Sloe Times

I feel so lazy lately. In the last week or so, my posting has really dropped off. Not so much because I've been ignoring my blog, but because I've been so busy with everything and nothing all at the same time. Other than the few things I have already written about, absolutely nothing has happened worth writing about lately. That being the case, I will now inflict upon you all the crap still floating around in my head.

On the poker front, I've been doing relatively well. This of course being relative to how much I'm actually getting to play which isn't much lately. I'm on track with the goal I set earlier, so I have nothing to complain about. I did have the home game this weekend and was playing real well right up until the very end. We played a tournament and I took 2nd in that when my A6 didn't improve over an unimproved A7. Them's the breaks. We played ring games after which consisted of Stud, Hold'em, and an orbit of Omaha. We were playing 6 handed and I was playing a nice solid game. I got schooled by the wife a couple of times early on after I had made a big deal of sitting down with her a couple of nights before to explain how to play it tight so she could play pretty much all night without losing all her money early on. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so liberal with the lesson ;) Anyway, we got down to 4 handed after awhile and then the games got expanded to 5 stud, 5 draw, baseball, and finally midnight baseball. The midnight baseball game cost me my winnings and my buy-in but that's life. I pulled a 3 with 3 or 4 cards left to roll and after counting out the pot figured out it would put me all in to match. That didn't seem so bad considering at the time I had the best hand with cards to go and if I caught another 3, that would be just fine because I was already all-in. So I went.... and lost. That's ok, it was good times and good fun with friends. Final tally at the end of the night left me -$20, the wife -$1, Steel_Rain +$33, his brother -$17, my canadian friend and his girlfriend +$5. The funny part is that my friends girlfriend was also pretty new to playing and he got cleaned out and she recovered nicely for him ;)

Speaking of my friend from Canada and his girlfriend. I was glad he could make it down and seeing him and meeting her made for a nice weekend. Other than dinner at Fogo the other night we went out to Navy Pier (something I honestly hadn't done before and I have lived in Chicago for a long time now). It was fun, and a bit aggravating when the ticket dork miscounted the tickets she gave us for the ferris wheel and then rather than acknowledge the mistake basically called my friend a liar. It's not like this was a tough issue, she got $20, and gave us 3 tickets (tickets are $5 ea). What's the problem here? So after some escalating back and forth and $5 MORE later, we're climbing 150 feet into the air and checking out the skyline of Chicago. Now, just to add insult to injury here, we had timed it fairly close so that we would be up near the top of the ride when the nightly fireworks started. They started late and we were on the down side behind a building with no view of the lake where the fireworks were being set off when they started. Bastards. This was obviously conspiracy to mess with my evening.

I have been reading my AD&D books and finally came to the conclusion that I miss gaming of the roleplaying, paper, and dice variety. To that end I've put together a quick campaign that I'm building on in the Dragonlance setting. I'm doing this for a PBeM campaign that will probably start up in a week or so. I've always liked the Dragonlance stories and campaign setting. It's always seemed to be more geared towards roleplaying and getting your characters more involved than 'travel to the dungeon, slay the creatures, collect the loot, rinse, and repeat.' So for that, my hats off to Margaret Wies and Tracey Hickman for building a vivid and gripping world that has provided years of entertainment.

Work is about as boring as it gets right now. All of the projects I'm involved in are stalled for one reason or another outside of my control. Because of this I've been relegated to helping with production support activities, or doing nothing at all. I don't mind helping out on the production stuff, but it is definitely not what I hired on for so the sooner the projects start back up, the happier I will be. What makes this an absolutely horrible situation is that because we are still in the process of reorganizing the teams, I do not have anything going on giving me some visibility to the folks that are building the new teams out. I am not worried about losing my job, but I am concerned that I may miss out on an opportunity because I'm unaware of it and the people making those decisions don't have any visibility to me. I could do some cold calling and just get my name out there, but one of the other factors here is that the team I'm currently on hasn't had any real announcements in terms of it's future structure and frankly I like the folks I work with, no knob-heads to speak of and if it's going to stay intact, I wouldn't be upset with staying where I am. So I'm trying not to let too much of the 'grass is greener syndrome' grind on my mind.

The boy is super mobile now and using anything he can get a grip on to pull himself up into a standing position. Of course he doesn't have any real balance while standing yet so it requires that whatever he is holding onto not being mobile. This isn't so bad except for thing in the kitchen. When he falls and hits the carpet, there's plenty of padding and he's not falling far enough to cause any damage. The kitchen on the other hand has a floor made for cracking skulls so I suspect it's more a matter of when than if. *sigh* However, if I want to just turn him into a drooling, unmoving, zombie all I have to do is pop in the Baby Mozart DVD and he goes into this unbreakable trance. That helps when I've got baby duty while trying to get some work done.