Argh, Ye Scurvy Guvnor!

You have to love the odd phenomenon that is college football. Only strange humanoids such as ourselves could create such a baffling monster, equal parts straightforward, exciting, and utterly non-sensical.

I absolutely love the fact that nearly every year we end up in this same predicament, debating the pros and cons of a playoff system, dancing around the almighty dollar, before finally proclaiming it all good, and that the controversy as to who should play for the national title is just a fluky, one-time aberration, and that the current bowl system (cha-ching$$$) is super. Because, you know, college football is about making sure that the players get an education. Yep.

Besides, it's a great system, and it's just this one year that things are wacky and fans and teams are pissed. What, you remember this happening in other years? Go eat the last of the leftover turkey and stuffing, Tubs, and cram those memories right out of your head.

In the category of letters I never, ever thought I'd write:

Dear Miss Spears,

For the love of Jebus, choose one of the options below:

1) Wear panties.

or

2) Keep your legs closed.

Your biggest fan,
Me

We went to see a TXRD roller derby match last night, which was pretty entertaining. ScurvyWife works with a girl on one of the teams, which was the main reason we went, but I'd been meaning to go for years. I thought it was a pretty decent turnout for a cold Sunday night in Austin, so I guess the roller derby scene in Austin is still kicking.

Last Friday night we dropped by the Lockhart town square, as they were having a "Dickens Christmas" weekend, with food and booths set up with people hawking Christmasy stuff. We found a gift for my dad and stepmom but the pickings were pretty slim, as it was more of a sell-cheap-imported-crap thing than a craft fair, as it was advertised. We were about to take off when I noticed a bunch of, umm, pirates heading our way, yelling non-sensical pirate-isms. So we sort of stood there as twenty or so high-school age kids streamed by, all dressed up as, umm, pirates. I was trying to remember if there was a less popular Dickens book that was about pirates (A Scurvy Christmas?) when one of them handed me a flyer advertising some upcoming Renaissance festival type thing, but with a pirate theme. Which made it all a little more sensical. Well, sort of.

Poker, poker, poker... I've been playing some FPP satellites to the PCA event at PokerStars of late, mostly the 1000 FPP ones. Bumped up my FPP total to about 40,000 but I haven't had a chance to playing in either the 15,000/10,000 FPP events that pay 1/3 trip packages. Got fairly deep in a few $50-$100 buy-in tourneys, but only ended up with relatively baby cashes. AA didn't stand a chance versus 810s in one and KK couldn't hold up against A3o in the other. You know, standard.

I've pretty much cashed out my accounts, so I'm not sure what the poker future holds, at least for online play. My heart hasn't been in it for awhile and now my head and motivation have fled south for the border, as well. I'm basically a break-even player at best these days, but impatience is ruling the land and sea and leading to poor play.

I've been painting myself into an un-fun poker corner for awhile now, where I almost resent the time it soaks up, putting pressure on myself to justify the time expenditure by producing a certain amount of dollars, etc. Which I either manage to do (whew) or fail to do (bah). Perceptive readers will notice that there's no (whee) in that equation, just relief and pissed-offed-ness. Which probably is doomed to fall apart in the long run.

So what am I gonna do with all that free time, assuming that I do indeed manage to stay off the online poker crack pipe? I'm honestly not sure. Although the whole Nano thing ground to a halt pretty quickly, it did get me writing a bit again, at least enough to reawaken the residual guilt that I've never really given writing a shot. I can't get too stoked about the idea of writing more literary fiction like in grad school, as I think the world is pretty full up on that, but there's no reason not to get off my ass and write some detective novels. None at all. And yeah, odds are great that anything written will join the 99% of manuscripts that sit around in desk drawers, gathering dust, but at least I'll have given it a shot.

I need to be better about staying ahead of the curve, too, as far as projects around the house. I'm pretty good about staying busy, but I need to keep in mind that plans change and sometime opportunities arise that you can't really pass up. I got caught a bit unprepared by the timing of buying the new house here in Lockhart, as I was working under the assumption that I'd still have a year or two to finish up what I wanted to do on the Austin house (renovate the kitchen and bathrooms), and I don't want to make the same mistake here. We're planning on living in this house for quite awhile, and it'd be perfectly reasonably to plan out assorted projects over the next five years. But if I can bust my ass and do it all within a year or two, well, that's pretty much equivalent to money in the bank, even if I don't see it for awhile.

I'll likely also spend more time making artsy and/or fartsy stuff. I've had a lot of fun with the metalcasting stuff of late, and I think a big reason is that it forces me out of my recent mindset of almost unconsciously performing a cost analysis on anything I do. Yeah, money is nice, and I'll probably always be cooking up assorted schemes and plans to escape the 9-5 day job rat race, but always viewing things through the lens of whether it's a profitable use of my time is a pretty damn dreary way of living life. Aside from the fact that if I look back on the assorted things I've done in life that have made me money, most of them didn't originally stem from a blatant attempt to make money. This here poker blog has been pretty damn profitable but making money was the last thing I ever expected from it, when I started it up back in the realtive days of yore.

Not to continue the bashing of poor poker, but it's also pretty sobering to think I spent a few hours making my mom a candle holder cast from aluminum for Christmas, which she seemed to like, and will keep around the house, with it continuing to spark feelings of happiness for quite awhile. Contrast something as simple as that with all of the hours consumed by online poker in the last few years, and the tangible happiness that was created by that, for someone other than myself. I can't think of much, other than funding some trips to Vegas for ScurvyWife and myself and the happiness of socking away some money in the bank. I mean, yeah, true, I enjoyed playing poker a lot of that time, so there is a goodly amount of self-pleasure, but jerking off is fun, too, and just as impermanent.