Bad beat

Remember the nice new car I was so excited about not too long ago? Jackass in an old pickup truck wasn't paying attention on the highway and slammed into it. A line of cars stopped for some unknown reason. Everybody managed to stop safely except for him. After he pushed me forward, I very nearly hit the car in front of me, but fortunately had left j-u-s-t enough room not to.

Submit your guesses in the comments as to what the final repair bill will be. Closest (over or under, not Price Is Right rules) wins--I don't know what.

Open-face Chinese poker problem (quasi-poker content!)

Cardgrrl's house is now finished and she has moved in. Last night I was over there for dinner and recreation. I taught her how to play OFC poker. I've only played once before for money, though a few days ago I bought an app for my Android phone and have been playing some no-money games with friends around the country. So my experience with the game is not quite zero, but pretty close to it. Which means that situations I haven't seen or thought of are going to come up from time to time.

Last night, for example, I ended up making this hand:

Cardgrrl had fouled her hand, so I potentially had a big score here--a scoop plus a royalty for the full house. But neither of us knew whether this hand was valid or fouled because both the top and middle had J-10-7. And it's not like Cardgrrl has a few Chinese Poker rule books sitting around the house that we could consult.

So I posted the picture on Twitter and asked for opinions from those with more experience playing. I was surprised but pleased that the answers I got were unanimous: It's a valid hand.

But then that just made me wonder why it's valid. Is it because:

(A) Jack of spades is a higher card than jack of hearts?

(B) The two hands are considered equal, and being equal is valid?

(C) The middle hand is J-10-7-5-4, which is better than just J-10-7 on top?

Here Twitter delivered some variability in the explanation, with all three possible rationales getting at least one nod. But the answers from the most experienced players were consistently (B). Apparently two hands tying is as valid as the stronger one being below the weaker one. So, for instance, if you happen to make a seven-high straight on both the back and the middle, that's a legitimate hand, not fouled. To put it another way, I had been under the impression that each hand must be stronger than the one above it, but the actual rule is that no hand can be stronger than the one below it--which is not quite the same thing.

So now you know. (Or maybe, unlike me, you already did.)



BONUS SUBJECT AND PHOTO:

Both Cardgrrl and I had long been wanting a cat but were in living situations where it could not happen. As you know by now, I remedied that very soon after moving in to my apartment. (If you want to watch a couple of stupid videos of me playing "cat hockey" with my darling Lucy, see here and here. Do not expect cinematic epicness.)

Well, on Saturday Cardgrrl also cured her catlessness. She went to one of the local animal shelters and brought home a tiny bundle of feline furriness named Loki. He is, as she accurately puts it, ALL OF THE CUTENESS ALL OF THE TIME. My guess is that if you did a chemical analysis of him, he would turn out to be 99% cuteness and 1% carbon/nitrogen/oxygen. See more of Loki's sweetness here.

Here's the three of us last night posing for a selfie:

Survey question: How adorable are we?

1. Very.
2. Extremely.
3. Super-duper.
4. OMG!

Arriving

Seems strange that it was just a few hours less than one week ago that I wrote that last post. I spent four days on the road, arriving in Asheville late Monday afternoon. Cardgrrl was at my apartment (she had picked up the keys from the landlord in case I arrived in town after hours) with roses and a chocolate cake to welcome me. I'm starting to think that maybe she likes me.

The last three days have been a whirlwind of buying stuff, unpacking boxes, getting deliveries, assembling, cleaning. Everything is new and in need of figuring out--how the microwave works, how the dishwasher works, how to distribute dishes and food in the cupboards, how long the washer and dryer run, which bank to choose, where to get good pizza, how to navigate to the Walmart, how the trash and recycling work, how to get new email working, and on and on and on. But it's all getting done, one thing at a time, and my work station is now set up sufficiently that I can resume gainful work tomorrow, which is exactly the day I had planned on when tentatively setting up a moving schedule a month ago--so yay me.

Weather here is mild for February compared to everyplace else I've ever lived except Las Vegas.

Strangely, I have not yet woken up confused or mistaken about where I am. Maybe I've been planning this long enough that it's not a shock to my brain. On the other hand, I see my friends tweeting about a poker game at this or that casino, and have an impulse to go join, until I remember that I'm not there anymore.

Cardgrrl and I spent hours assembling a new desk. I needed to finish it today. It was in the first bedroom, which I had planned to use as an office. But it was a bright, sunny day, and the light was so nice through the windows of my south-facing living room that I changed plans. I am going to try making the living room my work space just for the nice light and view. Which leaves me with a bedroom without assigned purpose for now. I'll probably put my books in there when I get some shelves, and likely use the space to work on my bike when it needs repair/maintenance. Will need to mull over what to do with it.

Tons of work to catch up on, so probably no poker trips for a couple of weeks anyway.

Leaving

Everything has been shipped or packed into my car, except the two items (suitcase and computer case) that I'll be living out of until I get settled in my Asheville apartment. I expect to turn in my keys and hit the road in about two hours, arriving at my new home sometime Monday--which, by happy coincidence, will be the fourth anniversary of the day I first met Cardgrrl, in the poker room at Harrah's. (I think if you go back and reread the post I wrote about that first meeting, you'll see that I liked her right off the bat.) My goal is to have a home office setup sufficient to allow me to resume work by Friday, a week from today.

Cardgrrl's house, meanwhile, is showing real progress. The foundation is nearly finished, despite lousy weather for construction through most of January. Three or four more months, and it will be ready for her. Then we'll both be settled in our new places, and poised to see what we can make of our lives in North Carolina. (We're not quite ready to actually share the same zip code--that would be too scary--but we will move to the next level of relationship, which is adjacent zip codes.) You can, as always, follow both her house progress and her photographic adventures in her blog, "Something Beautiful."

I am equal parts sad, nervous, and excited about this transition. This past 6 1/2 years has been fun and challenging, and I've learned a lot about myself and the world. I've grown in important, interesting, and unexpected ways. It's time to see if Asheville can reshape me as profoundly as Las Vegas has.

I am immensely grateful that so many people have found my meandering thoughts worth reading. Your enthusiastic reception has made the hours of writing and rewriting a rewarding pursuit. I cannot sufficiently thank you for your support.

I'm sure I'll pipe up here once in a while with a thought, rant, story, or joke. Plus, I expect that occasional trips back to the Land of Many Poker Rooms are inevitable, and you'll read all about them right here.

But for now, take good care of yourselves, play good poker, and don't be grumpy. That's my job.

Photo credit: Terry Hassan

Neither up nor down

When I was a wee lad in Sunday School, the teachers often had us sing an action song "to get the wiggles out" before moving on to the substance of the lessons. One of the favorites was "The Noble Duke of York." This has many variants on both the words and tune, but this is the way I learned it:

Oh, the Noble Duke of York
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up a hill
And he marched them down again.

Now when you're up you're up,
And when you're down you're down.
But when you're only halfway up,
You're neither up nor down.

We would be instructed to stand up on the "up" lines, sit back down on the "down" lines," and sort of half stand up on the "halfway" line.

I don't know whether it was due to subliminal indoctrination from that song or just a natural predisposition, but I've never liked being in between places, on the way from one location to another. I want to either be where I was or where I'm going. Of course I've heard a lifetime of advice from people telling me to enjoy the trip, stop and smell the roses, etc. And I do try. Once in a while I even succeed. But most of the time I revert back to my habitual squirreliness about being neither here nor there, and want to get the journey over with. Even though I'm shorter than average, most people have a hard time keeping up with my walking pace if I go as fast as I'm inclined to go, because I want to be there already.

This is on my mind at the moment because Josie emailed me this morning to ask how the move to North Carolina was going. I dashed off a grumpy reply saying that it sucked. I then started to enumerate the ways in which it sucked, which is what has me on this little tantrum.

I have to sell a bunch of stuff, give away other stuff, and just throw away yet more items. My apartment is in more disarray than it ever has been because of the process of figuring out what to do with everything. I still haven't completely settled on what means of moving the things I'm keeping will be. I can't tell how much will fit in my car and how much I have to ship separately. My bike is all taken apart for shipment so I can't go riding. I don't sleep well because I'm fretting about the thousand and one decisions I have to make and worrying about getting them wrong. I sweat that I'm not going to get everything coordinated and done in the time frame I've set out. (I'm shooting to head out of town February 7th or 8th and arrive in Asheville four or five days after that.) I'm constantly thinking about all the things that might go wrong at the last minute, even with the best-laid plans. There are large expenses to be incurred in shipping, gasoline for a cross-country drive, in paying temporary double rent and utilities, down payments, deposits, fees, etc.--and at the same time my income will drop to zero for a couple of weeks while I get a work space outfitted out east. I have one of my largest-ever consulting jobs waiting to be done, having promised to try to finish it before I move. I don't know if I'll have time or opportunity to get together with friends for any sort of proper good-bye before I'm gone. All in all, I'm just feeling pretty damn sorry for myself, in the most whiny, juvenile, embarrassing, and pathetic way possible.

To anticipate a likely thought going through readers' minds: no, this angst is not reflective of doubt about or resentment for the move itself. I am fully at peace with that. Sure, I'd be happy to be staying put. But I'd also be entirely happy to be in Asheville, in my new apartment, with everything already settled, maybe even with an adopted kitty as a companion (which I can't have where I am), with a lot more space than my current apartment gives me (and ten times nicer to boot), free to get together with Cardgrrl whenever we feel like it. It really is just the disruptive, unsettling, in-between-ness of it all that is gnawing at me all day every day. It's existing in a state of limbo that I hate, being not quite hither and not quite yon.

I think it must be a universal experience that parents teach their kids far more life lessons thoughtlessly, by accident, just in the course of daily life, than they do through the occasional carefully planned chat or activity. (Don't worry. This is going somewhere, and it will all connect back.) My dad's 90th birthday is Friday, and I'll be driving up to Salt Lake City for the weekend for a family get-together. The impending occasion has caused me to reflect on some of the things he taught me in moments that he was probably not intending to be life lessons, and which he likely does not remember as vividly as I do.

He is an inveterate tinkerer. Over my growing-up years, he made a lot of improvements to our modest home. One of the biggest additions was turning the long wall of our family room into bookshelves, storage cabinets, and a window seat. While he was in the middle of that project, which seemed to be taking forever (everything seems to take forever when you're 7), I commented about how much work he was putting into it. He replied, "Yes, but you just get it done, and then you get to enjoy it for a lot longer than it took to do it."

I'm trying to keep that in mind over the next several weeks of chaos and uprooting. (Uprooting--that's an interesting word that popped into my brain there. Like moving a plant to a larger pot so that it has more room to grow.) I just want it to be done so that I can get on with enjoying what awaits me on the other side.

So long, and thanks for all the fish*

From time to time, somebody asks me whether I plan to stay in Las Vegas for the rest of my life. My answer has always been, no, I don't plan to stay, but I also don't plan to leave. There is no plan. I would tell anybody who asked me that question that I will leave if and when something happens to makes me think that I should live somewhere else. Otherwise, I'll stay.

Well, something finally happened to convince me that it was time to live somewhere else: I fell in love.

This won't exactly come as news to my readers, unless you're brain-dead. (In which case, congratulations on just being able to read. Quite an accomplishment.) I met Cardgrrl in February of 2009. By July of that year I knew it was something serious. During a visit I made to her in Washington, D.C., in August of 2010, I finally became convinced (1) that she was never going to move to Las Vegas (as I had not-so-secretly hoped), and (2) that I wanted to be a lot nearer to her than 2400 miles, and (3) that meant that I would have to move east.

That plan, however, entailed some serious logistical difficulties. The cost of living in Washington is much higher than it is in Vegas, and I would have to meet those increased costs without 50 poker rooms in my back yard.

By happy coincidence, around the same time some consulting work related to my formal education and my pre-poker career sort of fell into my lap, and I nurtured the source so that I would start getting more and more such projects. (I mentioned this work twice in the blog, here and here, just to drop a couple of hints that change was in the air, and to see if anybody was paying attention. As far as I could tell, nobody noticed that those hints signified that a major change was underway.)

Even if you missed those clues, surely long-time readers must have noticed that my frequency of posting dropped fairly dramatically year by year from the high-water marks in 2008 and 2009 to the present. Some of that was due to the simple fact that after a few thousand posts on one subject, it gets progressively harder to find new things to say, new topics to write about. But the drop-off was due at least as much to the fact that as time went on, I was spending more time on the growing side business and less on poker. Poker has gone from being my sole source of income when I first arrived in Vegas in the summer of 2006 to being only a small part of it in 2012.

Cardgrrl also met me halfway. Early last year she decided that she wanted to try living somewhere besides D.C., established some criteria for herself by which to judge potential target cities, and started exploring the possibilities. (Vegas was never a contender.) By about June, she had settled on Asheville, North Carolina. After several exploratory trips there over the next few months, she finally made the move into an Asheville apartment at the beginning of November, and is now having a house built in the city.

No, Asheville isn't halfway between here and D.C., but it does have a much lower cost of living--comparable to that of Las Vegas. It's also a place that I would rather live than D.C. I consider our nation's capital a nice place to visit, but not to live, for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with. Her move made it easier for me to pull the trigger on my own.

A few hours ago I returned from a week in Asheville--my first time there. It's a beautiful city, set in the midst of some of the prettiest land in the country, even in the dead of winter. Take a look at a map, and you'll see that it's surrounded by the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, the Cohutta National Forest, the Sumter National Forest, the Cherokee National Forest, plus a comparable number of state parks and forests. Heck, the famous Blue Ridge Parkway/National Heritage Area runs right through the city; turn onto it, and 30 seconds later you feel like you're in the middle of a vast, wooded wilderness.

Biking should be, um, interesting in Asheville. As far as I can tell both from maps and from driving around in it for several days, there is not a single straight or flat street anywhere. Every street is winding and sloped.

Most of this visit was spent apartment-hunting. On Tuesday I found the best prospect--an upstairs unit in a well-maintained old mansion converted into a four-plex of two-bedroom apartments (one bedroom to sleep in, one to be used as an office) in the rich part of town, so I can pretend to be wealthy. It's about four miles due north of where Cardgrrl's house will be. On Wednesday I signed a lease; the place is mine starting February 1.

This is sooner than I had anticipated. As of a week ago, I was thinking it would be more like March or April when I would make the move. But things change, and I decided I needed to just do it. I'm not yet sure exactly when I'll go. I can't get everything planned and arranged to leave here by the first of the month. It will probably end up being more like February 10th to 15th time frame. Heck, I don't even know how I'll move--hire a moving company, drive a U-Haul myself, or maybe try to UPS anything that won't fit in my car. We'll see. (The new car, by the way, was an integral part of this evolving big plan, though I didn't tell you that at the time. The old car could not possibly have been trusted on a cross-country trip, nor could it carry much stuff.)

Anyway, the Las Vegas chapter of my life (actually the second Las Vegas chapter of my life, as I was here for a couple of years back in 1980-1982) is now coming rapidly to a close. With it, this blog will also mostly fade away. I won't shut it down completely. I'm sure that once in a while I'll have a story to tell, an opinion to share, a news item to comment on, a rant to get off my chest.

But poker is hard to come by in North Carolina. The only poker room that is less than a full day's drive is Harrah's Cherokee. Cardgrrl and I went there last night to scope out the place. It's about a 70-minute drive each way when there is clear weather and no traffic. The poker room for now has no live dealers, just a bunch of Poker Pro electronic tables, though they are in the process of training dealers, and have a WSOP circuit event scheduled to be there in April.

How about online? Well, we'll see. I've never been as successful at the online game as the live game, nor enjoyed it as much, though my Josie-inspired brief orgy of online tournaments in August raises the possibility that I could do better at it if I really tried.

The upshot is that I think it's inevitable that poker will be reduced to being a small, occasional part of my life and attention, and that as a result blog posts here will be few and far between. I will probably also greatly cut back on the amount of poker-related blog and Twitter reading that I do. I can't continue to saturate my reading with poker when I can't go out and play it. That would drive me crazy, I think.

I am sad to be leaving a city I've come to like very much, and to consider my home. I'm sad to be leaving behind the friends I've made in my 6 1/2 years here, and to no longer be in a place where friends and readers from across the country and around the world come to visit on a regular basis. I'm nervous about trekking across the country to a place that I really know very little about, and to be making my home in a state where I never had any reason to think I'd live, where I've only set foot once before last week--and that was just in the Charlotte airport during a layover--and where I only know two people besides Cardgrrl (Shamus and his wife live a couple hours away). I'm bummed that I won't have a ridiculous richness of choice of poker rooms running 24/7, regularly stocked with fish in a way that is the envy of the trout and salmon industries, with which I can scratch the poker itch whenever it hits me. I'm slightly nauseated at the prospect of having to face cold winters and humid, mosquito-filled summers again, after thinking that I had left them behind forever. I'm distressed that I won't be able to pop up to see my parents and my sister in Salt Lake City for weekend visits every few months, as has become my practice.

But rising above all of that is that I am excited to be able to be near the one I love, and to find out what our relationship can be when we can see each other on a regular basis. That is more important to me than what state my address is in, more important than the weather, more important than being near the Vegas friends I've made, more important than poker--more important than anything else. (As Jesus taught, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he move to North Carolina to be near his girlfriend." Or something like that.) That realization makes me confident that this move is the right thing to do. It's time for one chapter of my life to end, and for another to begin.

What story will that chapter tell? Hell if I know. But it's time to turn the page and find out.





*It seems hard to believe that anyone intelligent enough to be a reader of this blog would not know the pop-culture origin of this title. But just in case there's a lame-o out there, see here.


Addendum, January 12, 2013 

For Cardgrrl's perspective on this, see here.

Gone to Carolina in my mind

Early Friday morning I'm flying to North Carolina, which is where Cardgrrl is living these days, for a week of slightly belated holiday celebration.

I wish I were there already.



For your pleasure, two exceptionally lovely renditions of the obvious song choice:

The man across the hall

There's another apartment directly across the hall from mine--literally five feet away from my threshold. Behind it lived a highly reclusive elderly man. I use the past tense there because he died last week, in his apartment. There was some fuss as the police and paramedics came, then left with a body, leaving a legal notice on the door forbidding entrance while the coroner investigated the circumstances.

A few minutes ago, there was a knock on my door. It was his daughter. She is there to pick up his remaining possessions. She wanted to know if any of his neighbors knew him and could tell her about his life.

This seemed to me kind of an odd request, until she filled in more of the story. He disappeared in 1988, and had not been in contact with his family since then. They had periodically tried to find him, without success. So this poor woman had not seen or heard from her father in almost 25 years, with her first contact being the police calling to tell her of his death. She had had no explanation for why he vanished, no idea where he was. No wonder she was thirsty for any scraps of information about how he had been living.

I told her that when it was warm (most of the year) he kept his door propped open a few inches to let in air, but not enough that anybody could look in, and based on how much of the time the door was cracked that way, he almost never left his apartment.

I only saw him a couple of times in the six years I've been here, when we were both coincidentally leaving or returning at the same time and exchanged a nod and a hello. I assume he was probably just living on Social Security, or maybe he had some sort of pension.

About a year ago I noticed water puddling around his door and seeping out from there down the hall. I immediately contacted building maintenance so they could get the flooding stopped. To my surprise, he was in there! The flooding was coming from the apartment above into his, but rather than call for emergency help to get the leaking stopped, he was just mopping up his floor. Peculiar behavior. It seems that he really did not want to be bother anybody, or to be bothered.

Today was the first time I've seen inside his apartment. It's a studio. It has only one window, and the only thing visible through it is a cinder block wall six inches away. I had never noticed that the next building was so close to the back of ours that the apartments on that side had no view whatsoever. It's the kind of view that makes for a visual punchline in TV sitcoms when somebody first goes into a hotel room or apartment, opens the curtains, and sees a brick wall. I didn't know that there are people who actually live in places where that is the reality. Apparently that has been his entire view of the outside world for many, many years.

I hope that in his effects his daughter finds some sort of explanation for his disappearance and reclusiveness, as I couldn't help her learn anything substantive about him. She seemed like a warm, kind woman, and her pain at having been inexplicably shut out of her father's life for so long was palpable.

I find the whole thing terribly sad. I hope I don't end up like that.

His name was Bob.

Unusual day

Sunday was a highly atypical day for me.


Family

First I had a late lunch with my sister, her husband, one of their daughters, and her husband, all in town for the annual rodeo. Then we went bowling at Sam's Town. I won both games, scoring 139 and 150, which is pretty good for me--especially since I haven't bowled in about 18 months.

Unfortunately, in the process I somehow managed to wrench my back, so now I'm in pain and walking funny, dreading when I have to change positions. Getting old sucks.


Chinese

Came home, did some work. In the evening I sort of invited myself to a home game some friends were having--@spencer_chen, @gamble24x7, @veggiepoof, and one other whose Twitter I don't know. It was my first chance to play open-faced Chinese poker, which seems to be all the rage these days. I had never even played regular Chinese before, though I had watched it a few times and understood the basic idea.

My entire knowledge of OFCP comes from an article in Card Player magazine by Jennifer Shahade , a blog post a few days ago by Shamus, and an article by Dave Behr in the December issue of Bluff magazine, which by coincidence I had just read yesterday. So I was green as green could be, and knew I was likely to lose money. Which I did--$89, to be exact, at $1/point. But that's OK. Learning new forms of poker always costs money as one makes mistakes and, hopefully, learns from them to play better.

But ya know what? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that OFCP is not, in fact, a form of poker. For that matter, neither is traditional Chinese poker.

This is a point that I haven't seen raised in any of the three sources I mentioned, but which occurred to me as I watched the others play during the one hand out of five I had to sit out. (A maximum of four people can play at once, since each player needs 13 cards.) There are several ways to express the basic element that is missing, but they all amount to the same thing:

• There are no hole cards, no secrets that you hold which are unknown to the other players. 
• There is no betting on the strength of your hand. 
• It is a game of perfect rather than imperfect information. 
• You cannot bluff. 

Mike Matusow is generally not a font of wisdom that I turn to, but Michael Craig quotes him as saying, "If you can't steal, it ain't poker." He's absolutely right. 

Mike Caro has argued that the ability to bluff is more a defining element of poker than are cards. He describes an imaginary game of "cow chip poker," in which the players scout a nearby field for cow chips, conceal what they find in paper bags, then reassemble to bet on who has the biggest one. You can win with an empty bag by betting in such a way as to convince your opponents that you found the biggest cow chip. That's poker, even with no cards. In another hypothetical situation, he describes how two people can play poker with a deck of just three cards, because you still have the crucial elements of being able to have a secret card and bluff with the worst hand. 

Video poker is not poker, in part because it's played against the house rather than against other players, but also because it lacks secret information and bluffing. OFCP fails by that same criterion. They are both games that superficially resemble poker because they use the standard 52-card deck and poker's traditional five-card hand rankings. But resembling is not being. They are not poker. 

It was, nevertheless, highly enjoyable. I didn't find it nearly as addictive as others breathlessly describe it after first exposure, but it's definitely an intriguing game. 

Oh, and the other important thing I learned about OFCP is that people say "fuck" a lot. Really a lot. 

Television

After I got home, I watched the premier of "Sin City Rules" on TLC, which I had taped earlier. The only reason I was interested in it is because one of the stars is Jennifer Harman, whom I like. But I thought the whole thing was awful, painful, unwatchable. Jennifer is fine, but the other women are completely unbearable. They're self-absorbed attention whores. Judging by the first episode and the teaser on TLC's web site, the show exists mainly to capture and televise the catfights among them. Ick. I can't understand why anybody would watch such trash. The preview for next week's show seemed to focus more on Harman's life as a mother and poker player, so I'll probably give it one more try, but I can't see myself tuning in much beyond that. I'm kind of perplexed how she got associated with the show; she seems not at all like the others. 

And that was my completely out-of-the-ordinary day. 

More life updates

1. New car got 31 mpg around town on its first tank of gas. I know you've all been on pins and needles waiting for that number, so I'm putting it as the first item here, to avoid further suspense.

2. I got new shoes today:

They're Eckos. $50 at the downtown outlet store. That's probably the most I've paid for a pair of shoes in, oh, at least 15 years. Quite a splurge, eh?

The last time I got new shoes (see post here) was three days before I met Cardgrrl. Obviously good things happen when I buy new shoes. What life-changing event will it be this time?

3. More progress on learning how to take care of my bike. Last night I took apart and put back together my front brake mechanism, then adjusted the position and tension. Neither of my two books was as helpful as I needed for this task, but I found a guy who does extremely helpful YouTube videos on bicycle maintenance and repair. His channel is here.

4. While out riding the other day I spotted a place on the sidewalk where somebody had etched "Bicycle Bob." I swear it wasn't me!

5. I've had some cars and, worse, trucks zoom past me with barely a hair's width of space between us. If I had wobbled a bit or deviated just a few inches to the left as these vehicles were passing, I'd have been hit. It seems that many Nevada drivers don't know that they are required to give bicyclists the full lane if there are two or more lanes available to them, or a minimum of three feet of clearance if there is only one lane. Here's the actual statute:

NRS 484B.270 Vehicles, bicycles and electric bicycles: Driver’s duty of due care; additional penalty if driver is proximate cause of collision with person riding bicycle.

1. The driver of a motor vehicle shall not intentionally interfere with the movement of a person lawfully riding a bicycle or an electric bicycle. 

2. When overtaking or passing a bicycle or electric bicycle proceeding in the same direction, the driver of a motor vehicle shall exercise due care and: (a) If there is more than one lane for traffic proceeding in the same direction, move the vehicle to the lane to the immediate left, if the lane is available and moving into the lane is reasonably safe; or (b) If there is only one lane for traffic proceeding in the same direction, pass to the left of the bicycle or electric bicycle at a safe distance, which must be not less than 3 feet between any portion of the vehicle and the bicycle or electric bicycle, and shall not move again to the right side of the highway until the vehicle is safely clear of the overtaken bicycle or electric bicycle. 

6. I had a long ride planned for this morning, but it was raining. Plans foiled. While out on errands this afternoon, I parked near one of the washes that has a riding trail next to it and watched the water flowing in the wash:




This is after roughly 12 hours of a steady drizzle, not one of the fast downpours that sometimes hit us. I'd really like to see what these washes look like after one of those. It's something I've never done in six years of living here. Next time it happens, I'm going.

7. In the morning I'm off to Salt Lake City for a family visit weekend.

Life update

I have some work I need to do here at home, but had a technical malfunction that is temporarily halting the process. I'm waiting for a fix that I hope will come through any minute, so thought I would kill a little time by telling you about some things that nobody could possibly care about.

1. Poker has been going great, though, unfortunately for the blog, without much good story material. August and September were two of my most profitable months in a long time. Which is nice, after having just made the biggest expenditure of my six years in Vegas....

2. I brought the new car home Friday and sold the old one Sunday. It was sad to say good-bye to the car that has taken me everywhere for the last 20 years, but overall I know that it's a change for the better. The new one doesn't have the speed or the handling of the old one--to say nothing of its character and memories--but it wins hands-down in economy, reliability, flexibility, and practicality. That's a trade that I finally not only became willing to make, but realized that I had to make.

Here it is, just before I drove it home from the dealership:

3. My bike rides have gradually been getting longer and more ambitious. Today, for instance, I went 13.3 miles, starting at--get this--7:29 a.m.! The old Honda could not carry a bicycle unless you first ran it through a metal shredder, but the new one accommodates it easily. This means that I will no longer be restricted to rides that start and end at my apartment building, which will allow me to branch out and explore more interesting rides than are accessible from downtown. This consideration was, in fact, one of the final things that pushed me off of a couple of years of teetering indecision and to the new-car purchase. I'm enjoying my rides, and don't want to be confined to what's immediately around where I live.

4. I found a great Android app for my phone: Velodroid. For $3.09 it elegantly handles GPS tracking of bicycle rides. With a couple of clicks, you can then upload the resulting data to the free RideWithGPS.com site, which spits out lovely, detailed graphic/numeric analyses like this:

That strip along the bottom doesn't need to look so cluttered; for this screen shot I had it overlay elevation, speed, and grade, which makes it too busy, but you can look at any one or two of those parameters at a time. Moreover, you can mouse along that strip and a blue dot retraces your route on the map while you get a read on the elevation, speed, and grade at that point. Very cool. Yes, there are free apps that do basically the same thing, but I tried a couple of them and found them unintuitive or maddening or unreliable or otherwise badly designed. Velodroid is easy to use. It does everything I want and basically has no extra complicating, cluttering features that I don't want. It's damn near perfect. 

5. I am a mechanical dunce. Nothing about the way things work comes easily to me. Nothing is obvious. I'm about as quick a study as you'll ever meet in nearly anything I put my mind to, but the workings of machines is a glaring exception. So when I tell you that I have now learned how to remove the wheels from my bike, remove and replace the tires, and get the wheels back on (including that tricky rear derailleur), you might think, "So what? Most 10-year-olds can manage that." But I'm telling you that for me this is a major accomplishment, which took way more hours and boneheaded mistakes and false starts than a supposedly smart person should require. I started with the most highly recommended guide book on bicycle maintenance and repair (this one), but found that even with its dumbed-down approach, it assumed more basic mechanical competence than I possessed. So I gritted my teeth at the insulting title and purchased this one, which has helped, though incredibly I still need some things spelled out in more painstaking detail than either book does. Sigh. It's hard being stupid. 

6. My friend PokerLawyer sent me a copy of Maus, which, I'm now embarrassed to say, I don't think I had ever heard of before. That's embarrassing because I have come to understand what an important piece of art/literature it is. I don't know how it escaped my attention all these years. Mine is a "complete" edition that P.L. bought while in Germany, and which does not appear to be available in the U.S., unless I'm overlooking something. I finished reading it night before last. It's terribly sad and painful, but at the same time amazing to see what horrors people can survive. The elder Spiegelman's resourcefulness is really astonishing. At various times, he only escaped being sent to the ovens because of being able to speak English, or translate between Polish and German, or mend shoes the way he had observed professional cobblers doing, or garner favors with police or guards, or because he had made previous social connections that he could exploit. It's a story that would be important to tell in any medium, but his son's choice of a graphic novel with the characters drawn as animals somehow makes it feel more universal, even though it's obviously a unique set of experiences. 

7. Remember this adorable little thing? It now hangs from the rear-view mirror of my new car. It's not like I really need googahs to make me think often of Cardgrrl, but it nevertheless gives me pleasure to have this tangible reminder of her affection in my field of vision.

8. I saw this license plate Sunday and liked it: 

9. For old times' sake, here a "Guess the Casino" picture for you from a session Saturday night: 

Well, the techno-fix I had hoped would come is not going to, so I'm throwing in the towel on any more work from home for the day. Off to the tables. I hope that I can bring home not only the mobneys, but a good tale or two to share. 

Who I look like--the latest suggestions

For some odd reason, I seem to remind random strangers of a bunch of different celebrities. No, I'm not hallucinating. It's true. People that I play poker with will tell me that I look like somebody famous. In the distant (as blogs go) past, I've mentioned that people have told me I resemble Bill Gates, Zeljko Ivanek, Robert Varkonyi, Scott Adams, Joe Pantoliano, and David Cross. (See posts here, here, here, and here.) I've also been told John Malkovich, though I don't think I ever blogged about that one. ("Mr. Son of a Bitch--let's play some cards!")

Well, in the last two days I've had two more names added to the list. While playing at the Hard Rock Saturday night, the guy sitting next to me out of the blue asked me if I read comic books. Not since I was a kid, I told him. He said that that very day there was some sort of gathering going on at the Hard Rock involving a comic book artist named Grant Morrison, and I looked a lot like him. I had never heard of him, but here's his Wikipedia entry, and here's the accompanying photo they display:

Then last night, while I was playing in a HORSE tournament at the Orleans, the player on my left was watching music videos on his phone. He paused one of them, showed me the frame it was stopped on, and asked me, "Recognize this guy?" He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put a name to the face. He told me, "It's Moby. You look a lot like him." 

I suppose there's some truth in that, at least if you pick the right photo: 

Ego deflation

Out riding my bike this morning. (12.43 miles, with 629 feet down and back up in elevation, thank you very much.) Rode past an elementary school, where the kids were out on the playground for recess. A little girl, probably kindergarten or first grade age, waved at me exuberantly and cheerily called, "Hi, old man!"

Away again

Just over 24 hours from now, I'll be flying to Albuquerque for a few days with Cardgrrl and her sister, who lives there. Will be back at the grind by next weekend, though.

My amazing week

To say that I am not normally a social creature would be the understatement of the year. But this week saw a confluence of events and out-of-town visitors that brought out my inner mingler. Most notably, my pals Grange95, WriterJen, and PokerLawyer all came to Vegas to celebrate my birthday a few days early. (Well, they all had other flimsy cover stories, but I know the real reason. It's all about me, obviously.) We were joined, at various times, by a bunch of others, including some I always enjoy hanging out with--LasVegasPokers, PinkLadiesPT, PokerVixen, CKBWOP, CureMTM--the last of whom tied us into a new circle of friends, as seen in the first picture below.

The festivities included, in various subgroupings of the above people:

• Penn and Teller at the Rio (my fourth time seeing their show, which is always fantastic)
• Driving and hiking around Red Rock Canyon
• Long but cheap rubdowns from massage therapy students at this place
• Dinners at Lindo Michoacan, Simpatico (former mayor Oscar Goodman's brand-new restaurant inside the Plaza Hotel--maybe the best Italian food I've had in Vegas), and Delmonico Steakhouse
• Profitable poker sessions at Binion's and Venetian

I had expected this to be a rather expensive week of socializing, but for nearly all of the things that cost much, one person or another was generously stepping up and insisting on paying either with casino comps or their own money. I have such nice friends!

Here's the gang at Delmonico. That's right--it's me and eight lovely ladies (seven here, but one hadn't yet arrived), cuz that's just how I roll. (They do not all have devil eyes as it might appear.)

Here's another gang at Simpatico:

One small bit of the scenery at Red Rock:

A nice pair of Ferrari f430s (the convertible version of the car I drove last month) parked at Red Rock:

All in all, it was one of the best weeks I've ever had since living in Vegas, and almost certainly the best one that didn't include Cardgrrl. In fact, one downside to spending so much time with other people is that, paradoxically, it reminds me more acutely of how much I miss her.

Almost all of the visitors have now flown back home, so it's back to the grind for me--which this weekend must sadly include a big chunk of time doing my federal income taxes. Ick.

Ferrari man

As promised in my previous post, today I went out to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway (do they really need to specify "motor" when they're talking about a "speedway"? I mean, is there a horse-drawn "speedway" somewhere?) and took a few laps around one of the auxiliary tracks in a Ferrari F430. Here's how it looked from the cockpit:

Random thoughts:

I made several mistakes, which I guess isn't surprising for such a new experience:

• Once I hit the wrong paddle and downshifted when I meant to upshift. You can hear the engine whine in protest and the instructor (Brandon, who was great) chuckles at me.
• For the first couple of laps I kept lifting off the gas when it was time to shift, unable to break the habit developed from years of using a clutch pedal. Dang these new-fangled infernal machines!
• I couldn't figure out the geometry of the hairpin turn combination near the start of the course. On the second time through, you see Brandon reach over and grab the wheel to force me more left than I thought it looked like I should go. I got it right just once, on the fourth lap, and could definitely tell. It was kind of amazing how getting the line just right felt so much different than getting it wrong, and you'll see me smile and hear me comment on the "aha!" moment. It was like hitting the ball with the sweet spot of a tennis racket. But then I missed it again the last time around. Slow learner.

I don't really know if overall I was going faster or slower than most. I got passed a few times (though one of them was by the stunt driver, about which more later), and passed only one other person. Watching a bunch of people before it was my turn, I could tell that there was a pretty broad range of speeds. What I couldn't tell was whether that was mainly due to the bravery (or lack thereof) of the drivers, or due to some instructors being more restrained than others. Probably a combination of both.

In fact, if I had one critique of the experience, it was that I'm confident I didn't get anywhere near the outer limits of the car's capabilities. Cornering never felt more violent than when I take freeway off-ramps a little too fast just for fun, and braking was never even close to maximal. The cones to indicate braking points are very conservative; I really wanted to keep accelerating longer and braking later. And I really, REALLY wanted to attack that last combination before the straightaway a lot more aggressively, something close to the car's limits of adhesion. But instead I was a good boy and tried to be compliant to the rules. Later I'll post some video of their scare-the-passenger Corvette driver, and he's hitting the corners 20, 30, maybe 40 mph faster than the customer-drivers. The other exotics are all at least as capable as the Vette, but they're not being pushed hard. I understand perfectly well why they set it up with cushy parameters: They want to keep a large margin of error and not have people spin out their expensive cars. But the consequence is that you never get a real sense of what these amazing pieces of engineering can do, except for a few seconds of flat-out acceleration each lap.

(Speaking of flat out, here's Jeremy Clarkson extolling the virtues of the 430 on "Top Gear," plus Stig wringing every bit of performance out of it on a timed lap. Part 1 and Part 2.)

How fast did I go? I honestly have no idea. I never once looked down at either the speedometer or the tachometer. It took all of my attention to attend to keeping the proper lines around turns and paying attention to Brandon's instructions. But the layout of the track simply doesn't allow one to come anywhere close to its straight-line top speed. I only got into fifth gear once, sixth never, so there was a ton of top end left unexplored.

I think I got shorted a lap. The gift certificate was for five, and they give locals an extra one for free, making six. But I just watched the video again, and I counted only five. Oh well.

The guy doing our pre-drive instruction encouraged us to buy extra laps ($50 each). I'm sure they're glad to bump up the ticket price, but he said that the reason to consider it is that it takes about five laps to learn the course so that you can really start paying attention to getting things right instead of just "what's coming up next?" A commenter on yesterday's blog post said basically the same thing. And they're right. I was, in fact, just kind of getting into the groove of it when it was time to go home. But would it have been a dramatically different or better experience going around seven times than five? No. Just a little icing on the cake.

While watching others do laps before my time slot, I heard one man snicker to another about a woman out on the course, who was going rather slowly. "That's a woman in the green Ferrari that can't get around corners." Except that that green Ferrari was a Lamborghini. (Which suddenly gives me a flashback to what must have been the first World War II joke I ever learned, back in junior high school, the punchline of which was, "Yeah, but this Fokker was a Messerschmidt!") You never look dumber than when you show your ignorance while trying to look smarter than everyone else.

The drive home felt really weird. Five laps was enough--probably because of the intense concentration--to change my brain's expectation about how driving should go. I kept reaching for paddles to shift, looking for cones to aim at in corners, and feeling like I should really be flooring the accelerator. It reminded me of the first time a friend took me skeet shooting--I did it for so long that session that as I drove home and saw birds flying overhead there was an amazingly strong impulse to shoulder a gun and take them down. (For the record, despite all my time with firearms, and tens of thousands of rounds expended, the only time I've fired one at a living creature was to put down a severely injured deer that I had hit with my car about eight years ago. I have no interest in hunting. The birds thing was just a conditioned reflex, not reflective of any underlying desire.)

Overall it was hella fun. I don't think you can go far wrong giving somebody you love a gift certificate for a drive at this place (Exotics Racing--and while you're on their web site, I strongly suggest you entertain yourself with the "screamer of the month" videos, taken inside the drifting Corvettes). Or the next time you're in Vegas, just treat yourself to a completely different kind of afternoon than you'll ever get on the Strip.

I call this magnificent portrait "Dork with helmet":

(They require the stupid hairnet thing, I assume, to keep people's nasty hair goop and lice off of the expensive helmets.)

Me and my speedy steed:

(Thanks to Brandon for graciously agreeing to snap these two photos.)

Addendum:

Just after posting this, I checked Yahoo for the day's news, and found this story of a man who did a dash-cam video from his Ferrari--with results even more embarrassing than mine.

http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/ferrari-owner-japan-arrested-posting-video-high-speed-195346223.html

VROOM!

Here's what I'll be doing tomorrow afternoon:

http://www.exoticsracing.com/

I get an orientation lap around the Las Vegas Motor Speedway as a passenger in a Porsche Cayenne, then five laps driving a Ferrari 430. A gift certificate for this experience was Cardgrrl's present for my 50th birthday last April. I put off scheduling it, hoping that she would be in town at some point during the year, but that didn't work out. So tomorrow is finally the day. I'll probably throw them a little extra money for the in-car video of the laps. If so, naturally I'll post it on YouTube and here. Unless I, y'know, spin out and die in a fiery crash or something. (Here's one guy's video, though he's in the 430 Scuderia, which is a slightly racified version of the 430: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsfaozN_UWc.)

All you Vegas locals will be packing the grandstands to watch, right?

I'll never live it down

You ever do something on an impulse that seems just silly and goofy and fun, and then about five seconds later think, "That's probably going to turn out to have been a really bad idea"?

(Photo credit--if you can call it that-- goes to PokerLawyer.)

Out of court

Jury duty ended for me yesterday. Case submitted to jury at about 4:30 pm. I was designated as an alternate, and none of the regular jurors had been absent, so I was not to be included in deliberations unless one of them had some emergency and couldn't finish participation in the deliberations. They decided to go home and start fresh in the morning.

I just got a call from the court telling me that the case is over, I won't be called back in, and I'm released from admonition not to discuss it. To my great surprise, the jury was deadlocked, and it's a mistrial--after what couldn't have been more than about four hours of deliberation! I don't think I've ever heard of a jury being declared hopelessly deadlocked that quickly. Usually the judge lectures and pressures them to give it another try a time or two before throwing in the towel.

I'm even more surprised because by the conclusion of the case, I could see no way to acquit. I stood ready to be convinced by my fellow jurors that there was some plausible, innocent explanation for the mountain of incriminating evidence, but I thought it unlikely that that would happen. I would admit that there was some theoretical way that one might connect the dots other than in the straight line they seemed to make, but no reasonable or plausible way to do so, unless there was something I was overlooking. I really thought that when we did the initial poll, results would range only from "leaning guilty" to "throw away the key."

Now I will spend the rest of my life wondering how many and which of them thought the prosecution had not proven the case, and how they reached that conclusion, when it seemed to me to be about as close to open-and-shut as it could be. My hunch, after watching them for three days, is that a few of them just weren't paying close enough attention to the myriad details. It was a lot of dry presentation of documentary evidence, and I suspect that some of them tuned out, failing to grasp the truly damning implications of the numbers and signatures on the mountain of paperwork. (It was a case of defrauding the federal government, so naturally the case turned on what the papers contained.)

Once again I'm faced with plain evidence that I just don't see things the same way that the rest of the world does.

On trial

I had to report for jury duty this morning. I thought that most likely I would be dismissed and life would go on, but I ended up being empaneled. So life kind of goes on hold for the next several days.

I'd tell you about the case, but then I'd have to kill you.