Now I remember why the rest of the world hates Mondays. First of all, it's only 9:30 in the morning, when I *should* be sleeping, but of course there are a few maintenance guys outside my building with their leaf blowers doing a wonderful job of pushing the leaves around. And there is some other jackass sitting out in the parking lot a few buildings down honking his horn over and over again trying to get somebody to come outside. No, it's not the programmed honking of a car alarm, it's a one-note symphony of frustration that he keeps repeating. Nice.
And since I can't sleep, I thought I'd get up, make a pot of coffee (check), take the laptop out to the living room (check), and do some writing/surfing/blogging while watching SportsCenter from last night. Well, I found out that I can *watch* tv, I just can't hear it. Something is amiss in our surround sound system, and there is no signal reaching the speaker output. Oh, the speakers are fine--the test tone is working, and it plays dvds and cds just dandy. But TV audio seems to be out of the question. That is extremely frustrating, and before I go and push too many buttons, I'll have to have Falcon Rob take a look at it--it's his system, after all. But he's still asleep, although I'm sure he'll be getting up soon as he has to got to work in an hour or so.
Otherwise, no TV today. I can't even watch anything that I've recorded on the DVR--no sound there, either. That pisses me off.
I can still watch the regular non-HD tv, but there is no digital cable involved, so the channel selection is limited, along with the fact that I can't watch all the stuff on my DVR list. Just last night I recorded March of the Penguins, having never seen it before, and was hoping to catch it this afternoon. Not gonna happen unless Rob works his mojo on the system before he leaves for the casino.
I guess, on the plus side, if there is no sound available, I won't watch a bit of TV today and will get all kinds of stuff done. I have a huge pile of clean laundry sitting at the foot of my bed that needs to be folded/hung/put away, my desk could use a little bit of cleaning and organizing, and I need to work on a spreadsheet to track my tokes this year.
For the past two years, I've written down my tokes in a pocket calendar that I've carried around with me, but that is a hassle--it seems to fall out of my pocket every night at some point, either in the pit, in the dining room, or even worse--in the can. And I could only look at one week at a time--not the easiest for comparison or tracking purposes. So I made a point *not* to buy another pocket calendar this year, and I've been writing down my tokes on post-it notes and carrying them around in my wallet for two weeks. Today I'm going to finally get the spreadsheet done so I can see exactly what I'm making every week versus what I give up by taking an hour early out here and there.
The casino biz has slowed waaaay down in the past year. None of the dealers in Vegas, no matter where they work, made as much in 2007 as they did in 2006. My earnings were down about $3500 for the year, and I'm *sure* that at least a thousand of that was due to taking off an hour or two early every other Monday. If I'm tracking it every day, and seeing on a weekly basis what I'm leaving on the table, it'll be much easier to say no when the bosses come around late at night asking me if I want to go home.
Last night, for example, was so frickin' slow in the casino, it was like working in a library in a town full of illiterates. I only had one player after midnight, and my last hour and a half I sat on a completely dead table, staring off into space. What made it even worse is that my game faced away from the bar and the rest of the pit, so I didn't have a TV or any people to watch. And since the games on either side of me were already closed, I was out in No Man's Land. And because there were no players nearby, even the cocktail waitresses wouldn't walk over. It was like being in solitary confinement, except that instead of bare gray walls to stare at, I had flashing neon lights from the empty slot machines.
And the boss in charge of the roadmap wouldn't close any of the games on my string, either, so I sat there for an hour straight, alone with my thoughts. The only actual work I did during those last two hours was help close a reserved dice table. But then again, it only took me about three minutes to count down $279,000 worth of gaming chips, get it verified, and then screw down and lock the lid. After that, there was nothing left to do, so I hung out by the time clock for ten minutes or so waiting until my last hour was "official" before heading out the door.
Have I mentioned that it's still freezing-ass cold here in Vegas? Well, when I got off the elevator on the top floor of the parking garage, I turned the corner and got hit full-on with a 25-mph blast of icy cold air. "Blustery" was the only word I can use to describe it. And while I know we've got nothing on those hearty souls in Green Bay and Chicago, it is pure misery for us thin-blooded desert-dwellers. Seriously, this below-freezing nonsense has just got to stop at some point. Global warming, my frigid white ass... And the wind was so bad that it was blowing my truck all over the road on the way home.
But I made it back to the apartment without incident, and hustled inside as quickly as I could. After a hot shower, I went straight to bed, curled up under a comforter and my sleeping bag.
Apparently, sitting around and doing nothing all night just drained me.
Mikey
UPDATE:
The digital demons have been exorcised from the surround sound system. A 20-minute call to Cox Tech Support, where I ended up unplugging the HD box and rebooting it twice seems to have been all we needed to do. Yay, sound!
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