Monday, December 11, 2006

Simi and Vegas - Dallas is on deck

This past week will go down as one that was a bit crazy. That makes it par for the course of the past year.

The week started with wrapping up my home fix up projects of the previous week in time to head out to Los Angeles. I spent the work week in Simi Valley with a customer of mine teaching them the ins and outs of SQL Server performance. Simi is a great area with its beautiful scenery and proximity to LA and great SoCal weather, it’s got about everything. The folks I met were very nice and seemed to enjoy the workshop.

The last day in Simi did have some unusual excitement when a brush fire broke out on the mountain above our location. Many of the employees (and at least one visiting trainer) made a special trip to the front steps to check out the action. I’m guessing that the fire was 1 to 2 miles away, but we could still see flames shooting into the air and helicopters dropping water onto the hottest spots. You just don’t see that often in NC.

At the end of class, I had the assignment from my NorCal sister-in-law to deliver a care package to my nephew at UCLA. So I got to have the fun of filling a grocery cart full of crap (fun crap, but still crap) like Gatorade, beef jerky, snickers bars, etc. The young man is into his first final exam period and his mom wanted him to have plenty of fun eats. Well, he’s got them now.

From there, I got to LAX way early for my 10:30 flight to Vegas. As luck would have it, I was right on time for an earlier flight and got on and to Vegas 2 hours early. That gave me time to meet up with the bloggers at the MGM and play a couple hours of break-even poker ($2-4 limit). Saturday was the big winter edition of the World Poker Blogger Tournament at Caesar’s Palace. You can see Special K in action at this site (http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/pokerblog/archives/003956.php#more). I’m the face in the foreground just behind the water bottle. My buddy Falstaff (http://pokerstage.blogspot.com) is facing me with his back to the camera. I did well going much deeper this time than in the summer, but still running out of luck before the final table. Falstaff did better than me, but still no money. Congrats to –EV for his tremendous win.

That night we went to a reception hosted by PokerTek (http://www.pokertec.net) to show us their PokerPro ™ tables. I want to save my impressions of the tables for a separate post. They gave us a good party so that we would give them some vInk, so I’ll do them right.

The rest of the night was full of poker (Harrah’s (lost) and Imperial Palace (won)) and a nap up until time to go to the airport. I got back home without incident in time to start preparing to go to Dallas Monday evening for the coming week. I could have spent the whole weekend in Charlotte and not have been so rushed, but I opted for Vegas and the poker bloggers, so I’m to blame for this mad schedule. I’ll be way behind for Christmas. Oh well.

Big thanks to all the poker bloggers (and others) who will never read this post (and a couple who will) but made my weekend a true blast including Falstaff, PokerProf, Flipchip, Iggy, Lee, Brian, Tina, Tim, Michael, Byron, Ryan, John, Maudie, Gracie (still sorry for knocking you out of the tourney),(http://www.sheverb.com/), EasyCure (not sorry for knocking you out first (gigli) :) ), Pauly, and Catitude. This is is a great group of folks. Thanks again, guys.

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