This is Not a Post About Doom and/or Gloom

I've been working my ass off pretty consistently for the last three or four weeks, which feels surprisingly good. Still plugging away over at the affiliate marketing site, and I've managed to launch two or three new sites as well, on top of movnig all of my web stuff over to a dedicated hosting package and getting that up and running.

I was actually perilously close to saying the hell with the affiliate stuff for awhile there, not willing to summon upon the energy to start rebuilding things from virtually scratch, but I'm glad I managed to grit my teeth and power on. Even though a lot of the stuff I crank out is shilly and not that embiggening for the Internet tubes as a whole, it's work I enjoy, and I find the whole affiliate model pretty fascinating in general, especially when using programs like Google Adsense.

The day job has also, miraculously, slightly improved. We managed to dodge the layoff bullet in our department, for the most part, and even though we reorganized yet again and I have a new boss (I'm on my fifth new boss in the last 12 months; some co-workers have had 7 or 8 bosses in the last year), new boss has been there for forever and actually has a soul, and, better yet, at least a tiny desire to show empathy towards her direct reports and make their lives easier, when she can.

I still waffle, pretty much daily, on whether I should stay there or leave. I see more and more SEO type jobs cropping up, which are completely and utterly in my wheelhouse, and most would involve at least a 50% salary increase. Which would be nice, but I basically only work 30 hours a week as it is and only have to be in the office three days of the week. People also completely leave me the hell alone, my phone never rings, and I can sit at my keyboard and type away at anything I want. It'd be nice to get a much juicier check come pay day but it'd also mean 50+ hour weeks, no telecommuting, and a lot more talking to people.

Still scouting around for real estate investments and meeting with our realtor on Monday to look at 5-6 new listings, but so far I haven't found much to get too excited about. Which isn't the worst thing in the world, as it buys me more time to chip away at projects around the house. Things are likely to get pretty hectic in the spring, as we're looking to sell the Austin house around that time, so anything I can knock out of the way now is good.

As far as poker, I'm rolling around the idea of playing a couple of smaller WSOP events, probably towards the end of June. The timing may not work, for all the obvious reasons, but assuming we can sell either the Austin house or unknown property that I buy soon and rehab (and making the further assumption that we make a goodly amount of extra scratch upon sale) before then, I like the idea of rewarding myself with getting to play in a couple of $1,500 events. Whether my wife likes the idea remains to be seen, but I think she will, as she's actually been encouraging me to buy into one regardless, so we'll see. I'd definitely go the NL route this time, as the Limit event I played last year was like slow, slow torture.

I've been playing some FPP satellites to the EPT events on Stars, mainly just to kill time while doing other work. I haven't been able to play in any of the ones I managed to satellite into, so I just cash out the FPPs, with about 30K of them sitting in my account now. Not sure what I'll do with them, as I have no desire to repeat my performance from last year, playing about 15 hours to finish 3rd in a mega FPP satellite to the Main Event that paid the top two spots trip packages. These things are pretty crapshootastic and no one will ever fold anything, but it's pretty easy to bide your time and just play simple, non-lemur poker and usually at least get fairly deep.