Recuperation

Taking the good doctor's advice, I've spent much of the past 36 hours in bed resting and drinking lots of fluids. And I feel much better. I haven't had to take much medicine and my cough is slowly breaking up. Unfortunately, today is slated to be a busy one, plus I have to work tonight, so I hope I don't have a relapse.

There's a few things I've been wanting to write about, but yesterday I basically slept all day instead of hanging out on the computer for hours on end. First of all, I had a great evening this past Tuesday, doing the limo ride down the Strip and having a great dinner. I even have a couple of pictures to share. So I've got to take care of that post, and also I need to write about the new Emperors Challenge Pai Gow game. In addition to that one, I'm learning a new one that makes it's debut in Vegas tonight at several properties, most notably my casino and also the Wynn. It's a player vs. dealer poker game, with the branding of the World Poker Tour name. I've forgotten the exact name of the game--it's something long and clumsy, but I'll report on it and the new pai gow variation at the same time.

Finally, my last visitor for a month or so is coming out this weekend, so hopefully after that I can buckle down and get things done. If I'm not feeling too sick on Monday, it's back to school. I really want to get a part time job for a couple of days during the week, maybe just enough to add another thousand bucks a month to the income. Also, the new schedule for next week should be out when I go into work tonight, and I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised with five days. I think that probably won't happen because the pay period doesn't end until next Sunday, and I can't imagine them bumping up a lot of people to full-time status in the middle of the pay period.

In a real downer this week, my bank has farked up for the third time. I went online yesterday to check to make sure all of the latest purchases have hit my account and saw that my checking account was now overdrawn almost $300. What the ....? Further investigation showed a direct debit of $350+ with the desription Florida Dues. I have no idea what that is, so I'm hoping it's just another bank error. But the real bummer is that the bank decided to hit me a couple of times at $27 a pop for overdraft fees. So I called them up and raised holy hell about it, and they are investigating. Now I'm waiting for an affidavit to arrive in the mail so I can sign it and get all of the money back until they finish the investigation, but that should still take almost a week, and they're telling me it'll take another ten business days to get everything squared away.

If I were writing messages for fortune cookies, today's words of wisdom would be FUCK WASHINGTON MUTUAL, your lucky numbers are 7, 11, 21, 23, 27, and 36.

I've had it with them. It seems that they've been closed one day a week since October, their computers are always down, I can't make deposits through their ATMs, and they can't even tell me the name of the company that pirated the $350 out of my account four days ago! Next middle-of-the-month payday I'm going to the credit union. Of course the pain in the ass will be changing my direct deposit over, so I doubt that I'll be able to totally escape their incompetent clutches until sometime in March.

As incompetent as the morons who run Washington Mutual are, I think they run a distant second to the folks in charge over at Compaq/HP. I've been wanting to buy a laptop for a few months now, but I've been rethinking it for the past several days. If I get a laptop, it would be a secondary device--I couldn't imagine using one as a primary computer. But the problem is that my current desktop computer is approaching 'Obsolete Piece of Shit' status. It's going on five years old, and runs on that horrid Windows Me operating system. I've also had to replace the hard drive and processor twice each, plus I have to make an annual trip to the electronics healers to debug the system and install patches. So it's time to retire it. And don't get me started on their ever-so-helpful tech support desk, where fluency in English doesn't seem to be a job requirement.

Besides, a new desktop computer would be cheaper than a laptop, and for the same price I can upgrade to a monster system with cool toys like a flat panel display and photo printer.

Time to take another look at that latest Dell catalog.

This will likely be my only post of the day--I've got a lot of stuff to do, so unless I'm feeling particularly motivated, this will be my last post until the weekend.

Mikey