori and Renee. Laura, Noelle and Vik showed up a little later and it was good to see the girls since one lives in Japan and the other in Boston. I started off slow with a few Gin and Tonics and had no idea where the night was about to go. Davis showed up a little late and whenever we're together, it spells trouble. Noelle and Vik had to leave around 7:30 so we decided to kill the first check of the night. I had a $50 bill that I had gotten as change somewhere and I wanted to get rid of it because they're bad luck for gamblers. I told everyone that I wanted to put down the $50 bill and didn't want any change back because it would be a remnant of the $50 bill. Somehow Tori convinced me to take $10 back but we still ended up tipping the waitress $39 dollars on a $96 tab. She even came back, asking if we accidentally left too much money, I love taking care of service people, they're usually so appreciative. Duane, EJ, and a bunch of others showed up and that's when things got out of hand. Iwon't go into details but there was a lot of jager and Patron Silver involved and when the smoke cleared I had spent more money that I've ever spent at a bar before. And that's saying something. I won't give the exact amount because my mom reads the blog and I don't want her to have a heart attack but let's just say it was money well spent. I had a blast and I've really missed nights like this. There weren't even any incredible stories or defining moments, well maybe the huge double shot of Jager we had, but it was just a great overall experince. Afterward, Eric drove me and John do Goldies for some $3/6. Eric's sober ass cleaned up and he hit quad Aces for $1100. Not a bad little jackpot. I lost about $200 but I'm pretty sure at least $100 of that went to the dealers. I'm not really sure what time we got home but I hit the hay real hard.
This "morning" I woke up at 1:30 and made my way to the computer. Poor Davis wrote a group email at 7 AM saying, "I can tell work is going to suck". I really don't know how they can have nights like last night and still make it to work. I haven't done a damn thing all day and I'm going to have to shower soon for Sabrina's party. It's a rough life.
I guess that's catches me up to today. I really would rather update daily but someimes life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I love Ferris.
I've been trying to work on my travel schedule and I'm probably going to head to South America with my mom in February. Right now it looks something like this:
January 3-11: Bahamas for PokerStars tournament.
January 11-15: San Diego
January 15-23: Seattle for (hopefully) 2 playoff games.
January 24-February 1: San Diego
February 1.....hopefully Detroit for the SB, if not, I'll head to Ecuador to see my mom and Will, my friend who came with me to Barcelona. I'll probably be in South America until March 7th.
March 12-19: Party Poker Million Cruise V
March 19-April 1: San Diego
April 1: Move Back to Seattle
April 3-June 4: Baseball Road Trip
June 12-24: Germany for the World Cup. I'll be around for all of the Pool play.
June 27-August 10: Vegas for the World Series of Poker.
August 10: Moving back to Seattle for reals.
September: Back to school at UW I hope.
Looks pretty good, huh? Merry Christmas, y'all. I'll try to update more frequently and have more pictures next time. Next stop on the tour: Party with High School friends tonight. Should be fun.
Dave and Tasha picked me up on Friday night and we headed straight to Marcus' apartment to get our drink on. Marcus has a sweet place in Queen Anne with a good view of the Space Needle and Puget Sound. The apartment is called Athena, a name that will always be dear to my heart. We drank a few Coors Lights and PBRs then moved on to the airplane bottles of booze. It's hard to take shots directly out of those things but I figured it out eventually. You have to hold it at a 45 degree angle to allow air to flow into the bottle and push out the liquor. If you have the bottle straight up and down, obviously it's harder to get the liquid out and if you hold it parallel to the ground, the booze comes out too slow and no one likes sipping on Cuervo. All of this may be old hat to some of you but I'm slower than most. Gonzalez showed up eventually as did Renee, Amanda and Steph a short time later. Steph hates the Jafro but Amanda thought it was really cool. I guess Steph just has no appreciation for true art. She went home after Marcus' place but the rest of us headed out to Tia Lou's. Tia Lou's is a club in Belltown that's pretty popular. It's not really my cup of tea since I prefer a more laid back atmosphere but there were so many close friends there that I couldn't help having a great time. Tye's shot exchange was in full effect and I bought double shots of tequila for Tye, Quang and myself. Quang is a short Vietnamese friend and he always makes the best faces after consuming tequila. At the end of the night, Tasha drove Dave and me back to their place in Auburn. Dave and I were planning on heading down to Vancouver, WA on Saturday morning but I was skeptical that we would actually wake up on time. I flt really bad for Tasha, driving our drunk asses 40 miles, so I tried my best to stay up and make idle chit-chat. Dave just passed out and only woke when we skidded though and icy intersection. He barked at Tasha, "Why are you driving so fast!" even though she was driving really carefully and the road was just really messy. Nice guy, Dave. After we regained control, we saw tires marks up onto the curb and tearing up part of someone's lawn. I think those people may have been the ones driving too fast. We got to bed around 3 AM and set our alarms for 9 AM.
Miraculously, we woke up on time and got on the road at a decent hour. Jimmy was only in town for a few days and we really wanted to see him. I had to drive Dave's car because he thought that he was still drunk. We stopped off at McDonalds and I got an Egg McMuffin meal with orange juice. Dave didn't think that he could hold down any food so we just got him a to-go bag that we would use as a barf bag if needed. He fell asleep pretty quickly and I powered though to Vancouver. He has one of those Nissan Z things and it's a really nice ride. I hadn't driven a stick in a while and it was an adventure getting used to the power but I picked it up after nearly making Dave puke a few times with my jerky shifting. We got to Jimmy's house around 1 PM and decided to head to Portland to do some tax-free Christmas shopping. We walked through Target and saw some cool stuff but didn't end up buying anything. Dave, the sweetheart that he is, shopped for some jewelry for Tasha but they didn't ever come over to help him so he left disgustedly. I told him that it looked like he was casing the place for a robbery, not shopping for his wife. He was hungover as shit, had a dirty beard working, and smelled a little like alcohol...or a lot like alcohol. We tired of shopping pretty quickly and headed to BJ's pizza to watch the Giants-Chiefs game. The Giants are a damn good football team and I hope they get the #3 seed in the NFC so that they'll have to meet the Bears in Soldier Field in round 2. I think the Bears are beatable when they have to go on the road but they're pretty damn near invincible with that defense at home in January. The perfect scenario for the Hawks would be to clich home-field throughout and have the Bears and Giants beat up on each other in their 2nd round game while the Hawks hopefully take care of business agaist the Panthers/Bucs. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let's clinch homefield throught first. I can't wait for the game on Saturday. Go Seahawks! Where were we?....
At BJ's Pizza, Jimmy and I ordered the combo pizza and Dave got a calzone. The pizza was really good but Dave felt liek his calzone was a little small. We're all spoiled by the monster calzones from Varlamos. I used my Treo to look up directions to the nearest Costco and we headed out there to see if we could spend some money. It was windy as christ(but how windy is christ, really) and Dave's car kept getting blown all over the road. We walked in and they had a Karaoke machine going and a tall lanky white guy was singing "Hero" by Enrique. Enrique is one of my faves so I instantly started serenading Dave. "Am I in too deep? Have I lost my mind? I don’t care... You’re here, tonight. I can be your hero, baby. I can kiss away the pain. I will stand by you forever. You can take my breath away." I'm obviously a loud singer so when I turned around it was no surprise to see everyone in the store staring at me and lughing their asses off. I needed a new camera so I headed to the camera display, right next to the Karaoke machine, and they teased me a bit about my love for Enrique. I ended up buying a Kodak 5.0 megapixel camera because it came with an extra battery that I'll be able to use while traveling. It was $339 originally but had an instant $40 dollar rebate AND was tax-free. I like the camera a lot but I left it in someone's car and I'm not going to get it until tomorrow. I should have a lot of pictures to unload by next post. So here are my best purchases of the year:
1) Treo
2) Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Noise Canceling headphones
3) New desktop computer and 2nd LCD screen
3) Magellan Navigation System
4) Digital Camera
5) Usher live in Atlanta DVD
6) Hooker in Barcelona
The Treo is amazing and I love having the internet at my fingertips everywhere I go. If I ever get into using the planner/contacts features it will be even more amazing for me. The headphones were really expensive but they are so awesome to have on the airplane. I love them. The computer works really well and having the second screen really helps while multi-tasking. The Magellan Navigation hasn't been used too much but I've really liked it when I've used it and I think that its value will truly come out during the baseball roadtrip. I've had the digital camera for less than a week so the jury's still out but I like it so far. The Usher DVD has been watched 3 times in the last 2 weeks, a sick amount of use. I didn't really buy a hooker in Barcelona but you could imagine how great it would be if I had! The only bad purchase is my laptop. It's very powerful and very fast but I wish I had focused more on portablitlity. It's a little bigger and heavier than I want it to be and it only has 2 hours of battery life because of the more powerful processor. If I had to do it over again, I'd spend more money and get something smaller and better. Oh well.
After Costco, Dave and I drove back to his place in Auburn. This time I got to sleep while he drove. I always feel bad when I do that to people on road trips but I was really damn tired. The original plan was to drive me back to Seattle on Saturday night but we were both so beat that we decided to head up there Sunday morning. It was really great seeing Jimmy, even though we had to drive about 5 hours to see him for about 4 hours. I slept really well on Saturday night and ended up getting about 9 hours of solid rest.
We woke up Sunday morning at 8 AM and headed up to Seattle. I had to pick up my luggage from Marcus' apartment because I had changed there before going to the club and couldn't find him again Friday night before going down to Dave and Tasha's. If you're paying attention, I wore the same clothes for 3 straight days. Sue me. Davis had mentioned on Friday night that we should watch the Seahawks game at his place so we headed over there. Unfortunately, Davis had a rough night and passed out somewhere else so we didn't get to watch the game with him. Luckily, his roommate Gough was home so we watched the game with him. I love Gough even though he isn't quite as crazy as the rest of us. My brother, Cliff, came over and we got to see a good game. At one point, the Titans scored 24 unanswered points to take a 24-14 lead so I went to brush my teeth to change our karma(if you're keeping track, I didn't have my toothbrush all weekend, you do the math). With fresh breath, I was able to rally the Seahawks back and we got an important road win, 28-24. I kept saying "who brushed his teeth?" as I high fived Dave, Cliff and Gough. After the game, Cliff and I headed to his ex-girlfriend Alex's place and we ate a nice lunch at Jai Tai in Belltown. We had the swimming rama, garlic pork, tofu phad thai and fresh spring rolls. It was the bomb.com. After lunch, Alex drove us to our mom's house where I got to take my first shower in Seattle. It felt glorious and Cliff and I did a bit of Spring Cleaning downstairs. We ended up getting rid of 5 large garbage bags of clothes and freed up a lot of space for our poor mom.
Monday was pretty uneventful. I went to Costco to buy groceries and Bellvue Square for more shopping but again didn't buy anything. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. I always procrastinate like a mofo and can never decide what to get people until the night of the 24th. Oh well. Tuesday night I went out to trivia with Morgan, Cliff and Cliff's friend, Laurie. Laurie is really cool and we had a great time with her. She was kind enough to DD so Morgan, Cliff and I went a little bonkers. We had few pitchers of PBR, an insanely big double shot of jager and an Irish Car Bomb. What do you think they call those in Ireland? Surely not an Irish Car Bomb. Maybe they just call is "A shot of Jameson and Baileys, dropped into a glass of Guinness." That sounds about right. I ended up leaving my camera in Laurie's car at the end of the night so I have to wait until tomorrow to get it back. Boooo.
On Wednesday, Morgan woke up on our couch and we all had fairly wicked hangovers. Morgan caught a cab home then drove back here to take us to Yoshino's teriyaki. They have an incredible tofu teriyaki dish that is one of my favorite foods in the world. For some reason Cliff and Morgan got a pork/chicken combo and both immediately regreted it after they saw my tofu bombness. After lunch, Morgan ran some errands downtown while I napped in the back of his car. He dropped me off at home around 2 PM and I hung out for a while before Renee came by to pick me up for Happy Hour at Pesos. I had the chopped cobb salad with avocados and bacon and a delicious dressing. The plate that it was on was too big and the salad would look better if they used a smaller plate. I also had some really good calimari and shared Nachos with Tori and Renee. Laura, Noelle and Vik showed up a little later and it was good to see the girls since one lives in Japan and the other in Boston. I started off slow with a few Gin and Tonics and had no idea where the night was about to go. Davis showed up a little late and whenever we're together, it spells trouble. Noelle and Vik had to leave around 7:30 so we decided to kill the first check of the night. I had a $50 bill that I had gotten as change somewhere and I wanted to get rid of it because they're bad luck for gamblers. I told everyone that I wanted to put down the $50 bill and didn't want any change back because it would be a remnant of the $50 bill. Somehow Tori convinced me to take $10 back but we still ended up tipping the waitress $39 dollars on a $96 tab. She even came back, asking if we accidentally left too much money, I love taking care of service people, they're usually so appreciative. Duane, EJ, and a bunch of others showed up and that's when things got out of hand. Iwon't go into details but there was a lot of jager and Patron Silver involved and when the smoke cleared I had spent more money that I've ever spent at a bar before. And that's saying something. I won't give the exact amount because my mom reads the blog and I don't want her to have a heart attack but let's just say it was money well spent. I had a blast and I've really missed nights like this. There weren't even any incredible stories or defining moments, well maybe the huge double shot of Jager we had, but it was just a great overall experince. Afterward, Eric drove me and John do Goldies for some $3/6. Eric's sober ass cleaned up and he hit quad Aces for $1100. Not a bad little jackpot. I lost about $200 but I'm pretty sure at least $100 of that went to the dealers. I'm not really sure what time we got home but I hit the hay real hard.
This "morning" I woke up at 1:30 and made my way to the computer. Poor Davis wrote a group email at 7 AM saying, "I can tell work is going to suck". I really don't know how they can have nights like last night and still make it to work. I haven't done a damn thing all day and I'm going to have to shower soon for Sabrina's party. It's a rough life.
I guess that's catches me up to today. I really would rather update daily but someimes life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I love Ferris.
I've been trying to work on my travel schedule and I'm probably going to head to South America with my mom in February. Right now it looks something like this:
January 3-11: Bahamas for PokerStars tournament.
January 11-15: San Diego
January 15-23: Seattle for (hopefully) 2 playoff games.
January 24-February 1: San Diego
February 1.....hopefully Detroit for the SB, if not, I'll head to Ecuador to see my mom and Will, my friend who came with me to Barcelona. I'll probably be in South America until March 7th.
March 12-19: Party Poker Million Cruise V
March 19-April 1: San Diego
April 1: Move Back to Seattle
April 3-June 4: Baseball Road Trip
June 12-24: Germany for the World Cup. I'll be around for all of the Pool play.
June 27-August 10: Vegas for the World Series of Poker.
August 10: Moving back to Seattle for reals.
September: Back to school at UW I hope.
Looks pretty good, huh? Merry Christmas, y'all. I'll try to update more frequently and have more pictures next time. Next stop on the tour: Party with High School friends tonight. Should be fun.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Sea-Town Bound
In 24 hours I'll be at Tia Lou's with a ton of close friends. Dave and Ravi are both celebrating their birthdays there and Tye is having some event that he calls "The Holiday Shot Exchange". I don't know what the hell that means but I do enjoy the holidays and shots. I have a feeling that there will be no blog entry tomorrow night and that Saturday's blog will be great.
Today, I did a lot of laundry and drank a lot of water. It's nice to be home for...36 hours. Literally, I arrived from Vegas at 1:30 AM this morning and I'm heading to the train station at 1:30 PM tomorrow. I'm not going to be back here until January 11th so I guess I really am paying rent just to store my crap. Oh well, it's good to be ballin' out of control. I bought in to the tournament in the Bahamas today so it looks like everything is set up. I really hope that my poker game will be redivivus by then and the cards are auspicious. I watched Carl win another tournament on Ultimate Bet today, his game is truly hale and he's a paladin of pot odds.
I have to apologize for my logorrhea but I recently subscribed to Dictionary.com's word of the day through bloglines.com. I highly recommend signing up if you try to keep track of a lot of blogs. Even if you're not as assiduous to the Internet as me, you can still get a bunch of good stuff. Just hop onto bloglines and it will tell you which blogs are updated so that you don't need to look through them all to find the one friend that's kept up his blogging. I'm subsrcibed to 24 feeds, including the BBC World News, the New York Times, Sir AlCantHang, Minh Ba, MTV News, Robert in Tanzania, Boyd in Japan, Steal the Blinds, Pauly, Pauly, Derek, and a bevy of others. It may look like a lot of work but I promise, it's really easy. Just go to bloglines and sign up.
I've seen five DVDs over the past few days and I have to rate them in this order:
5) Euro Trip
4) The 40-Year-Old Virgin
3) Usher live in Atlanta
2) March of the Penguins
1) Cinderella Man
It's unfair to both Euro Trip and the 40-year-old Virgin that I've watched such great DVDs lately because they're both really funny and good in their own right. It's just hard to compete with the other three.
Danielle made muddy buddies while I was away. I'm taking them to the airport with me for a snack.
Can anyone tell that I'm really tired? This is possibly the worst blog entry of all time. See you Saturday night.
Today, I did a lot of laundry and drank a lot of water. It's nice to be home for...36 hours. Literally, I arrived from Vegas at 1:30 AM this morning and I'm heading to the train station at 1:30 PM tomorrow. I'm not going to be back here until January 11th so I guess I really am paying rent just to store my crap. Oh well, it's good to be ballin' out of control. I bought in to the tournament in the Bahamas today so it looks like everything is set up. I really hope that my poker game will be redivivus by then and the cards are auspicious. I watched Carl win another tournament on Ultimate Bet today, his game is truly hale and he's a paladin of pot odds.
I have to apologize for my logorrhea but I recently subscribed to Dictionary.com's word of the day through bloglines.com. I highly recommend signing up if you try to keep track of a lot of blogs. Even if you're not as assiduous to the Internet as me, you can still get a bunch of good stuff. Just hop onto bloglines and it will tell you which blogs are updated so that you don't need to look through them all to find the one friend that's kept up his blogging. I'm subsrcibed to 24 feeds, including the BBC World News, the New York Times, Sir AlCantHang, Minh Ba, MTV News, Robert in Tanzania, Boyd in Japan, Steal the Blinds, Pauly, Pauly, Derek, and a bevy of others. It may look like a lot of work but I promise, it's really easy. Just go to bloglines and sign up.
I've seen five DVDs over the past few days and I have to rate them in this order:
5) Euro Trip
4) The 40-Year-Old Virgin
3) Usher live in Atlanta
2) March of the Penguins
1) Cinderella Man
It's unfair to both Euro Trip and the 40-year-old Virgin that I've watched such great DVDs lately because they're both really funny and good in their own right. It's just hard to compete with the other three.
Danielle made muddy buddies while I was away. I'm taking them to the airport with me for a snack.
Can anyone tell that I'm really tired? This is possibly the worst blog entry of all time. See you Saturday night.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
I'm Outtie
Well, Carl busted out of the tournament early yesterday so I'm going to be driving back to Carlsbad tonight. I've had a lot of fun during this trip to Vegas and I only lost a little bit of money. My poker game needs a ton of work and I'll be practicing a lot over the next couple of weeks.
I forgot to give an important shoutout last time. The Grossmont Griffins, my roommate's brother Matt's team, won the California State Title and were named JuCo National Champs. Matt's ordering a t-shirt for me and he's really excited about winning the championship. I think it's pretty damn cool.
On Monday, I got a late start but got to the Bellagio in time to watch Carl play in the main event for a while. They ended play at 9 PM so Carl, John and I went to the Bellagio Cafe for some dinner. The food was really good but the service was atrocious. If you ever eat at the Bellagio Cafe and get server by a gay 50 year-old, ask for a table change. It was really, really bad and we left a really small tip. I'm a huge tipper 99% of the time but I feel like a tip should mean something and I refuse to leae a big tip for poor service. I'm a 20-25% type guy for average-good service and a <10% guy if I get totally ignored during my meal. Oh well, the New York Strip was good, as were the green beans and mashed potatoes. Afterwards, we went to the Bellagio Sports Bar and had a few drinks, talking about poker and sports and poker. It was good to chill with Carl because I never seem to be able to meet up with him when I travel to Seattle. I think it's because I secretly hate him for his poker success but don't tell him that. After Carl left I played a little $30/60 but left around 1:30 AM, calling it an early night.
The next day I got a voicemail from Carl at 12:45, saying that he was out of the tournament. That's always bad news but I was able to chill at Christy's mom's house for a longer time and did't really get rolling until 5 PM when I went to the airport to pick up Steve and Sarah. I dropped them off at the Mandalay Bay and headed to the Bellagio to check out the tournament action. I ran into Noah who was sweating his friend, Patrik Antonius. He had one of the sickest piles of chips I've ever seen and was in total control. He's won millions of dollars over the last few years playing $200/400 heads up no-limit and has exploded onto the tournament scene this year, winning an EPT event in Austria, winning the Scandanavian Poker Championships, and finishing 3rd in another EPT event in Barcelona. He also models in Scandanavia in his free time. Yeah, it's good to be Patrik Antonius. He's still in the top 5 in chips and I'd like to see a Doyle Brunson-Patrik Antonius head-up match with deep stacks.
Steve and Sarah called me around 9 PM and we headed to the same Soprts Bar that I was at the night before. We hung out with Jen Leo and Steve Caldwell for a while before Jen hit the wall of drunkenness and had to call it a night. Steve, Sarah and I headed to the Casino Royale for some $2 craps with Pauly and ended up going on a good run. Steve was the hottest shooter and ended up getting everyone unstuck. He was betting more than the rest of us so he ended up winning $500 while I won $275. Not too shabby, especially when I consider playing craps flushing $100 down the drain in the name of degeneracy. THe Casino Royale is ridiculously ghetto and the drinks were awful. Steve ordered a Corona and was told that they only had Bud Light and Killians and when they brought his Killians, it was in a 10 ounce cocktail class. GHETTO! It was fun seeing Pauly and Derek and their friend, Spaceman, I don't even know his real name but he seemed to know a lot about Craps. He bet on the Don't Pass line twice, after people threw the dice over the rail, and was right both times. We quit around 1:30 AM and headed out to the stip to look for a decent meal. We found a cafe open at the Flamingo and it looked ok. Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving and the food was absolutely horrendous. If you're ever in the area late at night, please take the time to cross the street and head to the Bellagio Cafe. It's not much more expensive and the food is waaaaay better. Just make sure you don't get served by a gay 50 year-old man.
Seve and Sarah went to bed after our dinner/breakfast but I headed to the Wynn to play $10/20 mixed with Carl and our friend from 2+2, Bugstud. I ran well and played like a donkey and ended up winning $630 for the night. Including the craps, I was up $900 for the night, always a fun result. Carl and I ended up leaving at 5:30 in the morning and I didn't get back to Christy's mom's until 6. At noon, I was supposed to go check out the house that we're staying at during the World Series but I oviously slept through that one. Steve called me later and said that it was pretty cool but a little outdated. It should be fun living in an 80's mansion for a month and I can't wait. There are 6 rooms in the house and Carl, Steve and a bunch of other really good poker players will be staying there during the World Series. It should be a good environment for us to be in and will definitely be +EV. It will be awesome to hae good players to talk things over with and discuss strategies. I'm really looking forward to it.
I guess that catches you up to what I'm doing now, sitting in the living room in my boxers typing on my laptop. I'm going to get out of here soon and see if Carl wants to have dinner before I drive back home. I'm flying up to Seattle in 2 days and I can't wait. Friday night it's PAAAAAARTAY TIME. You'll probably want to hide the children again.
I forgot to give an important shoutout last time. The Grossmont Griffins, my roommate's brother Matt's team, won the California State Title and were named JuCo National Champs. Matt's ordering a t-shirt for me and he's really excited about winning the championship. I think it's pretty damn cool.
On Monday, I got a late start but got to the Bellagio in time to watch Carl play in the main event for a while. They ended play at 9 PM so Carl, John and I went to the Bellagio Cafe for some dinner. The food was really good but the service was atrocious. If you ever eat at the Bellagio Cafe and get server by a gay 50 year-old, ask for a table change. It was really, really bad and we left a really small tip. I'm a huge tipper 99% of the time but I feel like a tip should mean something and I refuse to leae a big tip for poor service. I'm a 20-25% type guy for average-good service and a <10% guy if I get totally ignored during my meal. Oh well, the New York Strip was good, as were the green beans and mashed potatoes. Afterwards, we went to the Bellagio Sports Bar and had a few drinks, talking about poker and sports and poker. It was good to chill with Carl because I never seem to be able to meet up with him when I travel to Seattle. I think it's because I secretly hate him for his poker success but don't tell him that. After Carl left I played a little $30/60 but left around 1:30 AM, calling it an early night.
The next day I got a voicemail from Carl at 12:45, saying that he was out of the tournament. That's always bad news but I was able to chill at Christy's mom's house for a longer time and did't really get rolling until 5 PM when I went to the airport to pick up Steve and Sarah. I dropped them off at the Mandalay Bay and headed to the Bellagio to check out the tournament action. I ran into Noah who was sweating his friend, Patrik Antonius. He had one of the sickest piles of chips I've ever seen and was in total control. He's won millions of dollars over the last few years playing $200/400 heads up no-limit and has exploded onto the tournament scene this year, winning an EPT event in Austria, winning the Scandanavian Poker Championships, and finishing 3rd in another EPT event in Barcelona. He also models in Scandanavia in his free time. Yeah, it's good to be Patrik Antonius. He's still in the top 5 in chips and I'd like to see a Doyle Brunson-Patrik Antonius head-up match with deep stacks.
Steve and Sarah called me around 9 PM and we headed to the same Soprts Bar that I was at the night before. We hung out with Jen Leo and Steve Caldwell for a while before Jen hit the wall of drunkenness and had to call it a night. Steve, Sarah and I headed to the Casino Royale for some $2 craps with Pauly and ended up going on a good run. Steve was the hottest shooter and ended up getting everyone unstuck. He was betting more than the rest of us so he ended up winning $500 while I won $275. Not too shabby, especially when I consider playing craps flushing $100 down the drain in the name of degeneracy. THe Casino Royale is ridiculously ghetto and the drinks were awful. Steve ordered a Corona and was told that they only had Bud Light and Killians and when they brought his Killians, it was in a 10 ounce cocktail class. GHETTO! It was fun seeing Pauly and Derek and their friend, Spaceman, I don't even know his real name but he seemed to know a lot about Craps. He bet on the Don't Pass line twice, after people threw the dice over the rail, and was right both times. We quit around 1:30 AM and headed out to the stip to look for a decent meal. We found a cafe open at the Flamingo and it looked ok. Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving and the food was absolutely horrendous. If you're ever in the area late at night, please take the time to cross the street and head to the Bellagio Cafe. It's not much more expensive and the food is waaaaay better. Just make sure you don't get served by a gay 50 year-old man.
Seve and Sarah went to bed after our dinner/breakfast but I headed to the Wynn to play $10/20 mixed with Carl and our friend from 2+2, Bugstud. I ran well and played like a donkey and ended up winning $630 for the night. Including the craps, I was up $900 for the night, always a fun result. Carl and I ended up leaving at 5:30 in the morning and I didn't get back to Christy's mom's until 6. At noon, I was supposed to go check out the house that we're staying at during the World Series but I oviously slept through that one. Steve called me later and said that it was pretty cool but a little outdated. It should be fun living in an 80's mansion for a month and I can't wait. There are 6 rooms in the house and Carl, Steve and a bunch of other really good poker players will be staying there during the World Series. It should be a good environment for us to be in and will definitely be +EV. It will be awesome to hae good players to talk things over with and discuss strategies. I'm really looking forward to it.
I guess that catches you up to what I'm doing now, sitting in the living room in my boxers typing on my laptop. I'm going to get out of here soon and see if Carl wants to have dinner before I drive back home. I'm flying up to Seattle in 2 days and I can't wait. Friday night it's PAAAAAARTAY TIME. You'll probably want to hide the children again.
Monday, December 12, 2005
SEAHAWKS, SEAHAWKS, SEAHAWKS
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I LOVE THIS TEAM! I love Matty finally taking advantage of teams stacking the line like woah. Holmgren must have gone into the lab and studied the Giants game or something because our offense looks faaantastic. I realize that we just played the 49ers but man, they look like they're clicking on all cylinders. Joey J is the the second coming of Steve Largent and Tutupu is the second coming of Junior Seau. He seems to be getting better by the game and I like him. A lot. Like, enough to mother his children if that were possible. Again, we need to take care of business next week and set up the possible SB preview at 12-2 vs 14-0. I think the Colts will still play hard and I'd like to see if we can hang with those boys. My heart says yes and my mind is keeping its mouth shut.
On Friday, I decided to relax and played some $30/60 at the Bellagio. Pauly called and told me that there were 30-40 poker bloggers at the MGM so I cashed out and headed over there. They had 3 tables of 2/4 HORSE going so I got on the list and chatted for a while with Brad and Pauly. It took along time to get seated but I finally got seated at a table with Pauly, his brother Derek, Al, Daddy and Jaxia. They were all really cool and I thoroughly enjoyed donating my money to them. Pauly is in love with Jaxia even though she's attracted to women. Al drinks a lot of shots and I got really, really twisted. After a few hours, Duane showed up and the HORSE game broke so I went to sit with Duane in his 2/4 Hold 'Em game. I donked away about $100 in that game and kept pulling out my tourney money(about 6-7K worth of $100 bills in a WaMu envelope) and throwing it across the table at Duane, telling him to rebuy. I kept throwing it perfectly so that the money slid out a bit and all the players at the table could see the money but it never came all the way out or went flying all over the place. I don't know why I did this but I was as hammered as I've been in a long time(sorry, Mom). We finally quit around 5 AM and I drove Duane back to the Bellagio........JUST KIDDING!!!!.......we caught a cab back to the Bellagio where Duane tried to get me to come up to his room but I shut him down and told the cabbie how to get to Christy's mom's house. I ended up apssing out in the back of the cab and he had to wake me up when he got lost. I guess my directions were less than perfect but I managed to get us there and I gave him $30 for a $20 tab.
On Saturday there was a super satellite the the 15K main event at 1 PM and I decided to play in it...until I woke up at 3 PM at Christy's mom's house with no car. I showered and called John, who was going to bed but said he would pick me up around 7PM to get some dinner and take me to the MGM to pick up my car. We went to a really good Mexican place called Viva Mercado that I found on citysearch.com. The portions were huge and the food was really, really good. They have a great Vegetarian menu, too so if my loving mother or father ever come to Vegas with me I have a good place to take them. The restaurant is in a strip mall and has a horribly ghetto neon pink and blue sign but the food is excellent. If I was driving by there is no chance I'd ever stop at the place but it was packed inside. After dinner, John dropped me off at the MGM and I waited there for Duane and his mom and grandma to get out of Ka, the Cirqur du Soleil show at the MGM. I drove them all to the Bellagio and Duane and I went to the poker room to find John while mom and grandma went to the room to rest. We talked to John and got on the 4/8 list but it was really long and we decided to go check out the Mandalay Bay since they spread a 2/4. Well we never got in the same game because Duane got seated in a 4/8 first and started wining so he didn't want to switch tot eh 2/4 I was at. I ended up hitting a straight flush and winning $500, $150 of which I tipped to the dealer. He was speechless and I was very happy. The hand was pretty crazy. I straddle with 6h3h and get 5 callers. The flop is 6x4h2x. I bet and everyone calls, still 6 players to the turn. The turn is the 2h and I bet again. This time, everyone folds to the button and I need him to call or I don't get to see the river. I'm really pissed at myself for betting but I thought everyone was going to call again. Finally, he throws in 4 chips and I get to see the beautiful 5h on the river. I bet and he raises! I 3-bet and he just calls, tabling T5o for a rivered pair of 5s. A straight flush beats a pair of 5s so I got the pot AND $500. I should have tipped the guy something but I didn't think about it until later. I drove Duane back to the Bellagio around 3 AM and went back to Christy's mom's for a good night's sleep before the 1 PM super satellite.
This time I actually made it to the satellite but ended up wishing that I missed it. about 20 hands in I run QQ into AA and I'm out in 10 minutes. $1500 for 15 minutes of poker. I probably could have gotten rid of the QQ but basically, I suck at poker and I want to jump off the Stratoshpere without a bungee cord. I'm playing really porrly and not running very good and it's really pissing me off. The running bad I'm used to but I've been playing so bad and that really upsets me. I'm pretty sure that it's rustiness from all the travel and I'm going to make a real effort to play a lot of tourneys online over the next few weeks before heading to the Bahamas. I've played so frikkin bad this trip and at the same time run into a lot of crappy spots and sometimes you just want to fold you cards forever. I probably will stick it out until the end of the World Series of Poker next year but I can tell that I'm not going to be into this forever. I guess that's a good thing.
Enough negativity. Christy's mom has Sunday and Monday off so I called her once I busted to see if she wanted to go out to dinner, as a way for me to repay her for letting me live at her house. She ended up making reservations for a really nice Japanese restaurant at the Wynn called Okada. so I needed to get some clothes. I made Duane go with me to Robinson & May and he picked out some pants, shoes and a belt for me to buy. I needed brown shoes and a brown belt anyway, so really the only semi-unnecessary purchase was a pair of pants. They are pretty sick and have the auto-adjust waist so they're perfect for my fat ass. We couldn't find a good shirt so we went to Nordstroms where I bought a sick Ben Sherman shirt. It's far sicker than any of the going-out shirts that I currently own and I really like it. For dinner we had the Okada roll, avacado and asparagus in a roll topped with lobster and wasabi sauce. It was so unbelievably great I can't even describe it. I've never had lobster on sushi before but it worked well and makes my mouth salivate just writing about it. After that we had some Kobe Beef and marinated short ribs. The beef was unbelievably tender and melted in my mouth. I had some sweet potato sho-chu to wash it all down and finished with a pumpkin creme broule. The whole meal was insanely bomb and the bill ended up as $175. I left $220 and decided that was cheap for 10 nights lodging. Afterward, Christy's mom and I went to the Orleans casino to play so low limit hold 'em then went to the Gold Coast to play Bingo. That's right, B-I-N-G-O. I was the youngest person there and Christy's mom, at 50 years-old, was the second youngest. I had fun and had to laugh at everything that was going on. There were two regular lines to buy bingo tickets and one handicapped line. Sadly, the handicapped line was longer than the regular lines and kinda defeated the purpose. We didn't have any luck and ended up losing $40. Oh well, I had fun with Terry and I really appreciate her letting me live here. It's really nice to be able to get away from the chaos of the strip for a while and have a living room to hang out in instead of a hotel room. I think it's definitely a better environment to keep my poker focus, I just need to relearn how to play.
Since I didn't qualify for the tournament, I'll probably head back to San Diego on Wednesday night and fly up to Seattle on Friday afternoon. I've been gone from Seattle for 2 weeks and already miss it like crazy.
Oh, man, they're showing the Seahawks highlights on SportsCenter. Joey J is a MAN. See y'all soon.
On Friday, I decided to relax and played some $30/60 at the Bellagio. Pauly called and told me that there were 30-40 poker bloggers at the MGM so I cashed out and headed over there. They had 3 tables of 2/4 HORSE going so I got on the list and chatted for a while with Brad and Pauly. It took along time to get seated but I finally got seated at a table with Pauly, his brother Derek, Al, Daddy and Jaxia. They were all really cool and I thoroughly enjoyed donating my money to them. Pauly is in love with Jaxia even though she's attracted to women. Al drinks a lot of shots and I got really, really twisted. After a few hours, Duane showed up and the HORSE game broke so I went to sit with Duane in his 2/4 Hold 'Em game. I donked away about $100 in that game and kept pulling out my tourney money(about 6-7K worth of $100 bills in a WaMu envelope) and throwing it across the table at Duane, telling him to rebuy. I kept throwing it perfectly so that the money slid out a bit and all the players at the table could see the money but it never came all the way out or went flying all over the place. I don't know why I did this but I was as hammered as I've been in a long time(sorry, Mom). We finally quit around 5 AM and I drove Duane back to the Bellagio........JUST KIDDING!!!!.......we caught a cab back to the Bellagio where Duane tried to get me to come up to his room but I shut him down and told the cabbie how to get to Christy's mom's house. I ended up apssing out in the back of the cab and he had to wake me up when he got lost. I guess my directions were less than perfect but I managed to get us there and I gave him $30 for a $20 tab.
On Saturday there was a super satellite the the 15K main event at 1 PM and I decided to play in it...until I woke up at 3 PM at Christy's mom's house with no car. I showered and called John, who was going to bed but said he would pick me up around 7PM to get some dinner and take me to the MGM to pick up my car. We went to a really good Mexican place called Viva Mercado that I found on citysearch.com. The portions were huge and the food was really, really good. They have a great Vegetarian menu, too so if my loving mother or father ever come to Vegas with me I have a good place to take them. The restaurant is in a strip mall and has a horribly ghetto neon pink and blue sign but the food is excellent. If I was driving by there is no chance I'd ever stop at the place but it was packed inside. After dinner, John dropped me off at the MGM and I waited there for Duane and his mom and grandma to get out of Ka, the Cirqur du Soleil show at the MGM. I drove them all to the Bellagio and Duane and I went to the poker room to find John while mom and grandma went to the room to rest. We talked to John and got on the 4/8 list but it was really long and we decided to go check out the Mandalay Bay since they spread a 2/4. Well we never got in the same game because Duane got seated in a 4/8 first and started wining so he didn't want to switch tot eh 2/4 I was at. I ended up hitting a straight flush and winning $500, $150 of which I tipped to the dealer. He was speechless and I was very happy. The hand was pretty crazy. I straddle with 6h3h and get 5 callers. The flop is 6x4h2x. I bet and everyone calls, still 6 players to the turn. The turn is the 2h and I bet again. This time, everyone folds to the button and I need him to call or I don't get to see the river. I'm really pissed at myself for betting but I thought everyone was going to call again. Finally, he throws in 4 chips and I get to see the beautiful 5h on the river. I bet and he raises! I 3-bet and he just calls, tabling T5o for a rivered pair of 5s. A straight flush beats a pair of 5s so I got the pot AND $500. I should have tipped the guy something but I didn't think about it until later. I drove Duane back to the Bellagio around 3 AM and went back to Christy's mom's for a good night's sleep before the 1 PM super satellite.
This time I actually made it to the satellite but ended up wishing that I missed it. about 20 hands in I run QQ into AA and I'm out in 10 minutes. $1500 for 15 minutes of poker. I probably could have gotten rid of the QQ but basically, I suck at poker and I want to jump off the Stratoshpere without a bungee cord. I'm playing really porrly and not running very good and it's really pissing me off. The running bad I'm used to but I've been playing so bad and that really upsets me. I'm pretty sure that it's rustiness from all the travel and I'm going to make a real effort to play a lot of tourneys online over the next few weeks before heading to the Bahamas. I've played so frikkin bad this trip and at the same time run into a lot of crappy spots and sometimes you just want to fold you cards forever. I probably will stick it out until the end of the World Series of Poker next year but I can tell that I'm not going to be into this forever. I guess that's a good thing.
Enough negativity. Christy's mom has Sunday and Monday off so I called her once I busted to see if she wanted to go out to dinner, as a way for me to repay her for letting me live at her house. She ended up making reservations for a really nice Japanese restaurant at the Wynn called Okada. so I needed to get some clothes. I made Duane go with me to Robinson & May and he picked out some pants, shoes and a belt for me to buy. I needed brown shoes and a brown belt anyway, so really the only semi-unnecessary purchase was a pair of pants. They are pretty sick and have the auto-adjust waist so they're perfect for my fat ass. We couldn't find a good shirt so we went to Nordstroms where I bought a sick Ben Sherman shirt. It's far sicker than any of the going-out shirts that I currently own and I really like it. For dinner we had the Okada roll, avacado and asparagus in a roll topped with lobster and wasabi sauce. It was so unbelievably great I can't even describe it. I've never had lobster on sushi before but it worked well and makes my mouth salivate just writing about it. After that we had some Kobe Beef and marinated short ribs. The beef was unbelievably tender and melted in my mouth. I had some sweet potato sho-chu to wash it all down and finished with a pumpkin creme broule. The whole meal was insanely bomb and the bill ended up as $175. I left $220 and decided that was cheap for 10 nights lodging. Afterward, Christy's mom and I went to the Orleans casino to play so low limit hold 'em then went to the Gold Coast to play Bingo. That's right, B-I-N-G-O. I was the youngest person there and Christy's mom, at 50 years-old, was the second youngest. I had fun and had to laugh at everything that was going on. There were two regular lines to buy bingo tickets and one handicapped line. Sadly, the handicapped line was longer than the regular lines and kinda defeated the purpose. We didn't have any luck and ended up losing $40. Oh well, I had fun with Terry and I really appreciate her letting me live here. It's really nice to be able to get away from the chaos of the strip for a while and have a living room to hang out in instead of a hotel room. I think it's definitely a better environment to keep my poker focus, I just need to relearn how to play.
Since I didn't qualify for the tournament, I'll probably head back to San Diego on Wednesday night and fly up to Seattle on Friday afternoon. I've been gone from Seattle for 2 weeks and already miss it like crazy.
Oh, man, they're showing the Seahawks highlights on SportsCenter. Joey J is a MAN. See y'all soon.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Been Too Long
Sorry.
I got to Vegas around 6:30 PM on Tuesday. I just typed "Bellagio" in my Magellan GPS and it took me right to the valet lot. Navigation rules. I went straight to the cardroom and played in 2 $335 satellites for the $3100 tourney on Wednesday. The first one was uneventful as I went out 6th but in the second one there was a fun hand. 3-handed, I'm in the SB with 12K chips, the BB has 3K chips and the Button has 15K. Blinds are 200/400 and the button raises to 900. I look down at black AA and reraise to 2200. I'd been playing pretty aggressive and I want it to look like a resteal. BB fold and the button goes into the tank. He takes his protector off his cards and looks likes he's about to fold. I take the chip off my cards and act like I'm happy to take the pot when he re-caps his cards and re-raises to 5K total. He does a good job convincing me that he's weak so I count my chips and just call. The flop comes K62 rainbow, I check, he insta-pushes and I insta-call. He flips over KK and I'm out in 3rd. 8 people put down $200 extra to increase the stakes so the pot was essentially worth the $3100 entry fee plus $1800 cash. Whoever wins that hand wins the table a huge majority of the time. Oh well. Down $870, I head to the side games and sit in a pretty good $30/60 game. I run good and cash out around 1 AM up $1120. +$250 overall but I still had to buy myself into the $3100 event.
The next day I woke up pretty early and was very excited to play in the tournament. I hadn't played in a while and I was itching to go. Long story short, I played like ass early and folded the best hand in a big pot when I could have almost tripled up. Once the blinds went up to 200/400 I never had more than 15 blinds and played pretty good situational short-stacked poker. I worked my way up to 10K chips at the 300/600 50 ante level when my bustout hand happened. The floor comes over to break our table so everyone is packing up their chips during the hand. I'm in the CO-1 with Tc3c and raise to 1600. The BB calls and we see a flop of 8h6h2s. The BB checks but I smell a check-raise so I check behind. With a bigger stack I may bet but it's so easy for him to check-raise me with crap on that flop and I don't want to bet another 2K chips and have to fold. The turn is the Th and my opponent quickly bets 2200. I have about 8300 left and push pretty quickly. I put him on an 8 because everything so far feels like a missed check-raise. He starts muttering to himself, "you must have flopped a set, I can't believe you slowplayed your set, I don't see how I can fold". Now I'm a little worried because he's putting me on a big hand but feels committed to the pot. He's getting 2.36-1 which isn't a great price if he puts me on a big hand and he only has me covered by about 4K. Eventually he talks himself into calling with AhJs. In the actual hand he was getting the correct pot odds but if he puts me on a range of hands and is THAT positive that I have a monster, it's a bad call. He's absolutely shocked that I only have one pair and tap dances on my nuts when he hits his flush on the river. I'd rather have him fold and have 14K chips without risking a draw-out but I don't really mind the call as I had a good chance to get up to 20K in chips with 30 minutes left in the 300/600 level. I end up finishing about 72nd out of 250. I felt like I played really poorly all day and drive back to Christy's mom's house to marinate for a while. After about 30 minutes I want to play again so I head back to the Bellagio and enter a $540 satellite to the $5K tourney the next day. I play arguably the worst poker of my life and finish the tourney in 8th place. I'm disgusted so I go to sit with my friends John and Mike in a 4/8 game and raise every hand while drinking double Jack and Gingers. I like doing this while running/playing bad because it seems to shake up my game a bit. I refuse to do it while running good for the same reason. We finished around 2 AM, headed to the Bellagio Cafe and ate a late dinner. I had a great roasted turkey with cranberry sauce, mashed potaoes and green beans and sobered up. I decided not to play poker at all today and just clear my mind. I brought money to buy directly into todays $5K event but I really didn't fell like I was playing my best poker so figured it would be best to chill for a minute. Tomorrow is another off day so I'll probably play online a bit and hit up the $30/60 a bit.
I mentioned that I'm staying at Christy's mom's house. She has a 3-bedroom townhouse a few miles off the strip and it's really nice to be able to come here and relax instead of being relegated to a hotel room. She doesn't have much food here because she works 80 hours a week and always eats at work so I had to go to the grocery store for Boca chicken pattys and Boca smoked sausages. It's always fun standing in line at the grocery store with 2 strippers. It's pretty easy to pick them out, bleached blond hair pulled back in a pony tail, gigantic fake breasts, and a ton of make-up. Someday I'll get tired of seeing strippers in the wild but today is not that day. Today I went to Best Buy and bought Cinderella Man, Dazed and Confused, Euro Trip and The Usher Truth Tour live in Atlanta. I went with John to get Cinderella Man because he had never seen it and I wanted to buy it. I ended up seeing Dazed and Confused in the bargain bin and couldn't pass that up. Then we saw Euro Trip and John claimed it was the funniest movie ever so I bought it even though I've never seen it. Then I picked up the Usher DVD and John made fun of me and said, "let's just go, you aren't going to buy that". Huh? "How do you know? I love Usher!". He replied with, "Stop screwing around, i know you're not going to buy that crap". Oh man, he definitely got my blood boiling so furiously that I almost bought 5 copies. Never tell a Schaefer that he won't/can't do something. Say I won't....SAY I WON'T!
The more I think about it, the more I think I'm going to skip the EPT in Copenhagen. The plan was to check out all the Northern European countries that I've never been to but January/February isn't the best time to go there and I think I'll take a rain check, no pun intended. I think the schedule looks something like this:
December 17 - January 3: Seattle for Holidays
January 3 - January 11: Bahamas for poker
January 11 - February 7: San Diego. A whole month at home!
February 8 - February 11: Deauville to defend my title. I thnk I have to go to this one, no?
After that, I'm not sure. I have almost 2 months in there before the baseball roadtrip so I'll have to think of something cool to fill it with. There's a tournament on a cruise ship in mid-March that I'd really like to qualify for.
It's a good day to be Kal mother-effing Penn. Harold and Kumar will obviously be amazing but I don't know if the Taj Mahal story will work without Van. Only time will tell but one thing is certain: I will see both of these in the theater.
I guess that's it in the Life of me. Sorry it isn't more interesting. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to see more strippers in the wild and get some action photos. At the very least I'll have a good story of how a stripper slapped me at Rite-Aid.
I got to Vegas around 6:30 PM on Tuesday. I just typed "Bellagio" in my Magellan GPS and it took me right to the valet lot. Navigation rules. I went straight to the cardroom and played in 2 $335 satellites for the $3100 tourney on Wednesday. The first one was uneventful as I went out 6th but in the second one there was a fun hand. 3-handed, I'm in the SB with 12K chips, the BB has 3K chips and the Button has 15K. Blinds are 200/400 and the button raises to 900. I look down at black AA and reraise to 2200. I'd been playing pretty aggressive and I want it to look like a resteal. BB fold and the button goes into the tank. He takes his protector off his cards and looks likes he's about to fold. I take the chip off my cards and act like I'm happy to take the pot when he re-caps his cards and re-raises to 5K total. He does a good job convincing me that he's weak so I count my chips and just call. The flop comes K62 rainbow, I check, he insta-pushes and I insta-call. He flips over KK and I'm out in 3rd. 8 people put down $200 extra to increase the stakes so the pot was essentially worth the $3100 entry fee plus $1800 cash. Whoever wins that hand wins the table a huge majority of the time. Oh well. Down $870, I head to the side games and sit in a pretty good $30/60 game. I run good and cash out around 1 AM up $1120. +$250 overall but I still had to buy myself into the $3100 event.
The next day I woke up pretty early and was very excited to play in the tournament. I hadn't played in a while and I was itching to go. Long story short, I played like ass early and folded the best hand in a big pot when I could have almost tripled up. Once the blinds went up to 200/400 I never had more than 15 blinds and played pretty good situational short-stacked poker. I worked my way up to 10K chips at the 300/600 50 ante level when my bustout hand happened. The floor comes over to break our table so everyone is packing up their chips during the hand. I'm in the CO-1 with Tc3c and raise to 1600. The BB calls and we see a flop of 8h6h2s. The BB checks but I smell a check-raise so I check behind. With a bigger stack I may bet but it's so easy for him to check-raise me with crap on that flop and I don't want to bet another 2K chips and have to fold. The turn is the Th and my opponent quickly bets 2200. I have about 8300 left and push pretty quickly. I put him on an 8 because everything so far feels like a missed check-raise. He starts muttering to himself, "you must have flopped a set, I can't believe you slowplayed your set, I don't see how I can fold". Now I'm a little worried because he's putting me on a big hand but feels committed to the pot. He's getting 2.36-1 which isn't a great price if he puts me on a big hand and he only has me covered by about 4K. Eventually he talks himself into calling with AhJs. In the actual hand he was getting the correct pot odds but if he puts me on a range of hands and is THAT positive that I have a monster, it's a bad call. He's absolutely shocked that I only have one pair and tap dances on my nuts when he hits his flush on the river. I'd rather have him fold and have 14K chips without risking a draw-out but I don't really mind the call as I had a good chance to get up to 20K in chips with 30 minutes left in the 300/600 level. I end up finishing about 72nd out of 250. I felt like I played really poorly all day and drive back to Christy's mom's house to marinate for a while. After about 30 minutes I want to play again so I head back to the Bellagio and enter a $540 satellite to the $5K tourney the next day. I play arguably the worst poker of my life and finish the tourney in 8th place. I'm disgusted so I go to sit with my friends John and Mike in a 4/8 game and raise every hand while drinking double Jack and Gingers. I like doing this while running/playing bad because it seems to shake up my game a bit. I refuse to do it while running good for the same reason. We finished around 2 AM, headed to the Bellagio Cafe and ate a late dinner. I had a great roasted turkey with cranberry sauce, mashed potaoes and green beans and sobered up. I decided not to play poker at all today and just clear my mind. I brought money to buy directly into todays $5K event but I really didn't fell like I was playing my best poker so figured it would be best to chill for a minute. Tomorrow is another off day so I'll probably play online a bit and hit up the $30/60 a bit.
I mentioned that I'm staying at Christy's mom's house. She has a 3-bedroom townhouse a few miles off the strip and it's really nice to be able to come here and relax instead of being relegated to a hotel room. She doesn't have much food here because she works 80 hours a week and always eats at work so I had to go to the grocery store for Boca chicken pattys and Boca smoked sausages. It's always fun standing in line at the grocery store with 2 strippers. It's pretty easy to pick them out, bleached blond hair pulled back in a pony tail, gigantic fake breasts, and a ton of make-up. Someday I'll get tired of seeing strippers in the wild but today is not that day. Today I went to Best Buy and bought Cinderella Man, Dazed and Confused, Euro Trip and The Usher Truth Tour live in Atlanta. I went with John to get Cinderella Man because he had never seen it and I wanted to buy it. I ended up seeing Dazed and Confused in the bargain bin and couldn't pass that up. Then we saw Euro Trip and John claimed it was the funniest movie ever so I bought it even though I've never seen it. Then I picked up the Usher DVD and John made fun of me and said, "let's just go, you aren't going to buy that". Huh? "How do you know? I love Usher!". He replied with, "Stop screwing around, i know you're not going to buy that crap". Oh man, he definitely got my blood boiling so furiously that I almost bought 5 copies. Never tell a Schaefer that he won't/can't do something. Say I won't....SAY I WON'T!
The more I think about it, the more I think I'm going to skip the EPT in Copenhagen. The plan was to check out all the Northern European countries that I've never been to but January/February isn't the best time to go there and I think I'll take a rain check, no pun intended. I think the schedule looks something like this:
December 17 - January 3: Seattle for Holidays
January 3 - January 11: Bahamas for poker
January 11 - February 7: San Diego. A whole month at home!
February 8 - February 11: Deauville to defend my title. I thnk I have to go to this one, no?
After that, I'm not sure. I have almost 2 months in there before the baseball roadtrip so I'll have to think of something cool to fill it with. There's a tournament on a cruise ship in mid-March that I'd really like to qualify for.
It's a good day to be Kal mother-effing Penn. Harold and Kumar will obviously be amazing but I don't know if the Taj Mahal story will work without Van. Only time will tell but one thing is certain: I will see both of these in the theater.
I guess that's it in the Life of me. Sorry it isn't more interesting. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to see more strippers in the wild and get some action photos. At the very least I'll have a good story of how a stripper slapped me at Rite-Aid.
Monday, December 05, 2005
How 'bout them Seahawks!?!
That was a fun first half to watch. I love being able to bench your starters at halftime. I know people are going to wnder if the Eagles just suck, and they do, but before the game, everyone felt that the Eagles were going to come out fighting and it was going to be a close game. Well, they came out fighting but Dyson and Tatupu landed two solid uppercuts and the Eagle's glass jaw shattered. Mike Ditka predicted that the Hawks would be shown "how to play physical" by the Eagles and that the Eagles were going to pull the upset. Did you see the wood that the Hawks were laying in the first quarter? You think Iron Mike's comments were a little swayed by his Bear's allegiance? I found a cool blog, written by a Bears fan who knows his stuff. Check it out if you want a better look at the 2005 Bears. Man, it just felt good all the way around to get an easy win tonight. We've got San Fran and Tennessee in our next two games so all signs are pointing to a 12-2 record going into the game against the Colts on Christmas Eve. I shall be there and I can't wait. I found a decent story on ESPN about the Seahawks mediocrity in the past. It's not great but I found it a little entertaining.
I'm not going to make it out to Vegas until tomorrow night. I was considering leaving tonight but Kele's sister and boyfriend wanted to cook us a spaghetti dinner for letting them stay with us and I couldn't turn them down. They cooked it with a homemade sauce from real(not canned) tomatoes, eggplant sandwiches(eggplant as the "bread" with ricotta and mint and the filling) and bomb ass garlic bread. For desert we had mochi icecream and my belly is very happy at the moment. I'm probably going to head to Vegas around noon tomorrow to avoid the traffic here in So Cal. On Wednesday there's a 3K tourney and on Thursday there's a 5K event. I'm buying myself into these ones so my bankroll might take a bit of a hit. I'm also bringing enough money to play in two $1500 satellites for the 15K main event that starts next week. Who knows, maybe I'll be broke by the time I get home for Christmas. I guess I better buy Christmas presents before the trip!
I guess that's all for now. Although I said this last time, the NEXT post will definitely be from Vegas.
I'm not going to make it out to Vegas until tomorrow night. I was considering leaving tonight but Kele's sister and boyfriend wanted to cook us a spaghetti dinner for letting them stay with us and I couldn't turn them down. They cooked it with a homemade sauce from real(not canned) tomatoes, eggplant sandwiches(eggplant as the "bread" with ricotta and mint and the filling) and bomb ass garlic bread. For desert we had mochi icecream and my belly is very happy at the moment. I'm probably going to head to Vegas around noon tomorrow to avoid the traffic here in So Cal. On Wednesday there's a 3K tourney and on Thursday there's a 5K event. I'm buying myself into these ones so my bankroll might take a bit of a hit. I'm also bringing enough money to play in two $1500 satellites for the 15K main event that starts next week. Who knows, maybe I'll be broke by the time I get home for Christmas. I guess I better buy Christmas presents before the trip!
I guess that's all for now. Although I said this last time, the NEXT post will definitely be from Vegas.
A Great Day
Today was a great day on many levels. It wasn't a great day for me pokerwise as I blew a number of tournies but it was great for Seattle sports and for Carl Olson. I'll get back to that after this interlude:
"While 'Separate Ways' is a superb effort by Journey, and can safely claim the title of greatest music video ever made, it doesn't rock even half as hard as 'Don't Stop Believing'. It shocks me that you would even consider writing such blasphemy. I think today will be my last day reading your blog."
Geez. I wish someone other than Justin had posted that because I could dispute their claim but Justin is the biggest Journey fan in the history of the world and I can't brush him off as a "Don't Stop Believin'" bandwagoner. I guess I just got tired of everyone and their mom hyping that song without knowing any other Journey song at all. And when they start up with "Someday, Love will find you...." my hair stands on end and I can't sit still. My fists start punching the air and I lose control. I guess I've just been desensitized to the rockingness of "Don't stop Believin'" and I fail to see the forest through the trees. I'd still rather hear "Separate Ways" right now but again, that's probably just because I hear "Don't Stop Believin'" all the time these days. I'm sorry for the insult Justin, but did you have to go there with the last sentence? Why not "I want to stab you in the heart with a rusty spoon" or "I hope you get in a car wreck and slowly bleed to death". Both would hurt me far less than losing a reader of the blog. Oh well, maybe he'll never read this apology.
Back to what a great day it was. The Seahawks clinched the NFC West when the Rams lost to the Redskins. That's one goal down, the next is a first-round bye and home field throughout. They need a win tomorrow because Carolina and the Bears are lurking. I think a Bears-Hawks NFC Championship at Seahawks Stadium would be awesome. We need to take care of business and although the Eagles are reeling, it's tough to win on the road when you travel across the country and weird things happen somtimes on Monday Night. Shawn Alexander also kills fools under the primetime lights so look for him to put up 200 yards and 3-4 TDs in a Seahawks rout. I love this team.
In basketball, the Sonics won their third game in a row and now sit at 8-8. They're improving and hopefully are done getting blown out by 40. Also, the Huskies broke their losing streak to the Zags and now are 7-0 on the season. Lorenzo Romar is god, that's really all there is to it. One final b-ball note, check out this sick Shawn Kemp montage. The Reign Man sure was special before he gained 150 lbs and cranked out 30 kids.
Finally, Carl won 103K today at the Bellagio, finishing 3rd in the $5,000 event. He probably would have won more if he didn't take a nasty beat to go out: AJ vs AT all-in preflop with his opponent spiking a Ten on the river to knock Carl out. Carl obviously played really well and I wish I could have been there to cheer him on. If nothing else, I could have shouted to the dealer, "NO TEN!!!!" and maybe had him flip over a different river card. Tourneys are such a pain in the ass because the money jumps so much at the end. Carl won 103K for 3rd but 2nd got 207K and the winner got 375K. Basically, no one is really happy except for the winner. Everyone else feels like they could have done more or won more. I'm really happy for Carl and I can look at the 103K from afar and pat him on the back. However, I know Carl isn't satisfied and really had his sights set on the 375K first prize. That desire is what makes poker players great competitiors and that competitive fire is what will make you better in the long run. Congrats, Carl, YOU DA MAN!!!
I think I'm going to drive out to Vegas tomorrow night after the Monday Night Football game. I'm going to head down to the Qualcomm area and watch the game with one of Tomsie's friends from Oak Harbor, Leon. He used to work at the Times and turned Jack Broom onto our story. I've never really kicked it with him for a long period of time but he's a real chill cat. I want to play in the Bellagio on Tuesday so I'll just have to make the drive late tomorrow night. Pauly's grandmother passed away and he's back in New York for a while for the funeral. It's sad everytime something like this happens but she was sick and it seems like dying was a way to ease her pain. It's not really a tragedy like an 18 year-old passing but it still sucks nonetheless. My deepest sympathys go out to Pauly and I hope everything goes well for him back home and we can hang out when he gets a chance to return to Vegas.
Seriosuly, check out these brilliant lyrics. Can I call it "the second best Journey song ever" without alienating any readers? Here's a quick sample of the brilliance:
Someday love will find you
Break those chains that bind you
One night will remind you
How we touched
And went our separate ways
If he ever hurts you
True love won’t desert you
You know I still love you
Though we touched
And went our separate ways
I've never seen the music video but I'm going to hit up Limewire stat and check that bad boy out. My next entry will probably be from Sin City. Until then, may your cards be live and your pots be monsters.
"While 'Separate Ways' is a superb effort by Journey, and can safely claim the title of greatest music video ever made, it doesn't rock even half as hard as 'Don't Stop Believing'. It shocks me that you would even consider writing such blasphemy. I think today will be my last day reading your blog."
Geez. I wish someone other than Justin had posted that because I could dispute their claim but Justin is the biggest Journey fan in the history of the world and I can't brush him off as a "Don't Stop Believin'" bandwagoner. I guess I just got tired of everyone and their mom hyping that song without knowing any other Journey song at all. And when they start up with "Someday, Love will find you...." my hair stands on end and I can't sit still. My fists start punching the air and I lose control. I guess I've just been desensitized to the rockingness of "Don't stop Believin'" and I fail to see the forest through the trees. I'd still rather hear "Separate Ways" right now but again, that's probably just because I hear "Don't Stop Believin'" all the time these days. I'm sorry for the insult Justin, but did you have to go there with the last sentence? Why not "I want to stab you in the heart with a rusty spoon" or "I hope you get in a car wreck and slowly bleed to death". Both would hurt me far less than losing a reader of the blog. Oh well, maybe he'll never read this apology.
Back to what a great day it was. The Seahawks clinched the NFC West when the Rams lost to the Redskins. That's one goal down, the next is a first-round bye and home field throughout. They need a win tomorrow because Carolina and the Bears are lurking. I think a Bears-Hawks NFC Championship at Seahawks Stadium would be awesome. We need to take care of business and although the Eagles are reeling, it's tough to win on the road when you travel across the country and weird things happen somtimes on Monday Night. Shawn Alexander also kills fools under the primetime lights so look for him to put up 200 yards and 3-4 TDs in a Seahawks rout. I love this team.
In basketball, the Sonics won their third game in a row and now sit at 8-8. They're improving and hopefully are done getting blown out by 40. Also, the Huskies broke their losing streak to the Zags and now are 7-0 on the season. Lorenzo Romar is god, that's really all there is to it. One final b-ball note, check out this sick Shawn Kemp montage. The Reign Man sure was special before he gained 150 lbs and cranked out 30 kids.
Finally, Carl won 103K today at the Bellagio, finishing 3rd in the $5,000 event. He probably would have won more if he didn't take a nasty beat to go out: AJ vs AT all-in preflop with his opponent spiking a Ten on the river to knock Carl out. Carl obviously played really well and I wish I could have been there to cheer him on. If nothing else, I could have shouted to the dealer, "NO TEN!!!!" and maybe had him flip over a different river card. Tourneys are such a pain in the ass because the money jumps so much at the end. Carl won 103K for 3rd but 2nd got 207K and the winner got 375K. Basically, no one is really happy except for the winner. Everyone else feels like they could have done more or won more. I'm really happy for Carl and I can look at the 103K from afar and pat him on the back. However, I know Carl isn't satisfied and really had his sights set on the 375K first prize. That desire is what makes poker players great competitiors and that competitive fire is what will make you better in the long run. Congrats, Carl, YOU DA MAN!!!
I think I'm going to drive out to Vegas tomorrow night after the Monday Night Football game. I'm going to head down to the Qualcomm area and watch the game with one of Tomsie's friends from Oak Harbor, Leon. He used to work at the Times and turned Jack Broom onto our story. I've never really kicked it with him for a long period of time but he's a real chill cat. I want to play in the Bellagio on Tuesday so I'll just have to make the drive late tomorrow night. Pauly's grandmother passed away and he's back in New York for a while for the funeral. It's sad everytime something like this happens but she was sick and it seems like dying was a way to ease her pain. It's not really a tragedy like an 18 year-old passing but it still sucks nonetheless. My deepest sympathys go out to Pauly and I hope everything goes well for him back home and we can hang out when he gets a chance to return to Vegas.
Seriosuly, check out these brilliant lyrics. Can I call it "the second best Journey song ever" without alienating any readers? Here's a quick sample of the brilliance:
Someday love will find you
Break those chains that bind you
One night will remind you
How we touched
And went our separate ways
If he ever hurts you
True love won’t desert you
You know I still love you
Though we touched
And went our separate ways
I've never seen the music video but I'm going to hit up Limewire stat and check that bad boy out. My next entry will probably be from Sin City. Until then, may your cards be live and your pots be monsters.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
I Love Football
The Champ is Here! The Champ is Here!
That's Kele's brother, Matt, all-conference Center and great guy. He might come on the baseball road trip with me if he doesn't get a scholarship offer for next year. Tonight we drove up to College of the Canyons and watched his team, the Grossmont Griffins, win the Southern California Community College championship over the Canyon Cougars, the defending state champs and owners of a 26-game winning streak heading into the game and now proud owners of a one-game losing streak. The O-Line looked awesome and I think Matt will definitely get his share of offers for next year. He's one of the team captains and you can see his leadership on the sideline, it makes me really wish I had played football. The play for the State Championship, against the Northern California champs, CCSF, next week in Fresno. I'll probably be in Vegas but everyone root for the Griffins and Mr. Gaughen. It was great to watch a game where the fans actually made it feel like a high school game but the quality of play was definitely on a college level. Here's one more picture of Matty and me. God, that is some beautiful hair.
I told you I knew him!
Tomorrow is a big day for me, pokerwise. I'm entering 5 different $200 tournaments across 5 different sites and competing with some of the best online players for $1K each. The $1K bet is on top of our tournament buy-ins and there's a formula to calculate who has the best showing across the tourneys. I'm probably a bit of a dog against these guys but the competition will be fun and hopefully it will force me to concentrate a bit more. If you want more details on the bet, check out this page.
I'm probably going to head to Vegas on Tuesday to play in some of the Bellagio tournaments and hang out with Pauly. Apparently there's a blogger convention out there and I might get to meet some of the legends of poker blogging. I know, I'm a nerd, but at least I can admit it. Nothing pisses me off like those closet nerds who try really hard to be cool but can't admit to themselves that they're really big nerds....like this guy:
One of those days
I'm just kidding, Cliff knows he's a nerd and fully embraces it. One of his Army buddies sent me that picture and I was trying to find a way to get it into a post. Never get this drunk around Army sickos because they'll not only put a mustache and goatee on your face, they'll go as far as putting on eye-shadow and mascara. God, isn't he pretty? Anyway, Ms. Clifford found out this week that he is going to fly fixed-wing aircrafts for the Army. I was unaware that the Army had any fixed-wing pilots, I thought they were all Air Force and the Army pilots flew helicopters, but apparently about 1% of Army pilots get chosen to fly fixed-wings. Usually they're grizzled veterans with 10,000 flight hours but for some reason the #1 graduate of Cliff's class got to train with fixed-wings and as you already know, he dominated. He and his whopping 130 flight hours start training in early January. He's going to be flying VIPs around and basically has one of the softest jobs in the entire Army. Way to go, Cliff, no dodging missles for you! The coolest part is that he has a great chance of being stationed at Fort Lewis so we're going to look at condos when we're up in Seattle for Christmas. He'll live with me somewhere downtown and crash with some of his friends down at Fort Lewis when he has early days/late nights. It should be really good for me to live with him and I hope I don't drag him into the gutter. Let's hope I get all cut up and acquire the ridiculous amounts of game that he has. Congrats, Cliff and I'm looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks.
Enough of the lovefest, I need to get to bed so that I'll be well rested for the big tournies tomorrow. Hopefully I'l have something good to report. If you're bored in the afternoon, hop online and watch me play for a bit. Hit me up on MSN: bkschaefer@htmail.com, or AOL: BrandonKoga, if you want to know what sites I'm on and what my usernames are. Or, you could read through that link up above about the $1K bet.
P.S. This is really random but you know how everyone loves "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey? Well, I'm here to tell you that the best Journey song is "Separate Ways" and it isn't even close. Download that bad boy and crank up the volume as soon as you can. It's a spiritual experience.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Lazy Days
Kianna
Kianna went home today and it was a lot of fun having her around. You can tell from this picture how much she loves me. Isn't that a cute middle finger? Kele and Danielle both have been working during the day so Kianna and I got to spend a lot of quality time together. I took her to see Yours, Mine and Ours and she thought it was really good. I'm sure none of you were planning on seeing this ridiculous crap but in case you were: DON'T! We were the only ones in the theater so we could laugh and talk as loud as we wanted so that was cool. I also bought her a Bratz Doll named Sasha. Bratz dolls are one of the most ridiculous things that I'm ever seen but I guess they're really popular. I bought her the "Step Out" version of Sasha and on the back it says, "My name's Sasha, but my friends call be Bugga Boo because I'm down with the hip-hop thang." I couldn't make that up. Kele's sister, Sara, and her boyfriend, Ryan, flew in last night and they'll be hanging out with us for a few days. Kele's brother Matt drove them up here last night so we had a nice little Gaughen family reunion of sorts in our little apartment. Tomorrow we're all going up north to see Matt play in the Southern California football championship and if they win that one they play for the state championship next week. Gooooo Matt's JuCo(I don't know the name). Matt plays center and he's definitely a beast. He's thinking about coming on the roadtrip with me if he doesn't get a scholarship to somewhere that he likes. He only has one scholarship offer so far and it's to some small I-AA school in Arkansas and he doesn't think that he wants to go there. Anyway, here's a nice picture of Kele before I talk about my schedule:
Kele
Morgan, aka Gorilla, called me today and asked if I wanted him to buy me playoff tickets for the Seahawks. I totally forgot about it but it looks like I'll have to miss the trip to Copenhagen if the Seahawks make it to the NFC Championship game. Copenhagen ends on the 22nd, the exact date of the game. Even if it isn't at home I think I want to try to go to that bad boy. And of course the Super Bowl is on February 6th so I want to keep that date open just in case. I don't want to jinx the Hawks by planning around those dates but man, I want to figure some stuff out. I guess I'll just wait to buy airfare until after everything has been sorted out. I may have to pay a little more but at least I won't risk missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I haven't been playing too much poker since Kianna's been here and whatnot so I might just head to Vegas on Monday, or Sunday after the big online poker tournies. I was planning on going a week later but I'd like to hang with Carl and play in some of the earlier events at the Bellagio. We'll see if I'm fired up after the Sunday tournies or if I never want to play poker again. Later, alligators.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
More Ridiculous Airport Stories
Amazingly something happened on the flight home Monday night that had never happened to me before. Renee drove me to the airport and I was there about an hour early. I guess most bad things happen when I give myself plenty of time to catch the flight. Things only go smoothly when I show up 15 minutes before takeoff. Anyway, I'm at my gate and right around the time we're supposed to board the plane, they announce that the rear toilet seat is cracked and they need to replace it so boarding will be delayed for 30 minutes. We all groan and go back to watching the football game. 30 minutes later they announce tha the crew is still dismantling the toilet and that we're going to be delayed another 30 minutes. However, they offer to give us a $6 voucher to use at the airport if we want. Huh? Do you know who I am? I wipe my rear end with $20 bills! So I take the voucher and try to buy a pack of gum and get them to give me the change but they won't go for it. I reluctantly get 2 bottles of water and a Snapple for $6.09 and hand over nine cents. They always manage to get you somehow. Anyway, I go back to the gate, drink my Snapple and finally, about an hour later, they announce that they were unable to replace the toilet seat and we'd have to fly with the rear toilet out of order. So we end up waiting an hour-and-a-half for absolutely nothing to get done. God bless Alaska Air. I get into San Diego around 1 AM instead of 11:30 at night and my roommate isn't the happiest camper in the world. My irresponsibility isn't my fault, it's a natural reaction to life screwing me over whenever I'm on time and trying to be responsible.
Expensive Parking
That's proof that irresponsibility pays. A few years ago, Renee, Danny, Cliff and I planned a trip down to San Francisco for Memorial Day weekend. Of course Renee and I got to the airport early but Cliff and Danny were nowhere to be found. I called Cliff's phone about 10 times before he answered, clearly getting woken up by the phone call and clearly hungover like nobody's business. It was about 40 minutes before the plane was supposed to take off and I figured that there was no way they'd make it. Well, they ended up throwing some clothes in a bag and driving like maniacs to the airport, hitting an express check-in kiosk, and making it on the plane, about 30 minutes after waking up. They parked the car in overnight parking, knowing that it was $20/day and knowing that they didn't have enough money to pay the ticket. When we returned 4 days later, we ran the ticket through, just in case, and indeed the ticket was for $80. Instead of paying we piled in Danny's Audi and drove to the exit. Danny chose a lane where a Ford Explorer was paying for his parking and nosed up to his bumper. Danny was on this guy's rear the whole time through the gate and as soon as he saw daylight, Danny punched it around the guy and we were home free. Danny kept the ticket and liked to check how much he owed every time he went to the airport. The ticket doesn't register anymore but the above was one of the last times that it did. It's kinda hard to pick up but the Lenthg of Stay is 45 Weeks, 15 hours and 57 minutes. Good times.
This morning I woke up around 11:30 and played a Double Shootout for the trip to the Bahamas. I finished 76th out of 78 entrants so things could have gone a little better there. Around 2PM, Kele's daughter Kianna came down from Ontario, CA and she'll be here until Friday. She's 10 years old and has a ton of energy. We played some Halo 2 and rough-housed a bit until Kele got home from work. At around 6PM we went to the local pizza place, called That Pizza Place, for dinner and video games. After dinner we went to the mall and looked at puppies. Good lord, puppies are expensive. They have a French Bulldog there for 3 G's. THREE LARGE. Insanity. We had a lot of fun at the pet store with Kele and Danielle trying to persuade me to buy them a weiner dog for Christmas. That one was only $1400 but I don't think I'll be making that wish come true any time soon. Finally, we headed to the movie theater to see Harry Potter 4. I liked it a lot the second time and being with Kianna made me realize how scary some of the scenes are in that flick. It's a pretty long film and afterwards we came home and just wound down a bit. I found out that Carl won a few more satellites into big events and I felt like killing him again. I seriously need to qualify for this PokerStars Bahamas tournament. I've decided that I'm going to play in it regardless of qualifying but I'd like to be able to save 8K.
I've also decided to play the EPT Copenhagen and Deauville events regardless of my qualifying ability. Justin qualified for Copenhagen already and if that fish is going to be in the field, I need to be there to take advantage of the dead money. So basically my schedule coming up is as follows:
December 10-17: Bellagio for a WPT event
December 17-January 3: Seattle for the holidays
January 3-11: Bahamas for the PokerStars Carribean Adventure
January 11-18: San Diego
January 19-22: Copenhagen for an EPT event
January 23-February 7: San Diego
February 8-11: Deauville for the EPT French Open
I'm considering staying in Europe for those two weeks between Copenhagen and Deauville to check out London and Ireland. I heard they're beautiful in January and February. I'd also like to spend more time in Copenhagen with my cousin, Walden, who is going to school there right now. Meh, I guess you can scratch San Diego Jan 23-Feb 7 and write in Europe. I guess I could just edit it now before I publish this blog but I've already typed this paragraph so screw it!
I hope I get to play a few tournaments tomorrow but it's going to be tough with Kianna bouncing off the walls. Here are a few random pictures from my time in Seattle. Enjoy.
Adorable
Pops
Typical Davis
Expensive Parking
That's proof that irresponsibility pays. A few years ago, Renee, Danny, Cliff and I planned a trip down to San Francisco for Memorial Day weekend. Of course Renee and I got to the airport early but Cliff and Danny were nowhere to be found. I called Cliff's phone about 10 times before he answered, clearly getting woken up by the phone call and clearly hungover like nobody's business. It was about 40 minutes before the plane was supposed to take off and I figured that there was no way they'd make it. Well, they ended up throwing some clothes in a bag and driving like maniacs to the airport, hitting an express check-in kiosk, and making it on the plane, about 30 minutes after waking up. They parked the car in overnight parking, knowing that it was $20/day and knowing that they didn't have enough money to pay the ticket. When we returned 4 days later, we ran the ticket through, just in case, and indeed the ticket was for $80. Instead of paying we piled in Danny's Audi and drove to the exit. Danny chose a lane where a Ford Explorer was paying for his parking and nosed up to his bumper. Danny was on this guy's rear the whole time through the gate and as soon as he saw daylight, Danny punched it around the guy and we were home free. Danny kept the ticket and liked to check how much he owed every time he went to the airport. The ticket doesn't register anymore but the above was one of the last times that it did. It's kinda hard to pick up but the Lenthg of Stay is 45 Weeks, 15 hours and 57 minutes. Good times.
This morning I woke up around 11:30 and played a Double Shootout for the trip to the Bahamas. I finished 76th out of 78 entrants so things could have gone a little better there. Around 2PM, Kele's daughter Kianna came down from Ontario, CA and she'll be here until Friday. She's 10 years old and has a ton of energy. We played some Halo 2 and rough-housed a bit until Kele got home from work. At around 6PM we went to the local pizza place, called That Pizza Place, for dinner and video games. After dinner we went to the mall and looked at puppies. Good lord, puppies are expensive. They have a French Bulldog there for 3 G's. THREE LARGE. Insanity. We had a lot of fun at the pet store with Kele and Danielle trying to persuade me to buy them a weiner dog for Christmas. That one was only $1400 but I don't think I'll be making that wish come true any time soon. Finally, we headed to the movie theater to see Harry Potter 4. I liked it a lot the second time and being with Kianna made me realize how scary some of the scenes are in that flick. It's a pretty long film and afterwards we came home and just wound down a bit. I found out that Carl won a few more satellites into big events and I felt like killing him again. I seriously need to qualify for this PokerStars Bahamas tournament. I've decided that I'm going to play in it regardless of qualifying but I'd like to be able to save 8K.
I've also decided to play the EPT Copenhagen and Deauville events regardless of my qualifying ability. Justin qualified for Copenhagen already and if that fish is going to be in the field, I need to be there to take advantage of the dead money. So basically my schedule coming up is as follows:
December 10-17: Bellagio for a WPT event
December 17-January 3: Seattle for the holidays
January 3-11: Bahamas for the PokerStars Carribean Adventure
January 11-18: San Diego
January 19-22: Copenhagen for an EPT event
January 23-February 7: San Diego
February 8-11: Deauville for the EPT French Open
I'm considering staying in Europe for those two weeks between Copenhagen and Deauville to check out London and Ireland. I heard they're beautiful in January and February. I'd also like to spend more time in Copenhagen with my cousin, Walden, who is going to school there right now. Meh, I guess you can scratch San Diego Jan 23-Feb 7 and write in Europe. I guess I could just edit it now before I publish this blog but I've already typed this paragraph so screw it!
I hope I get to play a few tournaments tomorrow but it's going to be tough with Kianna bouncing off the walls. Here are a few random pictures from my time in Seattle. Enjoy.
Adorable
Pops
Typical Davis
Monday, November 28, 2005
Seattle: The Greatest City in the World
Man, every time I come up here to visit Seattle makes me fall in love with her all over again. The city is beautiful and the people are great. I really miss living up here and I'm leaning toward moving back up for school next year. Living in Barcelona would be great, too, and I'm not ruling that out yet but I always have so much fun up here and I don't know if I can stay away for 2 years.
On Friday night, Cliff and I watched the entire first season of Entourage. It's really good and I recommend it strongly to anyone who hasn't seen it. Sadly, there are only 8 half-hour episodes but they're extremely entertaining. I'm going to pick up Season 2 as soon as I can. This 4-hour Entourage marathon was easy as hell compared to the 24 marathons that I've attempted. One night I watched 13 straight hours of 24 at Dookie's house. This is still my record for consecutive hours watching a DVD boxed set. I'm sure there are many of you who can beat that and I'm that I'll eclipse my record soon.
Saturday morning we went to see Noah again. It's absolutely incredible how smart and active he is. I'm very impressed with his patience and overwhelming desire to learn. He loves reading and loves imitating adults. They love sports in that house and Julie's husband is a high school coach so let's hope Noah grows up to be a jock and a nerd at the same time. I can't wait to see him next month when I come up for Christmas.
After visiting Noah, we drove back across the mountains. I decided to take the route through Vantage since my dad and Cliff had never gone that way and I had my new GPS that I wanted to experiment with. The GPS worked fine but when we pulled into Vantage I tried using the "Points of Interest" feature where you ask for the closest gas station, restaurant, etc. and it tells you where the closest one is and how to get there. Well, there was a gas station 100 feet down the road but the closest one that the GPS found was up the hill, about 14 miles away, in George, WA. I don't know why the two gas stations in Vantage didn't register in the POI's but I wonder if they would be in the more expensive version of the GPS. I'm going to use it a bit more down in Cali this week and if it keeps missing stuff I'm probably going to have to upgrade. We'll see.
Saturday night I went out to Fremont with Greenie and Davis to meet Dave, Tasha and a lot of his Federal Way crew. We started at Norm's, a really chill bar that sells Pabst 40s in brown paper bags. I like Norm's more than most places because it's not too pretentious. Greenie's girlfriend, Kitty came over with a few of her girlfriends who I knew from college days at UW and it was nice to catch up with them. One of the girls, Caroline, mentioned that she could take a double shot of 151 with no chaser and that she used to bet guys $20 who didn't believe that she could accomplish the feat. Well, I didn't believe her either so I whipped out $20 and said, "Let's see it!" She went to the bar to order the double shot and I almost vomited as they filled a lowball glass with the nasty stuff. I think it was closer to a triple shot than a double shot and I almost vomited again as Caroline calmly sipped it all down. 151 easily the harshest liquor in the world next to Everclear and she drank it like a cup of orange juice. I happily gave her the $20 and asked how much the shot cost because I wanted to pay for that too. When she leaned in and told me, "$10", I almost vomited for the third time as the 151 vapors escaped from her mouth and invaded my nostrils. Very impressive and well worth $20. Greenie and I had two 40s each and headed to the Ballroom with Kitty and her friends. I don't like the Ballroom very much because it is pretentious and everyone there seems to think that they're the coolest person in the bar. Greeine and I hit the dance floor after downing a few Jager Bombs and quickly showed everyone who the best dancers in the house were. Maybe not, but we had a lot of fun and it's always great to dance with hot girls. Some of the girls are married or engaged or very deep in a relationship but those girls are the mst fun to dance with since you aren't worried about trying to game them up or anything. I had one more gin and tonic and finished the night with a bottle of beer. We were all pretty good and drunk and I ended up crashing at Greenie's for the night.
In the morning, I felt like regurgitated dog crap. It's not a good idea to drink 40s followed by Jager bombs followed by gin and tonic followed my more Jager bombs followed by beer. It was Seahawks gameday so I had to get my shit together and I took Kitty and Greenie out to breakfast. We got to the place right when it opened, at 8 AM and were the only patrons of the restaurant at that early hour. I mentioned that I had to drop a deuce and Greenie said that he had to as well. I hit the bathroom first and unloaded a really nasty beer deuce. There was only one stall at the place so I left the toilet unflushed, washed my hands and told Greenie that he could go for it now. He went in the bathroom then came running out instantly, etremely pissed, ad yelled, "GET BACK IN THERE AND FLUSH THAT, NOW!" I was on the ground laughing and picked myself up in order to fluch the toilet for him. Poor Kitty, the rest of breakfast was kind of like that, me making vulgar jokes, Greenie laughing, and Kitty rolling her eyes.
I got home around 9 AM and talked to Sean, an original SuperFan, and he said he could come pick me up in 20 minutes. Renee said that she needed to get ready but she could drive me down in 30 minutes. I told Renee that there was no way she could get ready in 30 minutes and I told Sean to come pick me up. She was pissed but I couldnt risk getting to the tailgate party too late. I took a quick shower, put on my Seahawk's gear and took off for the game. We got down there later than usual, a little after 10 AM but found a good spot in Tailgater's Heaven and got the party started. Morgan, a friend of Cliff's from high school, always brings a keg and we love to mooch off of his beer. We bring the food and they get to eat some of what we barbeque. It's a symbiotic relationship that works well. Kenny and Curtis' brother, Boog, decided to go beer-for-beer and see who could act the least drunk. Well, by gametime they both lost as Ken could barely keep his eyes open and ended up passing out for a quarter or so. Renee finally showed up with Torrie at 11:45, absolutely disgraceful. They got about an hour of tailgating in before we had to head to our seats. Davis and I played a game of beerpong, or Beirut for you East Coasters, and lost by one cup. There were a number of factors that I believe led to our loss, the number one factor being the stiff wind in our face. I'm used to putting a nice arch on my balls but the wind kept knocking them down short of the cups. I had to switch to a line drive technique and I did it a little too late. We were behind for a while but once I got used to the line drive we came back and had about 15-20 shots at the final cup with a ton of shots rimming out. After we lost I went to look at the cup and there was about 1/3 of the beer in there that there should have been, a factor that may have led to some rim-outs. Not that I'm bitter or a bad loser or anything. Morgan and McDuff went on to crush three other opponents, by 5 or 6 cups each, using the wind at their back to their advantage. Weaksauce, if you ask me. We'll get 'em next time.
I can't believe I just wrote that much about a game of beerpong. I guess you can tell how much I love the game. The actual football game was as crazy as you'll ever see. The crowd was really into it and I think we helped influence the game a lot. The Giants had 16 penalties, 11 of which were false starts. That's absolutely insane. The Giants are a real good team and Eli Manning showed me a lot yesterday. He's going to be a legit superstar in this league. The Giant's defense is also really, really sick and I think they'll be tough in the playoffs. 99% of the time we lose this game but this is the 1% of the time where the kicker misses 3 game-winning field goals and the team that dominates, loses. I feel bad for the Giant's fans out there because I've been on the other side so many times but I have to say, winning feels good. We're 9-2 and have a pretty easy schedule left so I think there's a good chance we get home field thoughout and if the crowd is as good in the playoffs as they were on Sunday, I have a good feeling about where this team is going.
After the game Davis and I met Renee, Torrie and Torrie's sister, Evin, at Peso's in Queen Anne. I had the Habanero Enciladas and they were extremely spicy. I could only eat about 1.25 out of 2 and gave the rest to Davis. After dinner we headed home and I hit the hay, hard. It was another tiring weekend and I had a great time. I really do miss it up here. Luckily, I'll be back in a few weeks. The children can come out of hiding now, I'm headed back to Cali!
On Friday night, Cliff and I watched the entire first season of Entourage. It's really good and I recommend it strongly to anyone who hasn't seen it. Sadly, there are only 8 half-hour episodes but they're extremely entertaining. I'm going to pick up Season 2 as soon as I can. This 4-hour Entourage marathon was easy as hell compared to the 24 marathons that I've attempted. One night I watched 13 straight hours of 24 at Dookie's house. This is still my record for consecutive hours watching a DVD boxed set. I'm sure there are many of you who can beat that and I'm that I'll eclipse my record soon.
Saturday morning we went to see Noah again. It's absolutely incredible how smart and active he is. I'm very impressed with his patience and overwhelming desire to learn. He loves reading and loves imitating adults. They love sports in that house and Julie's husband is a high school coach so let's hope Noah grows up to be a jock and a nerd at the same time. I can't wait to see him next month when I come up for Christmas.
After visiting Noah, we drove back across the mountains. I decided to take the route through Vantage since my dad and Cliff had never gone that way and I had my new GPS that I wanted to experiment with. The GPS worked fine but when we pulled into Vantage I tried using the "Points of Interest" feature where you ask for the closest gas station, restaurant, etc. and it tells you where the closest one is and how to get there. Well, there was a gas station 100 feet down the road but the closest one that the GPS found was up the hill, about 14 miles away, in George, WA. I don't know why the two gas stations in Vantage didn't register in the POI's but I wonder if they would be in the more expensive version of the GPS. I'm going to use it a bit more down in Cali this week and if it keeps missing stuff I'm probably going to have to upgrade. We'll see.
Saturday night I went out to Fremont with Greenie and Davis to meet Dave, Tasha and a lot of his Federal Way crew. We started at Norm's, a really chill bar that sells Pabst 40s in brown paper bags. I like Norm's more than most places because it's not too pretentious. Greenie's girlfriend, Kitty came over with a few of her girlfriends who I knew from college days at UW and it was nice to catch up with them. One of the girls, Caroline, mentioned that she could take a double shot of 151 with no chaser and that she used to bet guys $20 who didn't believe that she could accomplish the feat. Well, I didn't believe her either so I whipped out $20 and said, "Let's see it!" She went to the bar to order the double shot and I almost vomited as they filled a lowball glass with the nasty stuff. I think it was closer to a triple shot than a double shot and I almost vomited again as Caroline calmly sipped it all down. 151 easily the harshest liquor in the world next to Everclear and she drank it like a cup of orange juice. I happily gave her the $20 and asked how much the shot cost because I wanted to pay for that too. When she leaned in and told me, "$10", I almost vomited for the third time as the 151 vapors escaped from her mouth and invaded my nostrils. Very impressive and well worth $20. Greenie and I had two 40s each and headed to the Ballroom with Kitty and her friends. I don't like the Ballroom very much because it is pretentious and everyone there seems to think that they're the coolest person in the bar. Greeine and I hit the dance floor after downing a few Jager Bombs and quickly showed everyone who the best dancers in the house were. Maybe not, but we had a lot of fun and it's always great to dance with hot girls. Some of the girls are married or engaged or very deep in a relationship but those girls are the mst fun to dance with since you aren't worried about trying to game them up or anything. I had one more gin and tonic and finished the night with a bottle of beer. We were all pretty good and drunk and I ended up crashing at Greenie's for the night.
In the morning, I felt like regurgitated dog crap. It's not a good idea to drink 40s followed by Jager bombs followed by gin and tonic followed my more Jager bombs followed by beer. It was Seahawks gameday so I had to get my shit together and I took Kitty and Greenie out to breakfast. We got to the place right when it opened, at 8 AM and were the only patrons of the restaurant at that early hour. I mentioned that I had to drop a deuce and Greenie said that he had to as well. I hit the bathroom first and unloaded a really nasty beer deuce. There was only one stall at the place so I left the toilet unflushed, washed my hands and told Greenie that he could go for it now. He went in the bathroom then came running out instantly, etremely pissed, ad yelled, "GET BACK IN THERE AND FLUSH THAT, NOW!" I was on the ground laughing and picked myself up in order to fluch the toilet for him. Poor Kitty, the rest of breakfast was kind of like that, me making vulgar jokes, Greenie laughing, and Kitty rolling her eyes.
I got home around 9 AM and talked to Sean, an original SuperFan, and he said he could come pick me up in 20 minutes. Renee said that she needed to get ready but she could drive me down in 30 minutes. I told Renee that there was no way she could get ready in 30 minutes and I told Sean to come pick me up. She was pissed but I couldnt risk getting to the tailgate party too late. I took a quick shower, put on my Seahawk's gear and took off for the game. We got down there later than usual, a little after 10 AM but found a good spot in Tailgater's Heaven and got the party started. Morgan, a friend of Cliff's from high school, always brings a keg and we love to mooch off of his beer. We bring the food and they get to eat some of what we barbeque. It's a symbiotic relationship that works well. Kenny and Curtis' brother, Boog, decided to go beer-for-beer and see who could act the least drunk. Well, by gametime they both lost as Ken could barely keep his eyes open and ended up passing out for a quarter or so. Renee finally showed up with Torrie at 11:45, absolutely disgraceful. They got about an hour of tailgating in before we had to head to our seats. Davis and I played a game of beerpong, or Beirut for you East Coasters, and lost by one cup. There were a number of factors that I believe led to our loss, the number one factor being the stiff wind in our face. I'm used to putting a nice arch on my balls but the wind kept knocking them down short of the cups. I had to switch to a line drive technique and I did it a little too late. We were behind for a while but once I got used to the line drive we came back and had about 15-20 shots at the final cup with a ton of shots rimming out. After we lost I went to look at the cup and there was about 1/3 of the beer in there that there should have been, a factor that may have led to some rim-outs. Not that I'm bitter or a bad loser or anything. Morgan and McDuff went on to crush three other opponents, by 5 or 6 cups each, using the wind at their back to their advantage. Weaksauce, if you ask me. We'll get 'em next time.
I can't believe I just wrote that much about a game of beerpong. I guess you can tell how much I love the game. The actual football game was as crazy as you'll ever see. The crowd was really into it and I think we helped influence the game a lot. The Giants had 16 penalties, 11 of which were false starts. That's absolutely insane. The Giants are a real good team and Eli Manning showed me a lot yesterday. He's going to be a legit superstar in this league. The Giant's defense is also really, really sick and I think they'll be tough in the playoffs. 99% of the time we lose this game but this is the 1% of the time where the kicker misses 3 game-winning field goals and the team that dominates, loses. I feel bad for the Giant's fans out there because I've been on the other side so many times but I have to say, winning feels good. We're 9-2 and have a pretty easy schedule left so I think there's a good chance we get home field thoughout and if the crowd is as good in the playoffs as they were on Sunday, I have a good feeling about where this team is going.
After the game Davis and I met Renee, Torrie and Torrie's sister, Evin, at Peso's in Queen Anne. I had the Habanero Enciladas and they were extremely spicy. I could only eat about 1.25 out of 2 and gave the rest to Davis. After dinner we headed home and I hit the hay, hard. It was another tiring weekend and I had a great time. I really do miss it up here. Luckily, I'll be back in a few weeks. The children can come out of hiding now, I'm headed back to Cali!
Friday, November 25, 2005
Good Times
I hope that y'all had a great Thanksgiving. I've had a lot of fun hanging out with my brother and pops the past few days. I really miss my mom during this time of year but she's doing what she loves and traveling like I could never dream.
We saw Noah for 2 hours this morning and it was absolutely incredible. I hadn't seen him for almost a year and he's really grown since then. He was running around and knows quite a few words and can recognize pictures of animals and imitate the noises that they make. He's only a year-and-a-half but he seems very smart and active for his age. Cliff saw him about 2 months ago and said that almost everythibg that Noah was doing was new. It's absolutely incredible how fast babies grow.
We went to Costco this afternoon and I picked up the Magellan 360. It was the only RoadMate GPS that they had and I decided to try it out. Costco's return policy is really great and I'll return it if I don't like it. So far it seems the same as the 760 that my friend Nat had. I'm going to try to get ahold of him tomorrow and see what the exact differences are. I guess I could do the research myself but laziness reigns supreme. I bought Cliff a handheld GPS to use with the Army so that's one Christmas present out of the way. Tomorrow we're hanging out with Noah for 2 more hours and then heading back over the mountains. Sunday the Seahawks end Eli Mannings season. Muahahahahaha.
This is officially the longest blog entry every written on a Treo. I apologize for any typos.
We saw Noah for 2 hours this morning and it was absolutely incredible. I hadn't seen him for almost a year and he's really grown since then. He was running around and knows quite a few words and can recognize pictures of animals and imitate the noises that they make. He's only a year-and-a-half but he seems very smart and active for his age. Cliff saw him about 2 months ago and said that almost everythibg that Noah was doing was new. It's absolutely incredible how fast babies grow.
We went to Costco this afternoon and I picked up the Magellan 360. It was the only RoadMate GPS that they had and I decided to try it out. Costco's return policy is really great and I'll return it if I don't like it. So far it seems the same as the 760 that my friend Nat had. I'm going to try to get ahold of him tomorrow and see what the exact differences are. I guess I could do the research myself but laziness reigns supreme. I bought Cliff a handheld GPS to use with the Army so that's one Christmas present out of the way. Tomorrow we're hanging out with Noah for 2 more hours and then heading back over the mountains. Sunday the Seahawks end Eli Mannings season. Muahahahahaha.
This is officially the longest blog entry every written on a Treo. I apologize for any typos.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Thanksgiving Quickie
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! My dad and brother flew into Seattle last night and we're heading down to my grandma and grandpa's place today. It's really great to see my family and I hope everyone out there is as lucky as I am.
I have one funny story from last night. I was in the terminal, waiting for my dad to come down the escalator and there was a young, college-age girl, talking on her cell phone next to me. It seemed like she was coming home from college and I overheard her talking to her roommate back home. Her converstaion went like this:
"Yeah, it kinda sucks, my mom got arrested on the way to the airport. Yeah, she was driving under the influence and when I got off the plane I had a message on my cell phone from the police department saying that she was in jail. Now my cousin is coming to pick me up but I think he may have been drinking, too."
Ah, there's no time like the holidays. Happy Thanksgiving.
I have one funny story from last night. I was in the terminal, waiting for my dad to come down the escalator and there was a young, college-age girl, talking on her cell phone next to me. It seemed like she was coming home from college and I overheard her talking to her roommate back home. Her converstaion went like this:
"Yeah, it kinda sucks, my mom got arrested on the way to the airport. Yeah, she was driving under the influence and when I got off the plane I had a message on my cell phone from the police department saying that she was in jail. Now my cousin is coming to pick me up but I think he may have been drinking, too."
Ah, there's no time like the holidays. Happy Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Back to Reality
The real world sucks. After the crazy weekend, Monday reminded me that most of my friends have these things called "jobs" and "responsibilities". It's increasingly difficult to hang out whenever and wherever and it's hard for me to take because I'm living in fantasy land.
Last night Dookie and I went to Kangaroo and Kiwi for $0.25 wings. They were delicious as usual and we ended up eating 50 of them total. We had a good time playing darts and watching Monday Night Football but it was just the two of us. Everyone else bailed and kept dropping words like "errands" and "working late". What the hell? BTW, I won both games of darts if you were wondering. After dinner, Dave dropped me off and headed home to see his wife. He's hung out a ton over the past week and I really appreciate the sacrifices he's made.
At 9, I met Greenie and Kitty at Finn MacCool's for trivia night. Again, I had a good time caching up with them but it felt weird that no one else could make it because they were "tired" or "downloading porn". I hate the real world. I love trivia but it's run by a gay drama guy who always has categories like "Seattle Theater" and "Broadway Showtunes". He's a funny guy but I really struggle with his trivia. Give me "Seahawk's Football" and "Jenna Jameson movies" all day long.
Tonight I'm planning on seeing a few more friends but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up just being me and my cat. I almost forgot to thank the people who have posted comments on the blog. I've said this before but without comments, I'm just a crazy man babbling to myself. With comments, I'm a crazy man babbling to others. There's a big difference.
Last night Dookie and I went to Kangaroo and Kiwi for $0.25 wings. They were delicious as usual and we ended up eating 50 of them total. We had a good time playing darts and watching Monday Night Football but it was just the two of us. Everyone else bailed and kept dropping words like "errands" and "working late". What the hell? BTW, I won both games of darts if you were wondering. After dinner, Dave dropped me off and headed home to see his wife. He's hung out a ton over the past week and I really appreciate the sacrifices he's made.
At 9, I met Greenie and Kitty at Finn MacCool's for trivia night. Again, I had a good time caching up with them but it felt weird that no one else could make it because they were "tired" or "downloading porn". I hate the real world. I love trivia but it's run by a gay drama guy who always has categories like "Seattle Theater" and "Broadway Showtunes". He's a funny guy but I really struggle with his trivia. Give me "Seahawk's Football" and "Jenna Jameson movies" all day long.
Tonight I'm planning on seeing a few more friends but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up just being me and my cat. I almost forgot to thank the people who have posted comments on the blog. I've said this before but without comments, I'm just a crazy man babbling to myself. With comments, I'm a crazy man babbling to others. There's a big difference.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Rough Weekend
It's been a tough couple of days since I last posted. Friday night was Founder's Day and all the fratboys had a lot of fun. I used to work downtown at the Fairmont Hotel and they still let me valet park there for free when I hang out in that area. Founder's Day was held at a place called The College Club, about 2 blocks from the old hotel so it worked out perfectly. They brought up the big EPT wins at dinner and I got to stand up and smile for everyone. Dinner was alright but the meat was a little too fatty. After dinner we headed to the fraternity house and tiook a couple hits off the beer bong. Two of the younger kids persuaded me to head to the casino with them and we went up north for some drunken $3/6. The guys in my class were pissed that I left the house but I have a hard time turning down some good drunken low-limit poker. I raised every single hand and no one accused me of colluding because I was the only one doing it. I really enjoy hammering pots preflop and trying to play good poker postflop. I think it's a decent exercise and people rarely adjust optimally to my style. They think I'm betting the whole way with crap. Usually, when I bet the river, I can beat Q-high but they keep calling down hoping that I have nothing. There's no better feeling than value-betting 4th pair and just knowing it's good. I tipped like a maniac, probably over $100 all told and still pulled a $120 profit. I bought in for 6 racks and had a lot of fun splashing around. I think it's harder to play with Carl there 3-betting me every hand but I also think it's more fun that way. It's just too easy to take advantage of the mopes. We ended up taking a cab home from the casino around 2:30 AM and I got to bed, trying to recharge my body for the Apple Cup on Saturday.
Dave, Tasha, Jimmy and a girl that we all just met named Amanda, came to pick me up Saturday morning around 10 AM. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly bright-eyed or bushy-tailed. I threw some water on my face, put on my Husky jersey and tried in vain to control the Jafro(Japanese Afro). We needed three more tickets to the game and headed to the fraternity to see if anyone had any extras. We came up empty in our quest for free tickets but convinced three undergrads to go to the ticket office with us and get cheaper tickets since the game wasn't even sold out. Swass met us at the fraternity house and we split up into groups of three to find parking with our two cars. Swass, Amanda and I found a too-good-to-be-true spot a few blocks away from the stadium. It was 2-hour parking and we decided to just come back every 2 hours and move the car. The tailgate that we joined was off the hook. There was a full Thanksgiving Feast, with 8 deep fried turkeys, stuffing, mashed potatos, gravy, green beans and apple crisp. Throw in 3 coolers of beer and about 10 half-gallons of the hard stuff and you get 30-40 drunk and loud Huskies. Just before kickoff Swass and I walked back to the car to move it and he already had a ticket. We looked at the sign a little closer and it was two-hour parking EXCEPT for Saturday home football games. On those days it's NO PARKING. Swass looked at the $44 parking ticket and said, "well, there's no point in moving the car now!" I felt bad so I gave him $30 to help pay the ticket and we headed back to drink more before heading into the game.
The game was brutal. The Huskies suck and the Cougs aren't much better. We lost by 4 points and it was pretty dang depressing. I sobered up while Swass left at halftime and was in no shape to drive by the time we met him in the parking lot. I was now the DD and we headed to a bar on the Ave called Finn MacCool's. We know the bartender there and she sent pitchers our way in waves. She's one of the most harcore drinkers I've ever met and she expects nothing less from her friends. We tried to make her proud but eventually had to say no mas as she brought out the last 4 pitchers that we didn't order. Swass actually stopped drinking because he thought he had to go see his grandma but when she called to cancel, he drove us to Davis' house in Queen Anne. Guess what we did there.....if you said drink beer then you are smart. A lot of people showed up at Davis' place and we had a lot of fun. He lives in a pretty good location, a few blocks up Queen Anne hill but within walking distance of the many bars in lower Queen Anne. We went to a place called Ozzie's that I usually like. It was really busy, porbably because of the Apple Cup and I felt really claustrophobic. I went outside with Erica and Amanda for some fresh air and we decided to get some food at a Thai restaurant called Racha. We ordered a ton of food with the drunken munchies and ate way more than we should have. We had some Chicken Pad Kee Mow, Swimming Rama with Tofu, Spring Rolls, and 2 other dishes. I also drank about 97 glasses of water in an effort to rehydrate myself. We walked back to Ozzie's after the meal and had to stand in line to get back in. We were in line for about 0.5 seconds then asked ourselves, "why are we standing in line to get into a bar where we don't even want to hang out?" We did the smart thing and caught a cab home. I didn't have any keys(they were still at the Fairmont valet) so I slept on Erica's couch.
This morning I felt grrrrrrreat again. Erica drove me to the Fairmont so that I could finally pick up my car. They were like, "WTF? How dare you leave your car her for 2 days?" I told them that it was the first time I had been sober since dropping the car off and that there was nothing I could do about it. I drove home and slept for 3 hours before pulling myself out of bed to go to Edmonds. I was supposed to see Harry Potter 4 with Renee on Thursday but I cancelled to hang out in Auburn with Dave and the crew. To make it up to her I promised to come up to Lynnwood and take her family out to see the movie on Sunday. I got up there around 2 and we watched part of the Seahawks game. They went up by a few scores and since we were playing the hapless 49ers I figured that the game was over and we headed to the movie. HP4 was pretty good but I think I like HP3 better. They're my two favortie books in the series and both made pretty good movies. When we got out of the movie I found out that the final score was 27-25 and we had to dodge a 49er 2-point conversion at the end to win. Yikes. Some people will criticize the Hawks for struggling against one of the worst teams in football but a win is a frikkin win and the Hawks are racking 'em up. Next week we have a pretty big game against the New York FOOTBALL Giants. Luckily it's at home AND luckily I'll be there to give the Hawks my added mojo. I think we'll take it down and solidify our position as THE team to beat in the NFC.
After the movie we went back to Renee's mom's house and she made a really big dinner. We had chicken breasts, corn, asparagus, mashed potatos, salad and sparkling cran-apple juice. It was really delicous and I pulled a nice eat-and-run because my friend John was celebrating his 25th birthday at a Go-Kart place in Redmond. I showed up late and didn't get to race at all but I had a beer with John and gave him Johnny Cash's autobiography. We ended up leaving a little after 9 and I declined an invitation to a local bar. I was definitely not in the mood for any more drinking.
I just got done playing about an hour of $10/20 Omaha/8. There are some really bad players and I ran good, netting about $350. I usually give my bankroll updates on Sunday but I've played very little poker over the past week and the official bankroll manager is on my home computer, not my laptop. The roll is definitely down because I lost a bit on money at Foxwoods but I probably won't give an official update for another 2 weeks. I'm up here in Seattle for another week and I probably won't play much. I hope everyone is having as much fun as I am wherever you are.
Dave, Tasha, Jimmy and a girl that we all just met named Amanda, came to pick me up Saturday morning around 10 AM. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly bright-eyed or bushy-tailed. I threw some water on my face, put on my Husky jersey and tried in vain to control the Jafro(Japanese Afro). We needed three more tickets to the game and headed to the fraternity to see if anyone had any extras. We came up empty in our quest for free tickets but convinced three undergrads to go to the ticket office with us and get cheaper tickets since the game wasn't even sold out. Swass met us at the fraternity house and we split up into groups of three to find parking with our two cars. Swass, Amanda and I found a too-good-to-be-true spot a few blocks away from the stadium. It was 2-hour parking and we decided to just come back every 2 hours and move the car. The tailgate that we joined was off the hook. There was a full Thanksgiving Feast, with 8 deep fried turkeys, stuffing, mashed potatos, gravy, green beans and apple crisp. Throw in 3 coolers of beer and about 10 half-gallons of the hard stuff and you get 30-40 drunk and loud Huskies. Just before kickoff Swass and I walked back to the car to move it and he already had a ticket. We looked at the sign a little closer and it was two-hour parking EXCEPT for Saturday home football games. On those days it's NO PARKING. Swass looked at the $44 parking ticket and said, "well, there's no point in moving the car now!" I felt bad so I gave him $30 to help pay the ticket and we headed back to drink more before heading into the game.
The game was brutal. The Huskies suck and the Cougs aren't much better. We lost by 4 points and it was pretty dang depressing. I sobered up while Swass left at halftime and was in no shape to drive by the time we met him in the parking lot. I was now the DD and we headed to a bar on the Ave called Finn MacCool's. We know the bartender there and she sent pitchers our way in waves. She's one of the most harcore drinkers I've ever met and she expects nothing less from her friends. We tried to make her proud but eventually had to say no mas as she brought out the last 4 pitchers that we didn't order. Swass actually stopped drinking because he thought he had to go see his grandma but when she called to cancel, he drove us to Davis' house in Queen Anne. Guess what we did there.....if you said drink beer then you are smart. A lot of people showed up at Davis' place and we had a lot of fun. He lives in a pretty good location, a few blocks up Queen Anne hill but within walking distance of the many bars in lower Queen Anne. We went to a place called Ozzie's that I usually like. It was really busy, porbably because of the Apple Cup and I felt really claustrophobic. I went outside with Erica and Amanda for some fresh air and we decided to get some food at a Thai restaurant called Racha. We ordered a ton of food with the drunken munchies and ate way more than we should have. We had some Chicken Pad Kee Mow, Swimming Rama with Tofu, Spring Rolls, and 2 other dishes. I also drank about 97 glasses of water in an effort to rehydrate myself. We walked back to Ozzie's after the meal and had to stand in line to get back in. We were in line for about 0.5 seconds then asked ourselves, "why are we standing in line to get into a bar where we don't even want to hang out?" We did the smart thing and caught a cab home. I didn't have any keys(they were still at the Fairmont valet) so I slept on Erica's couch.
This morning I felt grrrrrrreat again. Erica drove me to the Fairmont so that I could finally pick up my car. They were like, "WTF? How dare you leave your car her for 2 days?" I told them that it was the first time I had been sober since dropping the car off and that there was nothing I could do about it. I drove home and slept for 3 hours before pulling myself out of bed to go to Edmonds. I was supposed to see Harry Potter 4 with Renee on Thursday but I cancelled to hang out in Auburn with Dave and the crew. To make it up to her I promised to come up to Lynnwood and take her family out to see the movie on Sunday. I got up there around 2 and we watched part of the Seahawks game. They went up by a few scores and since we were playing the hapless 49ers I figured that the game was over and we headed to the movie. HP4 was pretty good but I think I like HP3 better. They're my two favortie books in the series and both made pretty good movies. When we got out of the movie I found out that the final score was 27-25 and we had to dodge a 49er 2-point conversion at the end to win. Yikes. Some people will criticize the Hawks for struggling against one of the worst teams in football but a win is a frikkin win and the Hawks are racking 'em up. Next week we have a pretty big game against the New York FOOTBALL Giants. Luckily it's at home AND luckily I'll be there to give the Hawks my added mojo. I think we'll take it down and solidify our position as THE team to beat in the NFC.
After the movie we went back to Renee's mom's house and she made a really big dinner. We had chicken breasts, corn, asparagus, mashed potatos, salad and sparkling cran-apple juice. It was really delicous and I pulled a nice eat-and-run because my friend John was celebrating his 25th birthday at a Go-Kart place in Redmond. I showed up late and didn't get to race at all but I had a beer with John and gave him Johnny Cash's autobiography. We ended up leaving a little after 9 and I declined an invitation to a local bar. I was definitely not in the mood for any more drinking.
I just got done playing about an hour of $10/20 Omaha/8. There are some really bad players and I ran good, netting about $350. I usually give my bankroll updates on Sunday but I've played very little poker over the past week and the official bankroll manager is on my home computer, not my laptop. The roll is definitely down because I lost a bit on money at Foxwoods but I probably won't give an official update for another 2 weeks. I'm up here in Seattle for another week and I probably won't play much. I hope everyone is having as much fun as I am wherever you are.
Friday, November 18, 2005
I Miss My Homies
I've had a fun couple of days back in the Pacific Northwest. My plane arrived around 10 PM on Wednesday night and the three of us(Jimmy, Dave and I) went back to Dave's place to watch TV and shoot the shit. On Thursday, Dave's wife Tasha made us a great breakfast consisting of bacon pancakes, bacon, and hashbrowns. She had the day off and Dave worked from home so we got to spend a lot of time chillin out maxin and relaxin all cool. We watched 6 episodes of Nip/Tuck then went to Nordstrom Rack because I needed a shirt for tonight's fraternity function. After shopping the four of us went to Happy Hour and started drinking. Marcus, Perry and Renee came down around 7 PM and we continued drinking at Dave's house. Around 9:30 we went to a piano bar called the Longhorn Tavern. It was pretty cool but we had to pay a $7 cover. Any amount of cover in Auburn, WA is ridiculous but I guess it was worth it. Tasha was very drunk and dranced on stage a few times. They had last call at 11:40(utterly ridiculous) and we went back to Daves and called it a night. I'm in Seattle right now, getting ready for tonight's festivities. Founder's Day is our yearly fraternity alumni event. The active chapter introduces the pledges to the alumni and the alumni get drunk. It's one of my favorite nights of the year and I'm really looking forward to it. Afterwards, everyone goes to the fraternity and hits on 18 year-old girls. Is there anything better?
Tomorrow is the Apple Cup and we're planning on tailgating then going to the game if we can still walk. Tomorrow's entry should be full of drunken debauchery and cradle-robbing. Stay tuned.
Tomorrow is the Apple Cup and we're planning on tailgating then going to the game if we can still walk. Tomorrow's entry should be full of drunken debauchery and cradle-robbing. Stay tuned.
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