Best laid plans and all that shite

So the plan for the weekend was have a nice dinner and go see a play Thursday night, make a little profit playing poker Friday night, have dinner with my parents to celebrate their birthdays Saturday night, and chill together Sunday, and ride my bike if I felt good enough.

0-4. I'm batting .00000 so far, and it's Sunday night.

So I laid out of work on Friday because I felt like refried ass, and I had managed to get all of the quotes that had to be delivered this week out on Thursday. So I dosed up on 24-hour Sudafed and Nyquil, and managed to stay a little stoned through a wondrous losing session of poker.

Even though I was a little high, I don't think I played any worse than I normally do, I just couldn't catch a draw for the first couple hours, and that bled away a bunch of my stack. That and I continued to not give the aggressive player on my left credit for flopping top pair when I had second pair, a thought that was continually reinforced when he turned trips a few times, and then I managed to go through a couple of orbits of Stud, Pineapple and Omaha Hi/Lo without winning a single hand (or half of a hand), and you have a recipe for rousing success.

It's hard to snatch a losing session from the jaws of three full houses in the first hour of play, but I managed. I struggled back in the last O8 session to make up a chunk of my losses, but it was still not a pretty night by any stretch.

Then Saturday rolled around, and along about mid-afternoon, as I was contemplating bathing (not very seriously, but beginning the contemplations), Suzy called with instructions to get dressed, we were taking her dad to the hospital. He had taken a fall at work last week that had left him understandably sore. Well, instead of improving as the week went on, his condition worsened until yesterday he was in agony.

Schmuck hadn't gone to the doctor before this point, of course, but that's another story.

So we took him to the emergency room at 2:30, and I called my folks to tell them that I would not, after all, be joining them for dinner. We weren't scheduled to meet until 6, but my knowledge of emergency room time and the fact that he had no life-threatening injuries allowed me to understand that we would not be finishing this process quickly. Turns out he really did fuck himself by waiting until Saturday to seek treatment, since he has several slipped and/or herniated discs in his back, and of course none of the orthopedists work on weekends. So Suzy had to go over there to spend the night to keep him dosed up with his pain meds and help him with more complex tasks. Like standing and sitting. His back is pretty fucked up, and I'll be amazed if it doesn't require some type of surgery.

So I'm a bachelor for a second weekend in a row, gunning for three. I leave on Thursday for Syracuse. In another brilliant move, one of our manufacturers has decided that February is a perfect time to roll out some new training for us. In upstate New York. Fuckers. I'll be at Turning Stone Thursday evening before my session on Friday, and Saturday afternoon and evening since my training ends Saturday around noon. Look me up if that's near you.

Then I repeat my recent trend of home for a week, hopefully without the getting sick part, then I head to Chattanooga for most of the first week of March. And in other news, thanks to the fact that I have a day job, this marks three years in a row that I have had to turn down work at the WSOP in the summer. Someday I'll take that 8-week leave of absence.