Now What?

Still a bit out of sorts and malaiseical from recent events. Trying to avoid more yammering about it, as the yammering adds nothing at this point.

At some point last week I picked up a nail in the front passenger tire of my truck, came out to hop into it and runs some errands, and it was flat as could be. With ScurvyWife largely out of commission from sinus surgery, I just drove her car around for a few days, finally getting around to changing out the flat towards the end of the week. A local tire place fixed it for free, so Saturday I took it back in to get the tire torqued on tighter and had them change the oil, as it needed it and hey, if you fix my flat for free I'm happy to throw some business your way. Total charge for the full service oil change? $10.63. Who says living in small towns in the country sucks?

The funniest part is that they were swamped when I took it in and the guy said it'd be 1.5 hours before it was done. I didn't really want to call ScurvyWife to come fetch me as she was still a bit out of it, and didn't feel like sitting around the shop for that long. So I walked home. ScurvyWife seemed to think that was the funniest thing she had ever heard of, especially when she looked out the window to see me bopping along down the street, but it only took me half an hour or so, it was reasonably cool and nice outside, and, hey, wow, exercise.

Played a goodly amount of poker this weekend, largely heads-up 10/20 LHE. Heads-up LHE is an odd game, if you're both reasonably savvy. Ryan expressed it much better than I can in his Suicide Pact Posts I and II (and then conveniently abandoned the conclusion and left everyone hanging), but I'd forgotten the odd nature of heads-up/extremely shorthanded play. It often resolves itself into extremely aggressive action where the loser is the first person to blink, as the distribution of cards is always random. By that I mean you often spar back and forth and fairly quickly establish the parameters for the encounter, as far as K high being more than enough to bet all of the way to the river, third pair on the flop being worthy of a 3-bet, etc. After that it's simply a matter of not blinking, no matter what.

What I'm learning, I suppose, is that it really is a zero sum game in many cases, if you both know what you're doing. It's also a game of extremely high variance, as you're inevitably shoveling much money into the pot when certain conditions are met, and it only takes four or five pots not going your way to post a hefty loss for the session. That's not to say you won't post big wins, even against an opponent that you have no edge against, as you will, but you'll also post big losses that are largely unavoidable, due to the random distribution of cards.

My simple point is that I've been doing well at the shorthanded games, and I think a reasonably significant factor is that I'll just bail on a session when it becomes apparent that I have no edge., even if that means, gasp, not playing at all if no other decent games are available. It's the most obvious of obvious points but table selection becomes pretty damn important when there are just two of you sitting at the table.

Suffered a two outer at the day job last week, too, as we're getting a new immediate boss, which was finally announced and of course it's one of the people I was actively hoping and praying wouldn't get the position, so boo to that. Trying to keep my head in a decent place in regards to HyperMegaGlobalCorp, especially with my supplemental happy-fun income outside work drying up for now, but it's been kind of hard of late. The life of a cube monkey is definitely an easy one, but far from the way a monkey should live his or her life. I'm probably locked into staying until early 2007, but it's time to start seriously planning an escape route, as I'll go nuts if I continue to spend one-third of my daily life completely and utterly bored out of my gourd, surrounded by incompetent, petty people.