Happy belated Holidays!

Since I haven’t officially “blogged” anything since last week, I want to wish you all a happy and safe holiday season…  a couple of days late.

Christmas for me tends to be a little haphazard.  We still congregate with my mom’s family AND my dad’s family on Christmas Eve, just like we did when I was a little Commish.  Since both families are primarily in the Bay Area, this becomes an exercise in driving and organization to make sure the right gifts get to the right homes.  

The driving started at 3pm on Saturday to my uncle’s (dad’s side) house in Palo Alto.  There we had a potluck dinner with all of the aunts and cousins cooking up their specialities.  Ham, scalloped potatoes, spam musubi (!), cheesy garlic bread, Chinese chicken salad… all of the traditional foods.  This was followed by my cousin’s incomparable chocolate cake (made from scratch) and coffee.  Then we had the kids open their gifts from the aunts and uncles (the cousins with kids made a deal long ago that we wouldn’t buy each others kids gifts).  And then came the now-traditional gift exchange (y’know, the one with stealing gifts and general hilarity… whoopee).

One side note: the Twenty Questions game is spooky good.  I showed everyone the online version, and while some played the handheld version, others clustered around the monitor to watch the 20Q engine figure out “wasabi” after sixteen guesses, “penguin” after seventeen, and many others leading my cousin to declare the game “The Devil in a box”.

Anyway, by now it was 830pm and time to head to my sister’s house where my mom’s side would gather.  My sister lives in Sunnyvale, so we packed up the gifts and leftovers and headed south.  Sound like a pain?  Well, it is.  Every freakin’ year.  So we run the same drill at my sister’s house.  Eat some more, kids open gifts, gift stealing exchange, this one ending around midnight.  I’ve railed against this late night torture for parents, and now that some of my younger cousins have toddlers, they’re beginning to see my point.  Exhausted kids are cranky kids.  Serves them right for not listening to me ten years ago.

Late Christmas Eve (or early Christmas morning, depending on how you look at it) at around 1am, I’m driving home.  My kids are watching a DVD in the backseat (one of my Xmas gifts to the family), and I’m totally beat.  By the time we’re back in Pleasanton and the kids are tucked away, it’s 2am.  Now my wife decides that she’ll fill the stockings, like the kids still believe in Santa.  Sigh.  

So what do I get for running around on Christmas Eve…  the flu.  I’ve been alternating chicken soup, Theraflu, and trips to the toilet for the past two days.  Whee.  I came back into work today.  My goals are threefold:

1. Just by showing up, they have to pay me for today, whether or not I stay.  This might not seem like a big deal, but when you know you’re laid off effective 12/31, every penny (or few hundred dollars) counts.

2. Get others sick.  Next week is the Worldwide Sales Meeting, a corporate cluster-fuck where they burn money like the Pentagon on a bender.  They lay me off, and a week later, they go golfing in Palm Springs.  Lovely.  Fuck that, I want them all to have the Hershey squirts while they’re there.  And no, I’m not bitter.

3. Clean out my office.  Since I don’t know how long I’ll stay on Friday, I want to get all my stuff cleared out ASAP.  If I wait until the last minute, I might not get all the stuff I want to take from here.  No, not office supplies, but over the last four years, I’ve toted a lot of shit here (pictures, business cards, training documentation) that is MINE, and I want to make sure I get it all.

-Mandatory Poker Content- One of the great things about online poker is that you can play when you’re sicker than a dog.  I fired up a couple of $20+2 SnGs at FullTilt over the weekend and carded a first and a third, bumping up my winnings enough to pay the freakin’ Donkeysucker for the fantasy football leagues he won.  Dick.

The closing hand last night was amusing.  I have a slim 5-4 lead in chips head-to-head with the blinds getting to the ridiculous stage.  I had a pretty good read on the guy and had been getting my money in at the right times.  He sucked out on me a couple of times and I sucked out on him (with proper pot odds for both of us), so we were pretty evenly matched.  I raised to 2xBB from the SB (standard) with AJs hoping for a push from him.  He kicked in a pot-size bet and I immediately pushed, putting him on a weak ace or king, but no big pair (which he would’ve slowplayed).  Sure enough he called with KJo and I had him dominated.  Uh, at least I did until the flop brought him KQ3.  The turn was a deflating King, and I was dead to a Ten.  And the river….?  TEN!  Not a suckout, because I got my money in with a big lead, but a nice miracle card anyway.  

I seem to have found a better footing now at FullTilt, cashing in about 50% of the tourneys there.  A lot of weak-tight players there mean continuation bets are often respected.  People seem to think that raises preflop indicate a face card and a bet into an ace-high board means you must have paired your aces.  Initiating a bet on a draw is often cold-called, meaning you can set your own pot odds.  Of course, this doesn’t always work because odds are odds, and not certainties.  I dropped a third of my stack chasing a nut flush draw that missed…  but I had pot odds.

Stay tuned this week for my end of NFL season review and the playoff preview.