I'm back

I arrived back in Las Vegas late last night after ten days in Washington, D.C. The time went by so fast it's kind of hard to remember what occupied it all. Cardgrrl and I exchanged Christmas gifts (she gave me a beautiful black cashmere sweater and a couple of books, I got her a much-needed bookcase and some games). We seemed to spend a lot of time grocery shopping, cooking for each other, eating, and cleaning up. We griped about the cold, windy, gray, drizzly weather. (Hmmm. I wonder where one could live that would have less of that stuff?) We went to her church. I posed for about a jillion pictures while she experimented with her nifty new camera (a Panasonic Lumix GF-1, which puts digital SLR capability in a compact form). We went on several walks (which involved frequent stops for more photography with the new camera). We went to the National Zoo. We drove out to Manassas, Virginia, for a poker tournament. We had a lovely dinner and evening with her two best friends and their two teenage sons. On New Year's Eve we and six more of her friends had dinner at a Burmese restaurant, then went to see "Avatar 3-D" (which was astounding). We drove out to Ikea to fetch her bookcase. (I had never been to an Ikea before--can you believe that? Reaction: Wow. Just wow.) We assembled her bookcase and rearranged her library to fit. We played the new games (Bananagrams, Upwords, Set, and Scrabble Word Play Poker). We each tried to keep up with reading our Twitter and RSS feeds. We started reading a book together (The Known World by Edward P. Jones). We watched some Netflix movies: a few more episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Wordplay" (great documentary about a crossword puzzle tournament and crossword puzzles generally), "The Lives of Others" (exceptionally good movie), and "Let the Right One In" (a strange Swedish vampire flick). We wrangled with some bureaucratic headaches at the D.C. DMV, as Cardgrrl attempts to sell her old car and buy a new one. We did a bunch of crossword puzzles together. (We make a killer team--large vocabularies and between us a pretty broad range of obscure knowledge.) In between it all, I managed to get through about half of an Isaac Asimov book that I borrowed from a friend nearly two years ago, and have shamefully neglected until now (The Edge of Tomorrow). All in all, a very pleasant trip, even if not much got accomplished in concrete, pragmatic life terms.

Except for the one tournament (which, for me, lasted all of 30 minutes when my aces got cracked) and some reading of blogs and forums, it was essentially a poker-free ten days. I'm ready to get back at it. In fact, after a crappy night of sleep--disturbed by a sinus headache, travel over-fatigue, and jet lag--I'm ready right now to go shower, grab a bite to eat, and hit the tables, probably at my usual Sunday afternoon hangout, Mandalay Bay.

What passes for a normal life around here, and the blogging that accompanies it, should be resuming shortly. It will be interrupted again later this week for a long, four-day weekend, as I zip up to visit my parents and sister in Salt Lake City Friday through Monday for a belated holiday get-together--so expect another writing slowdown then.

Thanks for your patience.