Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Reading/Listening, Visit, BE14, Poker

Reading: Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme. I'm on page 282 of 451. This week I read A Manual for Sons, which is just a chapter from The Dead Father, another book by Barthelme. It is hilarious, as was the rest of The Dead Father. I did pretty good at forcing myself to read all of last week, and I'm going to continue to make myself read at least something every night. It won't be hard because I'm broke until Friday.

Listening: Unfortunately for this section, I can't think of a single song that I listened to more than twice all of last week. I've had a song or two from Nia by Blackalicious stuck in my head, but I didn't have anything on repeat. I will, however, pick apart the Tiger Woods '08 soundtrack because it is awesome. The game makers did something ballsy and went with an all instrumental soundtrack. The entire thing has a cool, electronic jazz vibe to it. Most people probably don't realize that they are actual songs. I'll likely post some of my findings next week.

So Virginia is gone again, but I had her for two wonderful days. Her flight got delayed on Friday night, so she didn't get here until 9:30pm which made for a long day (she was up at 5:30am). We were super exciting and just went to bed that night. The next day she went to UNMC to spend some time with the resident program director while I was at work. When I finished work, she had managed to get a ride to West Roads which was detrimental to her bank account. We ate a late lunch with my sister and Brandon joined us part of the way through. After lunch we hung out for a bit and then Virginia was introduced to the Crescent Moon. The four of us (her, me, Brandon, and Jeff) drank there for awhile and Matt met up with us. Then we went to the R & R. The R & R is a hole in the wall about two blocks from our apartment. The clientele is not, well, classy. It's somewhat sub-standard for even a dive bar. Regardless, the five of us had a good time there, the highlights being Brandon's quote about the patrons ("The meat packing plant women of this bar are dancing to the same music that their pregnant, teenage daughters have on their MySpace pages"), and Matt teaching Virginia how to do a backspin and finish by striking a pose. That was the end of that night. The next day Mike was back in town and he, myself, Virginia, and Jeff went for lunch at the casino. Jeff threw a temper tantrum that would've made any four year old jealous because he didn't want to drive "all that way" (fifteen minutes) to eat. I shut him up by getting all of our meals comped. He also realized how good the food in JB's Cafe inside of the Horseshoe is. For those of you who don't know, it's awesome. We went there because Virginia wanted to see the casinos that I'm always mentioning. It's funny to me that she, who lives in Las Vegas, wanted to see our dinky little casinos, but she was actually somewhat impressed. We came back and watched TV, and then I took her to the airport at 6ish. She's likely coming back for the first weekend in February, and then I'm likely going out to see her while she's on rotation in California during the first weekend in March. I'll probably go see her in late March or early April as well, because she's coming for my birthday. We also mapped out some other dates, but I just realized that you probably don't care as you'll hear about it anyway, so I'm stopping there. Suffice it to say that it is so great to spend time with each other that we are trying to do it more. I'm super cheesy and I love it.

The beard behaved all weekend. I hardly noticed it on Saturday or Sunday, and it was good all day today until 8ish. Then, the thickest parts of the beard on either side of my chin started itching like Satan. Virginia loved it, and in light of its recent good behavior I'm giving it another week. If the experiment goes on much longer, I will have to get a trimmer as it's already starting to look as if I'm some sort of communist radical. I'll post some updated pics later this week.

I played two HU matches today and went 1-1. I lost the first one because of rust. The guy I was playing was bad and slowplayed every big hand he had, then he would move in on the turn for a huge overraise. My rustiness told me that he HAD to be bluffing sometime, so I called with 88 on a QTT board when he moved over top of my flop bet. In hindsight, it was very obvious that he had a Q (he had KQ), but I kept telling myself that he was going to bluff me and I couldn't stand that. That hand dropped me to 5k in chips and I never recovered. The next match, I got a lot more aggressive and forced him to make mistakes. I hammered at every pot forcing him to come over the top if he wanted to take down pots knowing that he wasn't used to poker like that and that he would eventually make a mistake. I had him down to 6.5k chips when he slipped. I had 69hh and raised on the button. He reraised, I called, and we took a T94 rainbow flop. He checked and I bet pot, which was about 1800 of his remaining 5800. He thought for way too long before moving in and I insta-called. He had never waited before moving in any other time, and it felt like he was about to try and push me off a pot as he had recently been pausing before folding. His KQ bricked on the 10 outs and I got back my money. I signed up for another match but he wouldn't play me again. Oh well, that's how it goes.

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