I'm a Maverick

     No, I've not been hanging out with Palin and McCain. The Mavericks is the name of my CC Fall League team. Since I'm done work for the season and the weather is getting really shitty (it's snowing for fuck sakes! In the middle of fucking October!) I've once again dove headlong into poker and joined the league for it's fall session. Played my first game last week, and won in spectacular fashion. Taking out all but one of my 7 other opponents. It wasn't easy, but the cards fell right for me at the right times and a few tricky moves on my part ensured a few stacks went in when I wanted them to. My second game is this evening, and I hope I can continue to play well.

     I've also been keeping up with my weekly Legion tourney. I've played 9 out of the past 12 weeks, and have cashed 6 in a row with 2 wins. The profit made has allowed me to afford a trip to Winnipeg to play the Manitoba Lotteries Poker Championship near the end of this month. There will be three tourneys held: a $600 freeze-out, a $300 bounty, and the $1100 Championship tourney. I'm only bankrolled for the $300 bounty, but I may be able to play the $600 freeze-out as well, if some things fall into place.

     Looking over my last post, I see I was in the midst of a golf slump. After that tourney ( I did get a "closest to the pin" prize on one of the par 3's. Woohoo) I put in some serious work on my game. I basically re-vamped my swing from the ground up. Different stance, grip, shoulder turn. It took a long time, and it's still a work in progress, but I am hitting the ball so much better. And farther too. Goodbye weak fade, hello high draw. It feels really good to have a 170-180yard approach on a 470yard par 5. Dogleg left? No problems now. I even put my new Taylormade TourBurner irons back in the shed and broke out my old Adams GT's. The TM's are more of a mid-level game improvement club. Wider soles and some perimeter weighting, but in a compact head with minimal offset. My Adams irons are a players iron with a muscleback design. 

     With my new swing plane I am able to close the face at impact to give me that nice right to left ballflight, but the TM irons were foiling that. See, with the wider sole and higher MOI (moment of inertia for those of you who now nothing of golf equipment, or physics) the club would try to cancel out the shutting of the face and that would lead to a straight shot (desirable as well), but a straight shot without much distance. It was like I was hitting it a bit fat all the time. The Adams clubs are responding much better to this action and are giving me a cleaner contact. 

     With my driver, I switched to a right foot back (roughly 20 degrees closed) stance and I am focusing on keeping my left arm on my chest all the way back through the swing with a much more pronounced shoulder turn. This, in conjunction with a weaker, rolled over left hand grip (my right hand is square to the face/target) is allowing me to load up and fire hard at the ball (which is now teed slightly lower and farther back than before) without the risk of my body and arms outracing the clubhead into impact. The result is a flatter angle of attack that comes more from the inside of the ball producing much more speed than I thought I could muster. 

     I'm still not fully grooved in to this swing and sometimes I fall into old habits, but overall I am hitting much better than I ever have before. Too bad the weather turned to shit for the past week or two. I'm hoping to get in a couple of more rounds before the snow is here to stay. I usually try to golf onto early November if weather permits, but it don't look like that's happening this year.  

     It saddens me that I will soon have to put away my clubs, store my cart and spend my afternoons shoveling instead of golfing. I hate winter. Maybe a trip to Florida this winter with Liane and my clubs is in order.......

How's ya shoot? Drunk. :)

    So I just finished my worst tournament round ever. Shot a 112, net 97. Normally I'd be pissed at myself, but instead of slamming clubs and swearing like a sailor, I just got drunk. Well, to tell the truth, I was drink by the 8th hole. I started with a triple bogey, double, double on my first three and just said "Fuck it". Beer cart came around and I grabbed three. Two holes later I grabbed another two. So on, and so on 'till I ended up where I am now: 28 beer and 2 shots of whiskery later. I gotta admit, I feel pretty good about my round though. Except for my longer clubs, I shot pretty good. If it wasn't for my short game I would have done alot worse. I just couldn't hit a drive to save my life. Many holes I went three off the tee. Hitting low snap-hooks or high slices into either the bush or water. Too many lost balls. Ah well. Tomorrow is another day. And it can't get ano worse right? :D

Gettin' Old(er)

     Today is my 28th birthday and I feel old. It's not the number of years, but the number of nagging injuries that are getting to me. Bad left ankle, both knees creak crack and pop at the slightest provocation, my back had been screwed since the day I was born and it's not getting any better. (Though I did get my slipped disk fixed up today and am feeling particularly spry at the moment). Might be just because I've spent the past week in pain on the couch. I think by Monday I'll be feeling a lot better about my age and bodily pains.

     Despite it all, I'm happy. I love my job, even though it is the main cause of my bodily pain, and I love my life. I am where I am because I chose to be here. Not through circumstance, not by chance, but by choice. So I guess I should just man-up, take a Tylenol and get on with my path.

     I'm lookin' forward to tomorrow. Plan is to golf all day with various family and friends. Going to put a case of beer in the cart and just do laps around the course. Then @ 7 I'm going up to the Legion for a poker game and a few more drinks. Then I'm going to party. I mean I'm going to get slobbering drunk. Just shitfaced. It's been a very long time since I've just let myself go like that (New Year's I think... can't remember...must have been :) ) so I'm due for a bender. Then it;s back to reality on Sunday as I'm back to work for Monday.

     Today was a particularly good day. Not only did I get my back fixed up, but I had a lot of fun in my Camaro on my trip out of town. Raced a Challenger SRT-8. Smoked him. Made an 11 car pass on a straight stretch on the 2 lane highway. Damn American tourists driving less than 70 km/h on smooth dry straight pavement. Just a train of SUV''s with boats and nobody wanted to pass the slow leader so everyone had to suffer. Not I though. I seen the long stretch coming up with no oncoming traffic and punched it. Within seconds I went from 70 to 215 (shhh, don't tell anyone, it's highly illegal to go that fast) and blew by them all. Dropped it back down to 95 and cruised the rest of the way home all giddy.

  Now it's time for a Crown and Coke, a smoke and some relax time before some family shows up for some cake. Have a great weekend everybody!

Argh, my back!

      Hey hey. Been awful busy trapping the past month. If I wasn't out on the lake, I was golfing or doing yard-work. Busy, busy. So summer is finally here, wind, rain and all. It's not too bad, just not great. Still getting on some good rounds on the course. Been steady mid 80's, with a few low 80, and a high 90 or two thrown in for good measure.

     Threw out my back on Saturday at work. Bad. It happened while walking over the bog with 5 gallons of minnow's in a barrel on my back. For those not in the know (everybody who does not trap minnows) 1 gallon of minnows is about equal to 100 dozen, or 1200 minnows/gallon. At a weight of 27lbs per gallon, plus water I had about 150lbs on my back which was way too much weight to be balancing myself through sinking muskeg. As I was trying to keep my footing I did a little shimmy and slipped a disk in my lower back. I managed to make it back to the truck, and endure a nearly 3 hour drive back to base (including a lovely flat tire change) on some of the gnarliest dirt logging roads known to man. By the time I got home I could hardly walk, and by the time night rolled around I was in agony.

     Three days later I am finally getting some relief. Took a trip out of town to a chiropractor. Helped a bit. Unfortunately the guy I went to was not my usual guy and since he didn't know my injury history could only give me a standard adjustment. Still going to my guy on Friday though. Get fixed up proper. At least I'm able to walk without too much pain anymore.

     Friday is a big day for me. I'll be turning 28. I know 28 isn't really a big deal, but with the way I've been feeling lately it still feels old. My knees are buggered, my back gets thrown out at least three times a year, and during a recent trip to the optometrist I found out that I am slowly going blind. In my good eye. My right eye has been shot since birth. But lest you all think I'm complaining, I still am thankful I live a good life. I am blessed with great family, a beautiful wife, a great home, a sexy car and awesome friends. Can't complain. Can't walk straight lately, but still can't complain.

     So since the trapping/golf season started I have not played much poker. A few live games at the Legion here and there and a couple of online tournies in the past month. Up a few bucks live, down a few online. Been playing way out of my BRM (read:$10 sng and $5 mtt with a combined Stars and FTP roll which started last month about $110) and I'm only down $20. So, yeah. dumb, but not catastrophic.

     Can't wait for my new grips to be put on my clubs. Got a set of Lambkin's mid-size grips. My stock grips weren't terribly worn, but they were not that good in cooler or we conditions. Which was terribly unfortunate since the season here is predominately cool or wet. The Lambkins are real tacky and a bit softer, with a great feeling grip pattern that should preform great all around. Plus the larger size fits my hands a lot better than standard size. Larger grip = less grip pressure = smoother swing = better golf. Plus I got them in white, so they should look bitchin'. They'll be ready for Saturday. I plan on spending the day on the course with a case of beer in the cart. just doing laps of our nine hole beauty with whoever cares to join me. Then it's off to the Legion for a poker game then who know's what after that.

     That's the plan anyways, I just hope my back co-operates. Chiropractor said with the proper stretching I should be fine to play golf, but no moderate to heavy lifting or prolonged periods in a leaning or crouched position for at least 5 days. So looks like I'm off work until Monday since that is the majority of what my job entails. Normally this would be a good thing, but we are in the height of the good trapping weather and good sales season. Good thing I've been kicking ass the past few weeks and helped get us well ahead on stock. But I still feel bad. Last year, a week from now, I tore a ligament and crushed cartilage in my knee and was off work for almost a month. I gotta take better care of myself.

     Anyways, I've rambled on enough for one post. Have a good week and an even better weekend!

Spring missed it's chance...

     First I want to start off by saying one thing: I will not make a blog post about a politically charged issue while drunk again.

     Now that that's out of the way.... Well we finally got a taste of summer over the past few days here. Spring skipped up completely so far. Went from below 0 and snowing to quick melt and 15+ in the matter of what seemed like a few days.

     Tuesday was a a great day! I went golfing, yay!! Mind you it was quite wet on the course, the greens were closed to play and there was still some snow in the low/shadowy areas I had to avoid, but I still got to play 7 holes. Man, am I ever rusty. These longass winters here are really a killer to my game. Wanted to go out again today and enjoy the 20C weather and warm sun, but had other things to do. Some yard work, some car detailing, and I was also doing more work on the sump pit that I've been installing in my basement.

     That has been a slow process. My basement is dug into clay, and due to the shoddy construction practices of the company that built it way back in the 60's, the weeping tile works like shit. Well, it doesn't really work at all for any real amount of rain. So I broke out a jackhammer and a shovel and went to work. Dug down maybe a foot before the hole was full of water and the sides began to erode out from under the concrete pad. I put my basin in, just enough to get it to fill up with water, dropped in my sump pump and started pumping away. I'm amazed at how much water was under my foundation. The pump has been running for 5 days now, pumping roughly 50 gallons of water a day out of there. Today it was dry enough to allow me to dig down another foot before it filled with too much water to continue. Gotta say, digging through partially frozen clay is a bitch. Now I have 2 or so feet of my 3 foot deep basin sunk into the hole and still pumping water.

     Tomorrow the forecast is calling for a buttload of rain, up to 15mm, so I'm glad I at least have some provision in place to evacuate the water. Still, I hope the forecast is wrong. I still need to dig down at least another 2 feet, widen the hole a bit, place a layer of crushed rock in the bottom, replace the basin, fill around the sides with more crushed, and then finish it with a nice veneer of concrete around the edge. Then all I gotta do is run the hose out my window framing, outside a ways from my house and I'm done. What I have done so far will help tremendously, but I hope the rain holds off a couple of more days so I can finish it properly. Fingers crossed!

     Then, as if rain weren't bad enough, it is supposed to go back to 0 on Sunday and snow a bit. Fuck, I'm so fuckin' sick of that white shit. If the forecast is right it'll be till at least Wednesday before I can golf again. That;s if it doesn't rain or snow again in the meantime...

     Ah well, at least I got to play a few holes and started my tan this week.

Sad ^Times. Sad Times Indeed

     So here we are, three days since the now infamous Black Friday. The day that seen FTP, PokerStars, and Ultimate Bet/Absolute Poker get shut down in America by the DOJ and billions of dollars seized.

     

     I won't go into the nitty-gritty of the details, as I'm sure most of you are fully aware of them at this point. But I will go on a bit of a rant to let you all know how I feel about the matter, even though as a Canadian citizen I'm so far completely unaffected by this:

Seriously now. How the fuck did you people let this bullshit happen to yourselves? Don't give me this crap about  not knowing this would happen or how this is all some underhanded government scheme to take your money. We all new this would happen eventually. But that's not what I mean. I mean how did you let yourselves be pushed around by your own government? The very government you elected to see to and protect your interests. 

I mean really. I won't go back too far here, but I'll give a little review on the chain of bullshit that I've seen since, say 9/11. Since that time you have been lied to in order to go to war for no good reason other than to "fight terrorism" (interestingly enough, the same terrorists you went to war to get are the ones you armed to the teeth in order to fight somebody else, then fucked over once they didn't want to fight anymore). You then elected to keep fighting in order to save face. While this was all going on, your top regulatory industries were making a mint by turning a blind eye to what the largest financial institutions were doing and hence throwing your country into a horrible depression that fucked over not only yourselves but many other countries.

Instead of throwing the people who were responsible for the banking fiasco that seen millions of you out of work and nearly as many lose their homes and pensions, you decided to (by total inaction and trust in your government) let them walk and throw billions of tax dollars at the problem. Good idea. Let it happen, forgive the companies, banks and individuals responsible, and give them billions of dollars to start up again, then trust the same regulatory bodies to make sure it don't happen again.

Also while all this was happening, you decided to take it up the ass when it came to anything about "national security". The propaganda that was fed and swallowed to you got you all so fuckin scared that you no longer asked questions when it came to your elected officials. As long as they told you that it was in your best interests you let it happen. No questions, no fact checking, nothing. 

This whole poker mess that you are now in was actually tacked on to a Port Security bill that was sure to pass. had the UIGEA been proposed on it's own, it would probably have been shot down. Instead, by turning a blind eye to everything else, you allowed them to do what they always got away with and paperclip it to a bill that was sure to pass. By spending the last decade just allowing things to happen without question, you all then just fucked yourselves. And who did you turn to after the UIGEA was tabled and passed? The PPA. An organization headed by a politician who works with other current/former politicians. And you think they are really going to do much in the way of helping the cause?? That's like getting grounded by one parent and trying to get out of it by sucking up to the other. It just won't work out like you hope.

Now, before I get all sorts of hatemail, or corrective comments, keep in mind that this is just a broad overview and a rant.

I continue...

So here you are now. Pissed at the government, pissed at Obama, Bush, and the world for slapping you with this injustice. You should all be pissed at yourselves. By allowing this chain of events to happen, you allowed the shutdown of your favorite hobby.

But all is not lost. Sure you can say "no matter who is in charge, these things will happen" or "it's been done, all we can do now is deal with it and see what happens". Bullshit!! You, as a people can do many things to make sure this does not happen again. Did you know that any American citizen can run for public office? Sure, it takes a lot of money to put someone in a high enough office to have any effect, but that cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of getting assraped back and forth by either of the current two parties. Make a fucking stand here people! Petitions and letter campaigns don't work. A call to your local congressman don't work. Know what works? Millions of protesters, millions of united voices, millions of dollars invested into a core of individuals that are chosen by you who actually have your interests at heart. 

Don't just sit there getting fucked and complaining about it, do something about it! If you don't, losing the ability to play online poker, getting on a plane without getting your luggage tossed and a finger up your ass, and eating the foods you want regardless of the trans fat content is gonna be the very least of your worries!

I will leave you with a quote that you might find interesting:

An excerpt from

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Milton Mayer



But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remote

Now that I'm done ranting and pissing you all off, I wish all of you the best in this difficult time. It is still too early to tell what lasting effects this whole situation will have, but I fear it is going to get worse before it gets better. This has gone beyond poker. This is now in the realm of personal freedom and happiness. And to that end I hope we can all come out of this better then we were when it all started. The US government hay have won this battle, but the war is long from over. Don't give up, fight it any way you can!