OK, so poker on Monday night kinda sucked. I played well with what I had, but I never really got anything worth playing, and was out in the first 45 minutes or so. When Julie decided that she'd have a girl's night on Tuesday night (which she bailed on anyways to catch up on some much needed veg/relaxation time), I went out to play again last night. What a difference a day made. I still had a rocky start, and eventually was down to 2,000 (out of the original 10,000 that everyone starts with) and antes of 500. What a great time to start catching some cards. Not only did I recover from that deficit, but I knocked 2 people out in the process, giving me the chip lead for the table. At one point, I was so distracted by having to deal, stack chips from the last hand, and play my current one, that I miscalled my hand at the end. I called it as a pair of aces, which was good enough for the win, and then someone else pointed out that I actually had a straight and somehow hadn't noticed it! That was the joke for the rest of the evening. Unfortunately, in the next 2 hands, I lost about 40k of chips as two different people pulled flushes on me to beat my two pair and trips. But I made up for that in the next 10 minutes or so as I knocked 3 more people out over the course of 4 hands and took the chip lead for the tournament. At one point in this, I was holding 460k worth of chips, which with 86 people playing was over half of the total chip count. I bounced around a lot on the final table, and finally ended up going out in third place. One hand after I went out it was over, and the guy who at the final table was down to his last chip 3 times pulled it off. I got a hat and tshirt free out of it, and I'm right on the bubble of getting an invite to the final tournament. One more decent finish and I should get in without a problem. OK, so that was a ton of typing, but if you couldn't tell, I was excited over having such a great night of poker!

Tonight is the instructor's meeting for Outdoor Emergency Care, the ski patrol class that I'm running. Next week the candidates start showing up, and then the real fun starts! I should have plenty of good stories from the first few weeks of classes, as we teach them how to do full body assessments. That is always good for a few laughs for the instructors. Privately, where the candidates can't see of course. We all gave our instructors the same amusement I'm sure.

Hey, we're playing nice today after all! Woohoo!

Heather C. was in from St. Louis over the weekend. We had a nice cookout, and got a good game of Settlers of Catan in. We ended up teaching Andrea and Heather M. how to play, so now maybe we'll have some more addicts to play with. There's always the online version, but it's so much more fun in person.

Tonight is poker night! I'm trying a free series tonight at The Dry Bean.

Last week a tornado, this week an earthquake, what's next? Plague and Locusts?

I know justice is supposed to be blind, but if this judge keeps it up, he'll be going blind!

Cell phones adversely affecting male fertility? This one seems a stretch to me. But for some reason I have an old Ghostbusters quote running through my head right now. Back off man, I'm a scientist.

Sometimes online things can be such a pain. My last two attempts to post on my blog failed. Before typing any more, let's see if it wants to play well with others today...

Online video conferencing/chat at 35,000 feet.

Justice is supposed to be blind, but if this judge keeps it up, he's going to go blind.

And staying on the legal thread, this guy was pretty dumb, but it makes for a funny story.

This is worth a link just for the x-ray picture in it.

Gary Oldman will play a villan in the last Star Wars pequel.

Online video conferencing/chat at 35,000 feet.

Justice is supposed to be blind, but if this judge keeps it up, he's going to go blind.

And staying on the legal thread, this guy was pretty dumb, but it makes for a funny story.

This is worth a link just for the x-ray picture in it.

Gary Oldman will play a villan in the last Star Wars pequel.

Online video conferencing/chat at 35,000 feet.

Justice is supposed to be blind, but if this judge keeps it up, he's going to go blind.

And staying on the legal thread, this guy was pretty dumb, but it makes for a funny story.

This is worth a link just for the x-ray picture in it.

Gary Oldman will play a villan in the last Star Wars pequel.

Well, last night was interesting. A tornado touched down about 1-2 miles from our house. Luckily, it didn't do anything to us, but some places not that far from us weren't as lucky. That's the closest that I've ever been to a forming funnel cloud. We saw the clouds starting to circle and thumbs coming down off them towards the ground. I kind of wanted to sit and watch it for a while, but Julie didn't seem to think that was a good idea. 8-)

Spammers and an AOL employee getting busted.

Here's a good reason not to get creative when trying to kill a spider.

This one reminds me of Weird Al's vision of Ghandi II.

OK, very high recommendations for Fitch's. The food was awesome, you've got to try the smoked prime rib. You can get it in any size 8 oz or more. Our waiter told us that he saw one guy order a 44 oz cut. That's a whole lotta meat! Fitch's also has a scotch menu that is 3 pages long. I was a very happy camper. It was a bit pricey, but worth it!

Tonight is poker night at Fetterman East, which is always fun.

Watch the progress of a few people out for a little bike ride called Race Across America.

Who knew that elephants could play soccer so well?

A fark tribute of photoshoped pics. With so many things going "extreme", these pics show the things that really shouldn't go there.

Saturday morning I went golfing. No, not disc golf as per my usual, but ball golf. Shocking I know. Kevin wanted to go for his birthday, so I figured why not? We had a foursome playing nine holes at Coachman's. I spent the whole way telling everyone how little I played (I can count the number of times in the last ten years on a hand or two), and how bad I was going to suck. Well, on a few shots at least, something clicked and I actually got some good shots off!?! The first was the best, it was on the fourth hole I think, a 300 yard straight hole, and after I whacked the ball, everyone turned and yelled "holy shit!" because you could hear that it was a solid hit. 270 yards, almost perfectly straight. WOOHOO! I had two other really good drives, a few good up shots, and a decent putt or two. Now if I could only have put it all together on a couple of holes...lol. Oh, well. At least the golf carts were a lot of fun. We only did one or two polo style shots from them. 8-)

Tonight we're going out for further birthday celebrations for Kevin, this time to Fitch's Chophouse & Spirits. I haven't been there before, but I've heard it's quite good, and it's right up the street from us, which is a nice bonus.

The Blue Marlin, as usual, was great on wednesday night. If you've got a bit of money to spare and a weakness for seafood, I can't recommend the place highly enough.

This weekend we're celebrating my brother-in-law Kevin's birthday. In his twisted mind, he seems to think the idea of four of us drinking Maker's Mark and golfing first thing Saturday morning is a good thing. As a warning to anyone in the vicinity of us. I have touched golf clubs a grand total of 3-4 times in the last 15 years or so(excluding mini-golf), and not at all in the last year. Basically, I'm a danger to anyone within approximately a 270 degree arc. Fore!

Funny side story. I was playing a disc golf tournament several weeks ago, and this clueless lady was wandering around with her kids in the middle of the longest hole on the course. Now to stave off any sympathy for her before it starts, in tournaments we pay to close the course down for our exclusive use, and post signs around it to that effect. Anyways, a guy on the tee had a horrible throw, and they all started screaming "Fore! Look out! Heads up!" I was with the group ahead of them and we thought they may have been yelling to us by the next tee. Nope, turns out that they were yelling at clueless lady and her kids. The disc missed a kid's head by a little bit, but nailed her in the gut. Afterwards, they weren't sure how much english she spoke, so maybe we should be yelling Quatro! (ok, a lot of typing for a stupid punchline, but oh, well :D ) And yes, she was just fine, just a little surprised.

Today is my third wedding anniversary. Scary how fast time flies. To celebrate, we'll be going out to the Blue Marlin, possibly the best place that I've ever been for seafood.

Poker last night was fun. Didn't win the trip...d'oh. Actually, I exited exactly in the middle, losing an all in bet of queens full of aces to aces full of threes. Sucks, but what can you do. Gotta play those. But hey, for free, I more than got my money's worth of entertainment!

Getting a bit of a Vegas monopoly going on? Mandalay is buying out MGM.

Some Austrian towns are considering changing their names. I don't know though. They sound kinda quaint to me.

And if you haven't seen it, a lovely flash animation view of the end of the world.

Well, with any luck, today will be less crazy than yesterday. So far it's been calm, but that doesn't really mean a thing for the rest of the day. Tonight should be fun. I'm in an invitational poker tournament at Babe's. You qualify by finishing in the top 6 at a weekly tournament, and at the end of a months time they have them all back for another one. No entry fee, but the top finisher gets a free trip for two to Vegas! So in random odds at worst I have a 1 in 24 chance. Possibly better odds if someone finished in the top 6 multiple times. It should be a lot of fun!

The packers have finally signed Tim Couch. No big surprise, but it feels nice to have a more proven backup on the team.

While the Miller/Bud advertisements lately have been rather amusing in their continual ripping on each other, I didn't figure on it to end up in court.

It's just disturbing that Virginia has to advertise to tell people not to have sex with minors.

Even more disturbing. Want to go see Rasputin's penis? It's in a jar in a Russian museum!?!

Wow, let's keep going with the weird. I always thought a lot of Nickelback songs sounded the same. I guess someone else did too, and their proof is funny. Requires sound.

Wow, Monday mornings suck. Any day back to work after a long weekend (I took last Friday off) always hurts, but today we are really busy. Updates/links/whatever to follow later on if things slow down enough to allow time for it. Somebody get me a fire extinguisher, my hair is on fire...

It's Wednesday, which mean's it's The Onion day.

The Autobahn isn't moving too fast.

Just because I haven't seen it in ages...It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time! Don't miss the alternate versions in there!

Milk doesn't always do a body good.

This guy would have been the life of the party.

I've never liked Michael Moore. I think his attempts to shock and mess with people smack more of Marilyn Manson than any intelligent human being. So I think that this item from Ray Bradbury describes him quite well.

Those four day weekends go too fast. Skiing at Tyrol Basin was actually quite good! A bit crowded, but the snow was nice, especially for June!

We saw the new Harry Potter movie Saturday night. You can definitely tell that there's a new director here, several things were changed, from the look of the castle to where things were on the grounds, but the effects were great and it was a lot of fun. They left even more from the books out that in the first two movies, which was a bit dissapointing, but all in all it was still a very good movie.

If you like playing poker at Ho-Chunk, get it in now, because after this month you'll have to play elsewhere.

Seven hours in a strip club would be pretty pricey, but this is just disturbing.

Garcon, there's a mouse in my soup.

An Aussie surfer chick wins Miss Universe. Too bad Kwame from The Apprentice got Fired and missed all the action.

All about blogging.

I know Texas is warm, but still...

A Minneapolis demolition derby by two 10 year olds.

Wow, what a weekend. We got lucky and barely got rained on, and played a whole lot of disc golf. Maybe too much, I might need to give my arm a bit of a rest if I want to try to compete in the Baraboo Open. 8-) On the non-discing side, I don't think the women did too much damage at the Mall of America, but I guess we'll see when the credit card bill comes lol. The drive back from the twin cities was nice, we took the scenic route down along the Mississippi River instead of the slightly faster interstate. All in all, a good time.

Only three more days until the new Harry Potter movie. The third book is when things really started getting good, so I'm really looking forward to this one.

And now it's back to the weekly grind...