Where's Summer?

It's been entirely too frickin cold out here for this to be considered a summer. I don't think we've had one 90 degree day YET here in beautiful, exotic northern Wisconsin. We certainly haven't seen 80 degrees in the last 3 weeks, and except for today, we haven't had any appreciable rain since June. Now, I'm not a huge fan of constant 90 degree days for weeks straight, but I would at least like to see some evidence of this whole "global warming" thing everyone is going ape about. For now, I'd wager the opposite; we're heading for another ice age.

So, since I managed to miss out on the Blogger Tourney that wasn't (I thought I was going to be busy on Sunday.. I wasn't), I hopped on the $5 mega-multitable on Party, along with almost 1400 others. First hand, I'm in MP and look down to see AA. Hmmmm.... Hero or goat time on the first deal. Go figure. 3x the BB gets 4 callers and the flop comes with my set A and two clubs. Checked around, and I bet half the pot to keep people in. I lose one and we're three to the turn, which is the third club. Suddenly EP wakes up and throws a half pot bet in. I just KNOW he's hit his flush, but I've still got a whole boatload of outs so I call. The river is a beautiful 4 to pair the board and fill my boat. EP shoots out another half pot bet and I shove. He insta-calls and I double up on the first hand.

About 10 hands later I hit a flush on the turn and scrape another monster pot and I find myself with a healthy lead early. I do reasonably well, but still manage to bust out 78th when my cards dry up and the blinds are huge. My last act was to shove in the face of an all-in from the CO from the BB with 77. The good news is, I did isolate him, the bad news was he flipped over AA, and it was all over but the crying. It's frustrating to make only $14 in profit for over 3 hours of work, but I do like the multi-table tourneys.

I think the grinding at the 50/1 is doing well, though again I don't have any idea, since I cover my stacks and I am only checking my balance every week or so. I really think this is helping to get my game back to an even keel. I have no idea whether I'm up or down, and when I'm multi-tabling, without the stacks to remind me, I don't linger on bad beats or wins too long. The next hand is waiting for me.

This has also been helping my home life. I would get way too upset when I got brutalized because I would know just how brutalized I was. I still have bad days, but I don't have any idea HOW bad of a day I had. I just sort of take it as it comes. Likewise, if I have a great run at one of the tables, I don't feel inclined to push edges and make loose calls.

It's impossible to be results oriented when you don't know your results.

So, the grind goes on.

In other news, my wife and I had a rare day off together yesterday. Couple that with a very good month on the money front and suddenly we had some disposible income, so we went out for a day on the town. Anyway, we're driving down the road and I see a guitar shop I wanted to go to earlier but it was closed last I went there. It was open now, and I wanted to look for an electric guitar, so we stopped.

Now, as an aside, I'm a lefty. Apparently, unless I go Jimi Hendrix and just string the guitar upside down, I'm pretty much screwed. If I want a left handed guitar I'll have to order one. Sounds expensive.

Okay, so we're in there and I get to talking to the guy in there about, well, guitars. Now, I know just about dick about guitars. I have one. I've had it for 10 years and have played it not much at all until recently. So this guy starts asking me questions about what sort of guitar I want and what style music I'm looking to play. Dude, I don't friggin know! I want a guitar that sounds decent and won't break me financially! Who do I want to sound like? Yngwie Fucking Malmsteen, but I'm about, oh, 15 years of constant playing away from that, so let's stick to "I'd like to get through 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' without screwing up more then twice". The conversation gets to lessons, and I mention that I've been using EGuitar Method vol 1, which is good, but I think that now that I've figured out how to make some somewhat passable sounds on this thing I might benefit from some live lessons, so I sign up for the guy there and am now taking lessons once a week. We'll see how it goes. I was a music major in college and was heavy into theory and performance. This seemed to really catch this guys attention and I got the impression that he and I are going to have some long sessions talking over theory. Hopefully he and I get along well. The last guitar teacher I had really didn't gel with me. Hopefully this guy and I will. We shall see.