Incommunicado

Wow... Has it been three days already? Man, I guess time flies even when you aren't having fun. Regardless of the amount of fun I'm not having, it's been a busy week for me. Of course the obligations of working in the casino have drained most of my energy, causing me to spend most of my off-time recharging the old batteries by just lying in bed reading.

The good news is, I've finally paid off the Clark County Justice Court, done my five-hour sentence of online traffic school (no getting around that requirement--after each section, it would tell me that I have something like 22 minutes more I should be reading and reviewing before I could go on to the next page. Ugh.), and my clean driving record, as far as the DMV and insurance company goes, remains intact. No tickets or accidents for the past ten years. Truth be told, I've had two speeding tickets in the past six years, but a couple of days in traffic school has wiped my driving record cleaner than a teenage shoplifter's rapsheet on his 18th birthday. Of course, it wasn't quite painless--It still cost me $175, which I really can't afford this month, but The Man insists on being paid.

But that's how I spent my Thursday.

Wednesday night was a lot of fun. Rob talked me into going with him over to his old roommate's house for the evening. His old roommate, Chris, and his buddies have assembled a half-sized one-ended dice table in their dining room to practice dealing on, and host the occasional five-cent game. The lure of free canned beer and five-cent dice somewhere other than Boulder Highway was too strong to resist, so we spent several hours over there laughing it up. And of course I had two absolutely EPIC rolls, which I wish I could've saved for a real casino, because I turned a ten-dollar buy-in into fifty bucks. Yep, I made forty bucks on the dice table, a nickel at a time. Pretty much killed their seed-money bankroll, too. Heh. But thinking about that roll and fantasizing about moving the decimal point will drive me almost nuts, so I'm just happy that I could afford to stop for a burrito on the way home and pay for it with house money, with a little left over for some non-canned beer.

I've always thought it would be a pain in the ass and waste of perfectly good space to have a dice table in your dining room while living here in Vegas, but the honest truth is that since they've put it in, they've stopped going to the casino at night, thereby saving hundreds of dollars that would've easily been lost to the big boys on the strip. I guess that makes perfect sense, and it's more socially acceptable than holing up in their rooms and playing World of Warcraft for days on end.

Last night at work was a lot of fun. I saw a very deserving old drunk loser get his ass beat to a bloody pulp. He picked a fight with the wrong dude (half his age and strapped) and got dropped like an annoying girlfriend. Blood, smashed glasses, tossed out by security--he pretty much hit the dumbass trifecta last night, and I could barely contain my enjoyment while watching it happen. And his nasty wife got tossed, too, which was just the cherry on top of the Sundae when all was said and done.

On top of all that, I managed to snag the half-hour early push, so I was on the road home by 2:30 am. I stopped to top off the gas tank, wash the truck, and get some groceries. Once I got home and put everything away, I was tempted to hit the jacuzzi for a half-hour or so, but decided against it. I stayed up surfing the net for a bit before calling it a night and hitting the blob for a good six hours of sleep before being awakened by my goofy sister Amy.

I haven't talked to her in about a month, but it was nice to catch up--she's coming out to Vegas in October for a long weekend, and we're thinking of hitting the Jimmy Buffett concert at MGM. Of course, tickets have long been sold out, and the nosebleed seats are going for $175 or so on the scalper market. Most I've ever paid was fifty bucks, so I either have to stop buying groceries and gas for a couple of months, or do something creative here in this sunny place full of shady people to earn some extra cash... Hmmm...

Anyhow--It's time to do another load of laundry, fold the clean clothes, run the dishwasher, and prepare myself for another evening calling the action behind the green felt tables. I've been working on my Down goes Frazier! all afternoon.

Mikey