Archive for the year 2005
Posted on December 14, 2005 by Ching under School.
Posted on December 11, 2005 by Brian under Poker.
Where do I begin? Let’s just start at the beginning of the evening. We were asked by a good poker playing friend of ours to come over and play a friendly game of poker with some folks and just basically have a good time and get to gather with other couples like our selves. I got directions to her house and we started off, as we entered the neighbor hood I noticed that one of the landmarks that Michelle (that’s our friend) had given me was a Christmas tree all lit up in her front yard. Well that really didn’t help me any because everyone and their freaking neighbor had a dammed Christmas tree in their yard lit to the point that Astronauts could see them from space. So I moved to the next land mark which was the type of house they had. That was easier to find! So we go in and get settled and start playing. About 45 min into the game my dad calls.
DAD: “What are you doing?”
ME: “Playing Poker, what’s up?”
DAD: “It’s your Mom, I need your help!”
ME: Sigh…”I’m on my way”
So I tell everyone to just post and fold me and I would return as soon as I could. I jump in the car and leave Ching to play her game while I got blinded out and mucked while I was away. As I’m coming up on Rock and Lincoln I notice an Ambulance coming out of the station. I say to myself “that’s got to be for mom” and so I follow it like a Lawer looking for a case to chew on. Sure enough I get to the house and the Ambulance and rescue truck are their and I pull in right behind the ambulance. I get in to find my mom in a caesura on the bed. Now here’s the part I haven’t figured out (till later). My father (In his infinite wisdom) decided that the Monday after Thanksgiving in the middle of an ice storm he was going to take his ass up on the roof of his house and fix the flashing on the chimney. Not to my surprise he fell off the roof and broke his back. He is now in a back brace for 6 weeks to let it heal. So what I’m wondering is how does a man with a broken back that cant even get a pencil up off the floor get a woman like my mother into bed off the floor. I found out later that my mom used what little energy she had left to help my dad get her into bed and then she was done and the caesuras started. So this also explained why my father was in so much pain for the rest of the evening. Now we return to me and what was about to happen. I tell dad that he’s going to ride with my grandparents and I’ll come pick him up when they get her admitted and everything calms down, I told him that Ching was still at this party and I couldn’t leave her their. He was fine with this and said to go back to the party till he called. I did and when I got their I had already been chipped up twice and was fixing to get put all in by the blinds. I managed to last till the final table by playing very conservable and getting what ever I could in the way of chips. I actually outlasted my wife who was at the final table with me. I was explaining to everyone what happened and really at this point was not in the mood to play poker any more and wasn’t paying that much attention when I got to the last three players. I knocked the third person out and it was left to me and Annette (the sister of the friend that invited us). We bounce back and fourth then in an act of desperation (mainly to finish it off so I could go spend some time with my dad) I go all in on a King Seven off suite, Annette had a King Queen off suite. When all the cards were laid out I wasn’t even paying attention. Then everyone looked at the table and looked at me and said “you won!†I thought they were full of shit till I looked and saw that I had the dammed straight with my 7. I couldn’t believe it, I freaking won.
That’s when my wife tells me “Wow, you play better poker when your not here then when you actually sit and play”. So from now on I’m going to leave my game for about 30 minutes and then come back. Maybe I’ll start to win more!
Posted on December 10, 2005 by Ching under Babies, Toys.
This is our new 6-foot multi-level cat condo. I won it from eBay a few weeks ago. I’ve been eBaying like mad lately. I’ve purchased more things from eBay this year (remember, that’s how I purchased my phone) than I have my entire life. I think it’s all because of the sugargliders. That’s what got it all started.
But I digress.. We decided to get the cat condo for the cats because we’d been buying various things for the suggies and we didn’t want the cats to be totally left out. So they get one big present this year. The cat condo.
These things are actually pretty expensive. For a hundred dollars, you can usually only get a small one at the pet stores. How fun is a small one? Not much fun especially with three cats who will be fighting to use it. So I looked to eBay to see if I could find any good deals on cat condos.
I found the going rate on the auctions to be about $100 to $160 with shipping. That’s over a hundred dollars in savings compared to the pet store prices. So I started bidding.
I lost several of these because I missed the auction close or the price just went above my budget. I was getting really frustrated and thought I’d never be able to win one.
I decided to visit the vendor’s web site to just try to order it from there but the price of the model I wanted was $159. I had seen some of these go on the auctions for as little as $100 so I wanted to try to get a better deal. Thus, I continued to try to win auctions.
The last auction I bid on had an ending time of around 9:40 on a Monday night. I couldn’t focus in class because toward the end I was just watching my auction. With about a couple of minutes left to go, I placed my final bid. Just as the class was being dismissed, I received the auction ended message and I won. Everyone in the class thought I was strange because I was jumping up and down with glee. My cat condo only cost $115. If you got that good of a deal, you’d be jumping up and down too!
Anyway, the cat condo arrived about a week later and Brian assembled it as soon as it was delivered. He said the cats started climbing all over it as he was putting all the parts together. They were playing with their condo even before it was completely assembled. He said he had to keep pushing them away so that he could assemble it and he felt bad for doing so because he didn’t want them to think that it was off limits. He just didn’t want to keep getting interrupted during the assembly process.
Brian said that putting the pieces together was pretty simple and the cat condo was fully assembled in minutes. The cats were all over it, jumping between the tiers. They were playing with the dangly toys and even broke a couple of them off even before I got home. Okay so the quality might not be that great on the dangly toys, but the rest of the condo itself is pretty sturdy. Brian and I figured that we may need to re-upholster the tiers in a few years when the fuzzy covering wears out but we figured that wouldn’t be too big of a deal because the parts are easy to assemble and disassemble. We figured we’d just go to a carpet remnant sale.
Anyhow, I’m happy to report that the cats love their new condo. The only disappointing thing is that after almost two weeks, they’ve yet to try the hammock. I purposely chose this model because I thought they would totally dig the hammock and fight over it. Our cats have yet to figure out how great it is. They have not gotten past the shakiness off, I guess. I think once they figure out how awesome it is, they’ll be spending most of their time sleeping in it. I don’t know how to get them in there, though.
The other day I tried to pick Oscar up and put him in but he wiggled away from me as soon as one paw touched the shaky hammock. I’m tempted to put catnip in it just to get them to try it. The crazy thing is I could’ve gotten a cheaper hammock-less cat condo. Had I known that they would not like the hammock, I would’ve been able to save some more money!
Anyway, I think we’ll give it a few more weeks before we intervene. Hopefully our cats are smart enough to figure this out.
Posted on December 8, 2005 by Ching under Babies, Toys.
Remember that Visa giftcard that Brian gave me over a month ago? Well, I totally forgot I had it. Then Brian remembered it the other day.
He’s like, “Whatever happened to that giftcard?” I go, “I still have it. It’s here somewhere.”
It was next to my computer monitor under some bills. I had totally spaced it out.
Anyway, I’d been thinking of what to use it for and I just couldn’t come up with anything. So today, I told Brian that we could use it to buy a tent for our suggies.
While at the store, we ended up getting a sleeping bag (for the floor of our tent), a couple of soft fleece pillow and a couple of fleece throws to furnish our tent. We ended up spending about $60 (we only got a small, two-person tent) so we had to pay some money from our checking account. Most of it was covered by the giftcard, though.
Of course, I had to point out that whenever I get a giftcard it usually goes toward something we both will enjoy but when Brian gets a giftcard it usually just ends up getting spent on video games. Naturally, he just pouted and said “It’s my giftcard dammit! I get to spend it on whatever I want!”
It’s a shame I can never think of what I want when I have money and I always seem to want everything when I’m broke. Why is that?
Posted on December 1, 2005 by Ching under School.
Our fruit store project is officially done! As done as it is going to be anyway. It meets all of the basic requirements I think so that should be enough to get full credit. I’m putting the finishing touches on it as we speak (as I blog?). I actually thought that this part would take me all weekend to complete. It actually only took about three hours (dinner included). Four hours if you count the shag break I took with Brian. I am a coding machine! Kidding aside, it’s mostly knowing what code to recycle. So call me a copy-and-paste master. LOL! I don’t care. I’m just happy I’m doing well in the class. This is probably the only class that I will get a decent grade in this semester. Although, I probably shouldn’t be counting my chicks yet. Final exams are still to come. Â =P
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