OK, since it's been roughly seven weeks since my last blog, I'll consider this whole blogging affair a "sometimes thing". I've already cashed out from Empire with my $75 from my $50 investment and promptly lost the rest of the money. Oh well, easy come...

I hadn't been on PartyPoker for a few months and they decided to send me $20 just for living. Oh, and they're insisting that I play 150 raked hands or they threatened to take it back. I used the $20 plus $2 I still had in my account to pay for a quick $10+1 Omaha hi/lo SNG, which I promptly won to add $50 to my account. So, I'm still waffling on whether or not I'll play the 150 raked hands or just let them take their $20 stake back. I'll probably go into the Omaha .50/1 rooms again, but I really despise the Party/Empire interface which strikes me as being terribly infantile.

My stake in UltimateBet has been hovering around the $80 mark, which is what I deposited about six months ago. I just haven't really been motivated to play a lot of poker lately, what with Little League three times a week and various family issues... specifically, my mother-in-law's recent passing and my father's Alzheimers.

My mother-in-law died last week. My wife (Laurie) had been spending a lot of time flying back and forth from the Bay Area to SoCal to help take care of her increasingly sick mother, and now she is spending a lot of time in SoCal to help settle the estate. That means that I've been playing Mr. Mom to the kids, driving them to every baseball practice and game, every dance practice, every school function, every-frickin-thing you can imagine. It's rough, and I can't even imagine how truly single parents can do it.

My mother-in-law was a hoot, a bridge-playing fiend who was one of the most pushy broads you'd ever want to meet. She adored her grandkids (my kids) and treated her kids and in-laws as necessary evils. She would yell about towels being hung up improperly, cups without coasters, pictures out of order, almost anything... I chose not to speak up at her graveside funeral for fear of choking up, but I can put a lot of what I wanted to say right here.

"I had an evolving relationship with Audrey. I started out as "that Todd", progressed to "that jackass that took Laurie away", to "that guy who yells at my grandkids too much", and finally to "my favorite son-in-law". Of course, I'm her only son-in-law, but I took that as a compliment.

I told my son a long time ago that if he was looking at a pretty girl, he should really look at the mother, because that's what the girl is going to look like in thirty years. Well, I saw Laurie and was dazzled. I saw Audrey and thought "Damn, she looks pretty good for her age". If Laurie is like Audrey in forty years, well, then my theory holds true, and I made the right choice."

Peace and love to you, Audrey... I mean, Mom.