I'm on my way back to Vegas soon! And I'm going to win big when I get there...
Okay, so maybe that's not really true. However, I did win money last night playing poker with the guys. Came in 3rd in a tournament of 7 guys playing no-limit hold 'em. 3rd place paid 20% of the pot, which ended up being $36. So, I made a whopping $16! Still, better than going home empty handed I suppose. It's just frustrating given that I had the chip lead most of the night and had it all the way into the money too when it was down to the last 3 people.
I decided to make a tough call on someone's all-in that cost me the chip lead and sealed my fate. I had suited jack-nine in hand and both were higher than anything on the table through the turn card with no pairs on the board. So, I had a high pair draw on the jack or the nine and a flush draw on the river card.... against probably a low pair (and possibly a three of a kind on a pocket pair and an equal flush draw I suppose). Turns out it was the low pair when we turned them over... so on the river all I needed was a jack, a nine, or a diamond. Didn't get it and that was the start of the end for me. Which was really frustrating given the fact that the other two guys in the last three at the table had 3 total hands of all-in where the short stack doubled up instead of being knocked out. If any of those 3 hands would have knocked one of them out, I'd have been guaranteed either $54 or $90 for 2nd or 1st place respectively.
Still, it was a fun night... dragged myself in at 1:15am last night and slept until 11:15am this morning. Always fun.
Other than that, absolutely nothing's been going on here. Hence the complete lack of updates lately. Work's been crazy... we've been spec'ing out new servers to move forward with getting rid of our Novell network stuff and move to a Microsoft domain. Everyone on campus is switching to a single Microsoft forest and single domain over the next couple years. Robert and I went to day-long meetings Monday through Thursday last week actually at UTS on campus to discuss the plans at USC. We've decided that until then since we really need to do something right now that we would go ahead and be last in that migration and move forward with our own setup for the next few years instead. Between that and a bunch of requests coming in lately and a group of ours moving across town to a new remote location, we've been kept pretty busy.
As for today I'm not sure what we're going to do. Probably just stuff around the house. We were going to swing by the Island out on the lake today to say hey to some of the guys from the Gamecock message boards that are camping out there this weekend like we did last year this time. But between getting a late start to the day and trying to save some money lately, I think those plans are nixed. Besides, it's something like 96 degrees outside today... I don't see how they're camping in that kind of weather.
Who knows, maybe we'll go somewhere tonight and spend my big time winnings.
Last night we went out to Finlay Park in Columbia for the free Summer Concert Series. Tokyo Joe was playing and Brian and Debra asked if we wanted to go... Debra went to high school with one of the guys in the band. They're a good group, nice sound... they play a lot of cover music, which I prefer, but even their own material from their 4 CDs sounded great.
I bought a new ring tonight... feels too strange without one.
I looked into a lot of different options... platinum like I had before, white gold, titanium, etc. Decided on Tungsten. It's slightly more dense than platinum, so it'll have the weight and substance my old ring had, only it's a harder metal and is very difficult to scratch and scuff. Priced a little lower than platinum too, so that's always nice.
Here's a picture of the new ring:
Now, whether it'll look good in person when it's delivered early next week is a whole other story... the ones I saw in-store tonight were nice though, so it should look all right. If not, the site I bought it from is a reputable one and has a full refund guarantee if I don't like it.
Well, the 4th of July here had it's ups and downs. The party was certainly fun and the fireworks were great. Only one minor burn on my hand from something that fell out of the sky as one of the larger cakes was going off. It left a hole and a blister around the size of a dime on my right hand, but nothing too bad.
The burn wasn't a big deal though compared to losing my wedding ring in the lake while tubing. Some diver might find a nice chunk of platinum at the bottom of Lake Murray someday. Though I doubt it because the lake is too dark and the bottom isn't smooth, it's an old flooded valley. Expensive lesson to learn I suppose.
The rest of the day was great. They have a nice house on the lake and a great Yamaha boat... similar to the kind I'd like to get one day, just a different model from Yamaha. There was a decent sized crowd there, many of whom we didn't know at all.
Anyway, click on the firework for my gallery of pictures from yesterday. We were so close to the fireworks that even my widest lens (18mm) didn't get all the shots in frame, but I think the shots of the fireworks turned out a whole lot better than in past years when I had a point-and-shoot digital camera.
We're just getting things ready this morning... Christina's making some German potato salad and a rum cake to bring over with us tonight. She made the mistake of sending me out to the store this morning to get some chopped pecans... there are fireworks stands all over the place. So, I added to the arsenal:
Not a whole lot more really... the box there on the right has 6 canister style shots instead of the round ball shots found in many Roman candles, meaning the fireworks are much larger. In fact, looking at the size of the shot next to one of the ball shots in that Black Cat red, white, and blue box candle from the original photo shows how much bigger each one will be. The pair of double-shot smaller candles and the two spinners were free with purchase, so that was nice.
If it's not raining much, I plan on bringing the camera and seeing what kind of shots I can get of the fireworks. Should be a lot of fun!
We bought a handful of fireworks to bring over with us tomorrow and I've already joked about setting them off now. It's amazing what you can get here versus back in Michigan. In Michigan anything that launches or leaves the ground is illegal to sell. Doesn't mean people don't have other fireworks, just means that they bought them in another state.
Anyway, we bought one large 49-shot 'cake' as they're called, a couple of 2 to 3 foot tall Roman candles, and they threw in one smaller 7-shot cake for free and a couple of 2-hour long burning sticks:
Not a ton of fireworks, though the Roman candles are obviously lots of tubes, but since there'll probably be 10 or more people there, I have a feeling there will be plenty of fireworks overall. Dave said Thursday at the gym that they start just after dark and they're usually still blowing stuff up after midnight.
