Bacon-ticipation

Good morning and Happy Monday to all you cube-dwellers out there who chose to be here instead of working. That's right--Stick it to The Man!

I hope everyone had a good weekend. Mine was long--I did about 24 hours straight on Saturday, slept all day Sunday, went out on Sunday night, and now I'm home, thinking about breakfast. And bacon, eggs, grits, toast, and coffee is sounding pretty damn good right now.

While I got quite a bit of housework done yesterday afternoon, those damn crappy tortillas did a number on me--I felt kinda sick after eating them. You've been warned--do not eat the flavored Mission tortillas. They are evil and taste like shiat. So once I cleaned up the kitchen and watched some SportsCenter, I made a couple of calls and then laid down for a bit. Unsurprisingly, I fell asleep for a couple of hours, waking up around midnight.

Fully rested, with no place to be and an extra hundred dollars in my pocket, I called my buddy who was working the floor last night in the poker room. He said there was a juicy game going on, full of people who I regularly pound on. So I told him I'd be down in about 15 minutes.

The game was a good one, but I lost $39 on my first hand when I flopped a straight, but one of my opponents went runner-runner and picked me off with a higher straight. Not a good start. Also, there was one other guy at the table who I've never seen in the poker room before, but I remember him from my days in the pit way back when. Luckily, I hardly ever had to deal to him because I was always dealing Pai Gow in Chinatown, but he had a distasteful reputation with the blackjack crew as somebody who always smelled really bad and also never tipped. Falcon Rob knows him--I think he used to call him 'Edgar Winter', which was about the nicest nickname he earned from the casino staff.

Anyhow, this guy was a horrible player, and it was my mission to take every dime off of him and be a hero to my former co-workers out in the pit. I started out pretty well after my initial beat-down. After about an hour, 'E-dub' was down about three racks, and I was up $66. Hell, even one of the dealers who *never* plays got in the game after her shift ended, just because the guy was so bad (and he was stiffing the dealers every time he managed to win a pot, too, so I'm sure that provided some motivation).

The problem was, I was either card-dead or catching a never-ending string of second-place hands. Twice I flopped straights, both times I got rivered. A couple of times I turned top-two, only to lose to a set on the river. It was ugly. And three times in the span of twenty minutes or so, the smelly guy re-raised with a three or four-outer gutshot draw, and hit all three times! It was amazing. The dude went from being stuck over $400 to having almost $500 in front of him because everyone was gunning for him and giving action. He just happened to get absolutely run over by the deck--he caught every card he needed for over an hour straight.

On my last hand of the night, I had pocket nines, and the pot had $105 and seven-way action preflop. I caught a set, and my neighbor caught a set of fours, so the battle was on. The 'well groomed gentleman in the seven seat' kept re-raising with Jack-nothing and raked a $200+ pot when he made another inside straight on the river. I swear, it was like he was fooling around with the Matrix, stopping time, setting the deck after the turn, and then sitting back down...

I gave up after that, losing all of my profit plus my hundred-dollar buy-in. I just couldn't beat somebody who was that lucky.

Oh well, I guess I'm back to where I was before Saturday night... But it sure would've been nice to snap that guy off. I've *never* seen anyone run that lucky before.

Anyhow, after I gave up on that endeavor, I sat around shootin' the shiat with the floorman for a bit, but then headed out to do some shopping. I went over to Walmart to get all the goods for making a batch of spaghetti (and I just realized I forgot the Parmesan cheese, dammit), but also bought a few more household items--a new set of real glasses, so I don't have to keep drinking out of plastic cups, and a really nice 8-quart T-Fal stockpot.

Of course, the first thing I'm gonna do is boil water in it for my spaghetti noodles, but it's so nice that I want to make some actual, you know, stock with it. But I don't have any bones on hand, and onions are the only aromatics I've got in the veggie crisper. Eventually I'll get there--a good stock needs about a week's worth of leftovers, anyways. But then the question arises--what would I do with a bowl of stock? I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there, but for right now, I just want to make some bacon and eggs for breakfast. Later this afternoon, I'll bust out my Italian kung-fu and make The Mother of All Spaghetti.

Mikey