Craptastic!!!

I'm staying the Hell out of ring games for the immediate future. Sat down and immediately started distributing my money to everyone else at the table. Bled $9 in about 20 minutes at the 50/1 table and I got up and ran away screaming like a girlie-man.

I have been having some luck at the S&G's, so I decided to try to recoup my losses there. Mixed results... I played four today. Results were 1st, 2nd, 4th and 7th.

7th. Turns out my ring game luck finally found out where I went. Nothing I got held up to anything. No real bad beats, really... Just such wonderful decision hands like A-6 suited or A-8 offsuit. I had gotten slapped around a bunch and was down to 250 or so in chips and the blinds ate me.

So my bankroll is $51. This sucks, because I really can't ride out the variance, and it also doesn't do anything for my psyche since I seem to be getting absolutely annihilated at the limit games.

I think I've gotten to the point in my game where it's time to back away until I can get my hands on a book or two. Lee Jones' Winning Low Limit Hold'Em comes highly recommended and it also deals with how to play at insanely loose tables. In the mean time, I think I'll just stick to the $6 sit and goes since, even though the profit margin on the $5 tables are a little thin, at this point any positive number is good, and since I can technically mitigate my losses to $6 an hour playing sit and goes, at least I won't be broke before Christmas!

My wife sat next to me and watched me play in a couple of the sit and goes. She generally doesn't like anything I enjoy, but she seemed to be getting into it a little bit. I was in a crabby mood though (because of the losses at the ring game) and it showed. Hopefully I didn't scare her off. She's great though. I've been under a bunch of stress lately and the fact that I'm grossly out of shape isn't helping any at all. Things should be getting a little bit better though. We voted a union in at work about 1 1/2 years ago and have been pounding out a contract since that time. I started work here last January, so I didn't get to see what all led up to it, but suffice to say no one at work has seen a raise in roughly 3 years. As a result, I make more then half of the people who work in my position, and I'm second from the bottom of the seniority list. Morale at work is bordering on mutiny, and word of the tentative agreement has everyone here cautiously optimistic. We shall see. In any event, of the 15 dispatchers we have at work now, I can name 4 with confidence who are actively looking for other work, and could estimate another 2 to 3 on top of that. If everyone manages to find something quickly, we are going to be fucked in legendary proportions, since it takes approximately 45 days from someone getting hired until they are desk qualified, and that's if everything goes perfect and the guys we bring in have experience both in dispatching and the system we use to do it.

Anyway, as I was saying, my wife is being a wonderful sport considering I've probably been a pain in the ass to live with lately. I really need to just get back my membership at the YMCA and start forcing myself to just go every day. I guess those in the know say that anything you do consistently (or stop doing completely) for 6 weeks turns into (or breaks) a habit. Well, I used to chew my nails. Did it since I figured out I could, and I finally made a conscious effort to stop doing it. Funny thing was, it wasn't even hard! Here I am 6 months later, and I have absolutely no desire to gnaw on my hands in spite of all the stress. I figure if I could do that, I could get into the habit of working out.

To help out, I picked up Bill Phillips' Body For Life some time ago. My problem is when I sit at work, I get the munchies. Most diet plans that restrict your caloric intake are no good for me because if I don't munch on something, I get crabby. Bill's plan has you eating specific portions 6 times a day. It got to the point where I had to eat a portion even when I wasn't hungry! I can deal with that, since I love food anyway... This is my problem. Trouble with Bill's program is in order for it to work, you have to also do the exercises program he has in there. The nice thing about it is it's only around 30 minutes a day. The bad thing is, I have to drive 20 minutes to get to the gym. This is the mental block I am running into, and it really is all that it is... A mental block. I spend over 2 hours a day doing nothing useful at home, so I might as well go make use of that time and get rid of this disgusting fatbody of mine.

Part of my motivation is a friend of mine... We'll call him Incubus, managed to lose a bunch of weight.

I gotta do it. This weight is killing me, physically and psychologically. There's gotta be an extra $20 a month somewhere I can extract for the YMCA membership. All I need to get the motivation to go is a 6 foot tall mirror right at the end of the bed so I can see my gut.

It'll get done or I'll die trying.

Now, if can just figure out how to stop my poker ship from it's dangerous list to port.