Well that was a first...

None of my fantasies about me and a gaggle of nurses in the middle of the night start or ended this way. And yes, there's more than one. And no, I'm not going to share them with you.

I was in Chapel Hill for work on Wednesday, having driven up there for a 9AM Thursday meeting that was cancelled around 8PM Wednesday night, well after I had arrived in my hotel room. Lemon. So after a nice dinner with a buddy, I went back to the hotel, read a little bit, watched NCIS and went to sleep. I know, I lead an exciting life on the road.

But at about 4:24 AM, it got a lot more exciting. In all my travels, I've never had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the night when I was in a hotel. It took me a second to figure out what that noise was, then I did all the normal things you're supposed to do. I went to the door, and didn't smell smoke. I felt the door handle, and it wasn't hot. So I decided that the odds of me dying imminently were slim, and got dressed. I tossed on pants, shoes, shirt and my jacket. Then I thought about it for a second, and decided that since my death apparently wasn't an immediate concern, I put my laptop in my bag, put my ipod in my pocket and headed for the door. I did eventually decide that I wouldn't waste the time for socks or to pack the rest of my clothes in a bag, figuring that might be a little excessive.

By the way, in January, even in the south, 4:30 AM is COLD. So I walked down the stairs, thanking Marriott Rewards once again for honoring my "low floor" request, and headed out into the night with all my fellow hotel guests. Obviously most of them were more concerned for their safety, as quite a few of them were in their pjs with no shoes.

And no, none of the pjs were terribly interesting. I was also disappointed. I look around at the bevy of freezing women and announce "I brought my car keys. I'll be going over to the Honda to get warm. Up to four of you are welcome to join me." I had a pile of takers, four nice young women who were in town for a nursing conference on hyperbaric chambers.

Yep, it's the middle of the night and I've got four nurses in their pajamas in my car with me. No baby oil, no Twister, not even any peppermint hand lotion. And frankly, it was too damn cold to take anything off anyway. Not to mention that whole married thing, and the fact that two of the four were uglier than a bulldog chewing on a bumblebee. So we sat there for a few minutes before the fire department gave us the all clear, and went back to our respective rooms.

I know, it started out sounding like it was exciting, but really wasn't. Sorry, I'll try to do better on the hijinks and shenanigans front next time.

More on the Media Question...

Here's what I currently have -

1) 46" LCD TV (in den)
1) Xbox 360 (also in den)
1) PS3 (ditto)
1) 500GB external HD (in office next room over)
2) laptop computers, 1 Mac 1 PC, neither one stays on or in one place all the time

I currently come home most days, plug my laptop into a USB hub on my desk which hooks into the external HD, and then when I download stuff from iTunes or bittorrent sites, it's all set up to download to the external HD.

What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to be able to listen to my music in the den using either the PS3 or the Xbox, as well as play back the TV shows and Movies I've downloaded on the big TV. Watching them on the 22" monitor in the office is fine, but I'd like to be able to watch them with Suzy, and seating in the office is limited.

So what I think I should do is this -

1) Get a cheapo PC with Vista Home Premium and a couple gigs of RAM (looks like abuot $3-400)
2) Get a small network switch and run a hard line into the back of the Xbox
3) Put all the stuff that's currently on the external HD into the PC, and set it up as a shared network drive, then set that as my destination download drive for iTunes etc.
4) Use my existing external HD as a backup

Does that make sense? Smells like the whole mess is gonna run me around $400 total, which ain't bad, but it would sure be nice to only do this once.

Media Management

There will be a poker post coming about my trip West by God Virginia. For now, suffice to say that I need to learn when to get up and put money in my pocket. It suck to be up $750 in four hours and still finish -$100 on a two-day trip. It sucks more when it's against players that suck. I am becoming a big fan of West Virginia poker.

But anyway - here's a question for my geek friends (and you know who you are). I have a shitload of music, movies, TV shows, stuff like that. I live off my laptop, so I store all my stuff on a 500GB external drive. I would like to be able to easily view those TV shows, play that music, etc. on my TV. I have an Xbox 360 and a PS3, both of which can do something like this. But the networking is what is giving me issues.

Is my life going to be easier if I just set up a PC somewhere that is hard-wired on a network to my 360 and store all my media on that PC?Or is there a solution I don't know about?

What about an Apple TV? Can I play stuff on there that I don't buy off iTunes?

And what about stuff I download via BitTorrent? What do I have to do to get one of these devices to play unprotected avi and mpg files?

I'm obviously not averse to spending money on this shit (note ridiculously large TV in my den), but I'd like something that's at least a little bit seamless on the execution side of things.

Once upon a time...

There was a really, really bad day in America. Some really bad men hijacked some airplanes and killed a lot of people. Some brave people fought back and crashed their airplane to keep them from killing other people. In North Carolina, a guy that had been pretty outspoken against the new President had only one thought, "Where is the President? We need a leader. Right. Now." And he decided to give the President that he did not vote for and didn't really believe had been elected in the first place his support. Because the country needed a leader, and he was the one we had, even if he wasn't the one he wanted. And in the first few days and weeks after those attacks, that President did pretty good. He exceeded the expectations of the vocal critic from North Carolina, and handled the worst crisis of my generation as well as could be expected. We won't discuss the seven years that followed, because they are actually beside the point.

The point is this - our country is now in a crisis of a different sort, but one that is no less real and will in the end directly affect more people than the first one. We have a new President, who has the opportunity to be a leader. I'd like to ask all my friends that didn't support Obama in his campaign and don't like anything he stands for to give him the same chance that I gave W. He might not be any good at anything. He might be just more of the same. He might be worse, and he might mortgage our future even more heavily to make today's balance sheet look better.

But he might be good for us. He might be able to do 1/3 of what he says he wants to do. And he deserves the benefit of the doubt for a little while. So give him a shot, even if you don't like him. If I can be big enough to do it for a President I hated, you can too. Then, if he screws up as bad as W, feel free to resume the hate.

Bad Read, Good Outcome

That might have been the theme of my weekend. It was certainly the theme of two big hands I dragged the pot in.

Firstly - Special K raised preflop to $2.75 from early position. One caller before it gets to me on the button, where I had straddled to $1. I make the loose call of $1.75 with J6o, and the flop comes down a lovely J-6-x (x might = a king, but I don't really remember). K bets out, the other preflop caller folds, and I raise. I put him on AK or something of that nature. He thinks for a moment before he raised all in, and I call. He tables the first pair of aces he's seen since October (and I can attest to most of this, since I've been around for most of his sessions since October), and they've been cracked by some dumbass with J6o. The board doesn't pair and I double up.

Secondly - I don't remember any of the preflop action, but the flop came down with a king, and I had KJ soooted. Jim the Knife was firing on every street, and I was calling him down. I didn't feel like I could really re-raise with the Jack, but it was good enough to keep calling with. Everything finished out and Jim tabled a King as well, but no kicker. I didn't put him on anything that strong, but it was a good result. So my reads weren't spectacular, but the results were ok.

One hand where my read was good, and hand held up, went down a little like this. I'm in a blind. BadBlood raised, Jim called, and I looked down at 5d-2d. I remark that I have recently fallen in love with this trashy-assed hand, and make the call. The flop comes down 5-2-9 with two clubs, and I remark that I can't talk about how shitty my hand is, get a raggedy-ass flop like that and NOT bet out, so I bet out at it. Blood raised me, Jim moved all in over the top, and I had to have a nice long think about things. It took me a while, but I finally decided that Jim would make that move with a huge range of hands, and moved all in over the top for my last few pennies. Blood got out of the way, and Jim turned over the best and worst of all possible worlds for me - Kc-7c. I saw the flush draw, and did something I practically never do: I offered to run it twice.

It shows how snakebit I still feel about the last half of 2008 that I even offered to run it twice when I was a 64% favorite to win the hand. Jim agreed, and the board ran out club-free both times, leaving me to drag a huge pot. I finished up pretty significantly on the evening, making up for an awful showing the last time we had a game at my house. I thought about it later, and am still intrigued by my own offer to run it twice. It probably stemmed partially from playing at Blood's house the night before, where running it twice when there are big pots on the line is a fairly common occurence. It also stemmed from a sense of impending doom that goes back to last year, but the fact was that I was only on buy-in #1, and that's a pretty rare place for me to be that late in the evening.

So all in all it was a good weekend of poker, with me logging a rare pair of back-to-back winning sessions to put me back in the black for the year. It looks like the home game is on the road this weekend as your intrepid heroes head north into real hillbilly country to take on the games at the Tri-State race track in Charleston, WV. Lemme know if that's close to your neck of the woods (literally, woods) and we'll grab a beer.

My first post of the new year

Is lame. I'm alive, but still have nothing interesting to say. Work is keeping me busy, and I'm actually pretty happy about that. I'm writing a good bit about the Aussie Millions over on PokerNews, so that's good. Caldwell resigned, that's kind of a bummer. I like John, and his cute wife and baby too. even though I haven't met the baby. But really, what's not to like about a baby?

I've played a little poker. It's all kinda sucked, so I'm stuck already. Headed south tomorrow night to play in a game where I am absolutely going to be one of the softer spots at the table. But who cares? I get to hang out with Otis, G-Rob, BadBlood, Brian the Red and Absinthe. And I hear there's some dude coming down from the mountains who might have written a thing or two about poker himself.

The Christmas Lights

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, when all the women were running around to the mall looking for the latest sale on this or that, Jeremiah Green would get up early, go to the garage and get down the cardboard boxes of lights. Then he’d get out the ladder, the hammer, and the extension cords and set to work. He’d work most of the day, with a break around lunchtime for a sandwich made from yesterday’s dried-out turkey on white bread with French’s yellow mustard and Miracle whip and maybe some celery on the side with salt sprinkled on it. He’d sit on the porch in his old flannel shirt eating his turkey sandwich and celery, and crack open a Pabst from the cooler in the garage.

Helen didn’t cotton much to drinkin’ so he only had himself a beer on those rare occasions when she was gone and he had the house to himself. Most years a six-pack bought after the Fourth of July would last the rest of the year, then he’d allow himself another beer or two for New Year’s after Helen had gone to bed. She’d long since given up caring about watching some silly ball drop, figuring that she could tell it was a new year when she looked at the calendar the next morning at breakfast. The day changed every evening without her help; she didn’t need to stay up past her bedtime just to ring anything in. Jeremiah liked to watch all the commotion on the tv, so he usually stayed up and had himself a beer or two while that Clark fella nattered on until he fell asleep. Then he’d wake up sometime in the middle of the night and go to bed.

Then once he finished his turkey sandwich, Jeremiah (not once in his eighty-two years was he ever Jerry or Jer, or God forbid, Jed) would lean the ladder up against the side of the house and start to string the lights. By the time Helen got home from shopping with her sisters it would be full-on dark, and Jeremiah would be back inside watching Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy if she ran particularly late. Once she got home and got all her prizes deposited in the front bedroom for later wrapping and distribution, they’d go out in the front yard together and take a minute standing on the lawn of the house he bought when he got home from the war, a time he never really talked about, not even to Helen. They’d admire his handiwork, Helen would remind him to put the ladder away before they went to bed, and he’d reply that it would get done eventually, and anyway, what if there was a light burnt out? Then he’d go up to the outlet he had installed on the porch by that Reynolds boy down the street just for this purpose, and he’d plug in the main extension cord.

With that, the whole front of the house, roofline, bushes, little cedar tree by the driveway and all the porch railings burst into white light, and the whole neighborhood could tell that the holidays were upon them. There were never any colored lights, at least not since 1973 when Jeremiah shaved off those sideburns. There were never any flashing lights or strobe lights, and never any plastic Santas and reindeer on the roof. There was just a bright white celebration of the season. For over fifty years, from the time the armistice was signed and Jeremiah came home from Korea, he dragged that ladder out of the garage every November and lit up the night sky in a celebration of the season, of family, and of just being alive.

Until this year. When Helen passed in August Jeremiah sat down in that vinyl recliner in the den with a Pabst, probably the first time in thirty years he’d had a beer in August inside his house, and it seemed like he didn’t move from that chair for months. Neighbors would come to visit, to see how he was holding up, and he’d tell them, in the stoic way that octogenarian men who’ve seen young men die have, that he was doing about as well as could be expected.

As well as could be expected didn’t really amount to much, he thought to himself after the well-wishers, the pastors and deacons, the neighborhood widows and friends of his children that had moved away years before and were back in town visiting their own parents had left. As well as could be expected was getting up three times in the middle of the night to pee and being confused every single time when he went back to bed and there was no one there. As well as could be expected was fixing his own breakfast every morning and finally going into the garage to drag out the old coffee pot that Helen had wanted to toss out back twenty years ago when they got the new programmable kind but he wouldn’t let her for fear that just this thing would someday happen and he’d have to make his own coffee and be too old and near-sighted to read the instructions on the damn thing and besides, what does a coffeepot need all them damn buttons for anyhow? You just put the coffee in it, put some hot water in it, and it turns into coffee. It doesn’t need a clock in it, much less more buttons than one for off and one for on.

So as well as could be expected wasn’t really very well at all, if he would take the time to think about it. Which he didn’t, because Jeremiah was never a man to spend too much time in deep contemplation. But now, at 83, there wasn’t a whole lot left for him to do except sit. And think. And since thinking was less appealing, he managed to lose himself in some of the seventy-six channels if eternal drivel that spouted from the 19” color television that sat in the living room on top of the old console tv that had finally breathed its last some eight years ago. So Jeremiah sat. And watched tv. And that’s how most days went. He watched tv until bedtime, watched the late news and went to bed, where he lay awake listening to the silence beside him until sleep finally took him off for a couple of hours at a time.

So on this Friday after Thanksgiving, instead of listening to Helen get up at the crack of dawn to go shopping with her sisters, then getting up to drink the coffee she left for him in the machine he never did figure out how to operate, then heading out to the garage to start on the decorations, he sat. He turned on the tv and watched a little bit of that, then fixed himself a dry turkey sandwich with Miracle Whip from the leftovers from the turkey that the Methodist women brought by on Wednesday.

He ran out of mustard last week and kept forgetting to put it on the list that hung on the refrigerator. If he didn’t write it down, he wouldn’t remember to get it when he went grocery shopping this Sunday, either. He had taken to grocery shopping at eleven on Sundays so he didn’t have to worry about seeing any of the church women in the store. Helen had always been real active in the church, but with her gone he didn’t see much sense in him going. He figured he and God still had a few things they needed to sort out from about fifty years ago, but they were the sort of things a man needed to talk through with his maker face to face, and going to church wouldn’t do him a whole lot of difference one way or the other.

As he was sitting, not really enjoying his mustardless sandwich but not really not liking it either, he started to hear some rattling around in his garage. The neighborhood, which had been full of young veterans when they moved in all these years ago, had seen its ups and downs, and was currently on the beginning of one of the up periods, which was to say that there were a lot more people living there at the moment who could be considered down than up, but in general they were hard-working people who didn’t cause too much trouble. The people on the tv liked to talk about it as a neighborhood “in transition,” but Jeremiah just thought that was a fancy way of saying there were some poor people that lived there, some white people, some black people and some Mexicans thrown in for good measure. There was some crime, sure, but in general it was decent place to live. But when he heard somebody rattling around in his garage, he didn’t run out to go look and see what they might be stealing.

It’s not that he was afraid that whoever was in his garage might hurt him. He’d known pain at different times in his life, you didn’t make it past fourscore years on this earth without getting hurt more than once, but he just really wasn’t that interested. And as the day wore on and the noise in his garage continued, he finally decided that if there was something worth taking out there they should have already took it and left him alone, so he went to the back door and stuck his head out to yell at whatever hooligans were back there. But by this time whatever perpetrators there had been were already gone, so all he saw was a closed garage door and a q quiet back yard. He went back inside and dozed in front of his tv for the rest of the afternoon, watched a little football, not that he knew or cared anything about any of the schools playing, but it was something to pass the time, and napped a little more.

Along about seven o’clock, he started to listen for Helen’s sister Mary’s car, and then remembered that Mary didn’t drive anymore after she got so blind they took her license away last summer, and besides, she wasn’t going to be dropping Helen off tonight anyhow. But as he stood in his kitchen alone, feeling once again the lost feeling of someone who is missing something that he just can’t quite put his finger on what it is, there was a knock at his front door. He had left all the porch lights off to keep folks from coming by to check on him since he didn’t really feel like sharing another afternoon of how you holdin’ ups with somebody who he didn’t really give much of a damn about and he figured didn’t give much of a damn about him either, so the knock was a little surprising. He figured it was a kid, since they weren’t usually smart enough to figure out that when the porch light wasn’t on it meant that the body inside didn’t want to be bothered.

So he made his way through the darkened house to the front door, and pulled it open to find an empty porch. He looked around for a minute, confused, before he saw it laying over to the right of the door. It was an orange extension cord with a red bow tied to the end of it. On the bow was a card, and Jeremiah reached down and pulled the card off the end of the card and read it.

“Dear Mr. Jeremiah,

We are sorry that your wife died. We are sorry that you are sad, and that you didn’t want to put your pretty lights up this year. We hope we did it good and it will make you a little happy.
Feliz Navidad,

Jose y Hector Garcia (from across the street)”

Jeremiah stood there for a minute looking around, not really knowing what to think, when he looked up and saw two boys looking out of a living room window across the street. The bigger one looked like he was about thirteen, and the little one looked to be maybe eight. The big one just watched him, but when the little one saw him looking, he waved excitedly, indicating that Jeremiah should plug in the cord.

So he did, and he walked out on his lawn to see his house lit up just like it was every year, with white lights on the little cedar tree by the driveway, on the porch railings, on all the bushes on the front of the house, and even on the roofline, although how those little boys got all the way up there he had no idea. Until he saw his ladder leaning up against the side of the house just like he did every year until after he got everything working just right. He stood there for a minute imagining he could feel a smaller hand in his own as he stood there on his lawn not quite as alone as he’d been a couple hours before, then he turned around, nodded to the two boys in the window, one waving like his arm was one a spring, and one nodding back solemnly, gathered his ladder, and put it away in his garage until after New Year’s.

Day 1

In an effort to force myself to write more, and to take more pictures to decide if I can justify the expense of a digital SLR camera instead of the cheap-o Kodak digital I've been rockin' for the past year, I've launched the picture a day plan. This is kinda ambitious, so I reserve the right to fail.

I want to take at least one picture every day for a year of something I see. Most of the time I'll write about them, so hopefully this will spur me to write more. Here's today;s entry.

This was the window dressing that my employees put up in my office when I was at LDI in October. I came home to a lovely set of My Little Pony drapes in my office. I've left them there. It starts conversations, alright. And says a lot about the industry I work in.

Is Twitter killing my blog?

Well, it certainly hasn't helped it. I do find myself twitttering all the short, random shit that I would typically post here, and with work getting busy I'm having to retrain myself to post more regularly. This week was certainly interesting, with getting back from Vegas, being home for almost 48 hours then taking a work trip across the state, managing to injure myself along the way and then spending 36 hours practically bedridden.

So we got out of Vegas before the snow, and I made my tight connection in Chicago with about 10 minutes to spare. I won the exit row lottery on both my return flights, and there was no one in the middle seat from Chaicago to Charlotte, so that was a comfy flight. I don't really remember the Vegas-Chicago leg, because I was asleep before our wheels left the ground and was barely awake when we landed. So I got home ahead of Suzy and Bonnie, and they got in safely, and all was right with the world.

Tuesday was my only day in the office, because I had a meeting planned in Manteo on Thursday afternoon. Manteo is about as far away as you can get while still being in North Carolina. When they called that part of the world the Outer Banks, they weren't kidding. So my plan was to work Tuesday and Wednesday, drive halfway to Manteo Wednesday night, and finish the trip for a 1PM meeting Thursday. Except my project manager's wife sprained her ankle over the weekend so he had to drive her to work every day. Which precluded him from making a site visit in Greenville (NC) on Wednesday. So I took that visit, which cut out my planned Wednesday in the office. The site meeting was fine, just a basic walk-through with the electricians, and then I was off to Manteo.

The Lost Colony is one of the longest-running outdoor dramas in the US, if not the oldest. It tells the story of the first colony on Roanoke Island, and the first English child born in the US, Virginia Dare. It also explores the mystery of the vanished colony on Roanoke Island, without giving us any answers, because frankly, we don't know what happened to those people. We helped them with a major infrastructure renovation last summer, so they want us to work with them over the next two years to fully renovate all their lighting. So I headed out there to meet with the Executive Director and several guys from the National Park Service (because Roanoke Island is a national park) to talk about the plans for that.

It was a good meeting, and we've prettty much got the gig, and it was neat to walk around that facility, that's seen the work of several theatrical giants. Terrence Mann (Les Miserables, Beauty and the Beast) has directed there for several years. Andy Griffith got his acting start there, and the current costume and production designer is a little guy who some folks in the theatre world might have heard of - William Ivey Long. William is one of NC's most famous theatrical sons, with 5 Tony awards to his credit. So there's a lot of history there, and the absolute coolest back stage I've ever been on. It backs up right on the water, to the point where if the wind is blowing over the water, you get wet standing back there. There's probably 10' from the back stage area to the water, so that's pretty cool.

Then I drove most of the way home, waking up in the middle of the night with a screaming pain in my right foot. I made it through the night sleeping intermittently, and then drove the 4 hours back to Charlotte and went to an urgent care joint. Turns out that the tendon that extends my big toe has become inflamed from all the driving and walking that I've done over the past two weeks. So the doc gave me one of the dorky post-op shoes, some anti-inflammatory drugs and told me to stay off it for a day or two. It's mostly better now, as long as I keep the Cataflam in me, so hopefully I'll be able to finish my Christmas shopping tomorrow night. Or at least start my Christmas shopping tomorrow night. Suzy gave me her list, so I've got some guidelines, just need to get the wheel back in shape so I can do it.

So today was all about catching up on my movie watching, which so far consisted of War, Inc. (highly recommend), one episode of Numb3rs, which I had never seen before (not bad), two episodes of Eleventh Hour (which I am oddly enamored with), two episodes on NCIS with Suzy (which we both love) and Stealth (which was every bit as cheesy as I thought). Tomorrow we have Christmas with Suzy's fam, then some shopping, then the Sunday Warm-up on Stars, then the huuuuge Sunday night game with the Panthers and Giants. Then back to work for another short week on Monday. I like short work weeks. Unless I have a bunch of stuff to do, in which case I hate them. But I've lined most of my stuff up so I don't have too much cooking until the first of the year, so we should be good.

This is not a WPBT trip report

Just a few disjointed thoughts from the weekend.

I got in a few hours ahead of Suzy and my sis Bonnie, who was making her first-ever plane ride, and got completely bomber at the IP. Thanks to everyone who bought me a drink, thanks to everyone who drank with me, and damn you all for how I felt Friday morning (and early afternoon). Overall the whole weekend was a great success, I thought. We all got together, we all drank a little (or a lot), some of us got married, one of us won a poker tournament, some of us won money, some of us lost money, but we all had a good time in each other's company.

Thanks to all the friends, old and new, who I saw this weekend. You guys inspired me to write again, if not significantly more frequently. I am always amazed at the feeling of closeness I have with people that I see for only a few days once or twice a year. In one of those rare quiet islands of thought right in the middle of the chaos, Iggy and I stood in the middle of everyone at the Geisha Bar, looked around, and just shook our heads at the insanity of what we are. We're a group of incredibly disparate individuals, who, almost by accident, became something bigger and better than ourselves.

Walking back to the bus after Gracie and Pablo's wedding, I was trailing along in the back of the pack and could overhear Pablo talking to his mom, and one thing that he kept saying really resonated with me. He said more than once "we're so blessed." He was incredibly touched that a pile of people would ride in a bus down to the magistrate's office in Las Vegas to see them get married off, but it's a lot more than that. I feel blessed to have you people in my life. I know that you're out there, my invisible internet friends, and that if I ever need you, all I need to do is call. It's really amazing the strength of the network that we've built.

Sure we might not all play the blogger tournaments. Some of us can barely be considered poker bloggers with all the other stuff we write about (yeah, I mean me). But the connection is real. We've laughed together, cried together, drank FAR too much booze together, raised money for good causes together, and made compete idiots of ourselves in public together. But this weekend reminded me that somehow, with all the different lists, and generations of bloggerdom, and groups within groups, that just walking up and saying "I'm (insert blogger name here)" and being a decent person is an instant ticket into something really kinda special. Something I'm honored to be part of.

I'll ramble more about the weekend at some point, but right now I'm in the cadillac of Fairfield Inns in Williamston, NC (I don't really know where that is, either), and it's almost time to look for food. I slept in my bed for two nights in a row, which is kind of a big deal lately, and now I'm on the road again. I think it calms down for a week after this, but then the Monday after Christmas I'm back in the ATL. So if any of you boys down there wanna sling some cards early in that week, let me know. I'll be there Monday and Tuesday nights, driving home for New Year's.