Destination Bash

Made it. I'm sitting in my room at the Courtyard Collegeville listening to Suzy shower up and thinking about water conservation...ahem, anyway. We got here around 11 last night after about 10 hours of driving, making following the GPS instead of Google maps the first (and hopefully last) truly poor decision of the weekend. I didn't know exactly how long and how stupid traffic can get north of DC at 6:30. The answer, if you've never driven from DC to Baltimore at that time of day in the rain, is LONG and STUPID. We lost at least an hour in traffic, but still made pretty good time. Suzy was a real trouper, putting up with my most minor of pee and beverage breaks until we were just outside of B'more and stopped for a quick sandwich. I think that 45 minute break at Panera Bread was the longest we were out of the car 'til we pulled in here. So I got her settled in the bed, fired up the Macbook, and banged out my last story of the week for PokerNews. And now I'm on vacation.

This weekend marks the first time in a year that I've asked for time off from everything. There have been a few times that it's fallen just right and I haven't had anything to do except enjoy myself, but it feels different to actually request, and be granted, time off from day job and freelance job. It's a nice feeling. I'll admit to a certain level of insecurity in my freelance work, which sometimes leads me to not turn down anything for fear I won't have the chance to take the next gig. It is, after all, freelance work. But now that I've been doing this writing thing for a couple of years, I've gotten to where I trust the people I work for to keep throwing me work, and they trust me to generally keep throwing them good content. I know I bitch from time to time about having to work too much, but I get bored if I don't have anything to do, so two jobs is about the minimum I can stand having.

There have been a couple of things I've knocked out this month that I was pretty pleased with. The profile on Tom Schneider when he won his WCOOP bracelet was good, I thought, and there were a couple of recaps for PN where I tried some different things that I thought added to the piece. Last night's was one of them, where I took the focus a little narrower and dialed in on three young internet studs who bluedgeoned each other at the tables. I found their rise and fall interesting, and hopefully the readers do too.

But for now, I'm off, and I'll see you guys on the other side. I've convinced Suzy that Charleston, WV is a great halfway point for our route home, even though it's 2 hours out of our way. They just added poker to the casino there, and I wanna see what that's like!