Post is here.

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The last post is around the corner; change your RSS to here.

Yes, an actual poker post.

don't forget, change your RSS feeds to katitude.ca.

What is possibly the last ride of the year.

How I busted out of NumbBono's rebuy.

Another week and I think I'm shedding this place. Change your RSS feeds to Katitude.ca.

Cross-posted from Katitude.ca:

Tonight is the night of the dime rebuy. A full hour of joint silliness. Folds will be mocked, walks even more so. Carson has some odds loosely calculated....they're interesting, to say the least.

I'm not 100% I'll be there. I hope to be as it looks like a giggle, but too many factors are sucking the fun right out of life at the moment - I feel like I'm wearing a "Kick Me" sign on my back that only the Fates in charge of friends, family, home and work issues can see.

One more kick and I may take up drinking heavily for a living.

Actually the drinking heavily sounds like a plan. Maybe I should stop by the liquor store and pick up some martini fixin's for tonight. HHhhmmmmm...martini fueled poker. Maybe the dime rebuy game is just what the doctor ordered.

This place is slipping from memory already. Two posts up on katitude.ca.

Story here. RIP Frankie Venom.

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Want to keep up with my ramblings? Change your RSS to katitude.ca

Too long to put in both places; look here.

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Last post in the space coming soon; change your RSS to katitude.ca

Best example of kerning ever.

After having the domain purchased and hosted for well over a year (thank you yet again, Kipper!), I've finally done something with it.

So within a week or so (as long as it takes me to get tired of duplicate posting), I'll stop posting to this blogspot address, and will focus on the new and pretty blog at Katitude.ca. Change your RSS feed if you want to continue to read my rants and ramblings.

If there was anything that reinforced what a design geek I am, this was it. I spent waaaay too much time finding images for the random image banner and playing with the css font tags, but I became impatient and irritated when it came to figuring out why the effing comments kept showing as 0 even when there WERE imported comments.

Let me just say that the Wordpress forums are not as helpful as you might think.

Because I am so done with importing comments from blogger to wordpress, commenting will be closed here. Head on over to Katitude.ca and leave your two cents worth. Please; let me know what you think.

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This weekend is the Canadian Thankgiving....happy turkey day to all my fellow Canucks. The weather is going to be wonderful, so Keith and I are gong to head out on the bikes for a last ride. We'll be returning to town for family dinners on Sunday and Monday. Mmmmmm...turkey *drool.

You are The High Priestess

Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education.

The High Priestess is the card of knowledge, instinctual, supernatural, secret knowledge. She holds scrolls of arcane information that she might, or might not reveal to you. The moon crown on her head as well as the crescent by her foot indicates her willingness to illuminate what you otherwise might not see, reveal the secrets you need to know. The High Priestess is also associated with the moon however and can also indicate change or fluctuation, particularly when it comes to your moods.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

01001011 01100001 01110100 00101100 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 01100111 01101111 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100110 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101111 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101110
~ my computers.

I have today off. It's a lovely sunny day, high of around 70 or so. It would be a good day to get the bike out for a cruise along country roads lined by red maples or to go rollerblading on the trail along the Humber River.

But technology has conspired against me, and this is what I'm doing:

1. Using this computer to try and find a solution for my Wordpress woes. This is Day 3 of trying to find a workaround for the problem of uploading a 4mb file to a server that will let me upload a max of 2mb. Many thanks to Pokerwolf for the much needed laugh, and to OhCaptain for the assistance!
2. Cleaning this laptop of the tens of thousands of teeny tiny litte files created when FileSplitter crashed while attempting to split the 4mb blog file. The morning was spent backing up data and trying to do a factory setting restoration. No go. So I'm deleting the teeny tiny little files a few thousand at a time (select all and the laptop crashes).
3. Working on a clients site re-design on the mini laptop while I'm waiting for things to happen on the other two machines.
4. My passport expires 3 days before I leave for Vegas. Vegas is my current light at the end of the tunnel. This reminds me to get on it and get across to a photographer today. Not sure if that's going to happen today tho; so immersed in computer glitches that I'm still in my bathrobe. I know it's not technology, but I still have to do it and soon.
   
5. Drinking vast amounts of coffee in my happy kitty mug. This was cup #3 of a really nice dark roast Mexican/Cuban blend. I've had another since...I feel like I'm vibrating at a cellular level right now.

Today's code word was supposed to be indulgence. Throw some money at my pensive mood and see if I can shake it loose.

My plan was to leave work at 11, walk downtown, have a nice lunch on Wish's patio then head to Stillwater for my hair appointment. Change Wish's lamb burger on the patio for a brie and raspberry crepe in the park, and that part of the plan went well. I was faulty in thinking that it was the monetary exchanges that would improve my mood.

I had been listening to an interview on CBC this morning (no idea what the show was or who was interviewed), my attention being caught by a discussion about the increasing ubiquity* of iPods providing a never-ending soundtrack to one's life. A question stuck with me - is silence obsolete? One guest jokingly said yes, the other was far more earnest in his reply: I am far more in the world when I am experiencing it with all my senses, he said.

So rather than walking around listening to Weekend Players and Lhasa de Sela, I left the iPod in the purse. I'm so glad I did; I would have missed the sound of the kids laughing in the playground and the twittering of a flock of sparrows in the bushes behind me, waiting for me to leave so they can scavenge for my crumbs. There was the whir of two dragonflies moving past me, their wings flashing gold and green in the sunlight, and the sound of the wind moving through the leaves.

Presto. Instant mood improvement. Which made the rest of the day icing on the cake.

Keith picked me up after my appointment and we went for sushi at our favourite place. It seemed a shame to waste the rest of a nice day inside working on a computer, so we went for a walk along the east branch of the Don River.

We hiked and explored the path through the trees, walking along the river when we could. Stones were skipped - it's our ritual. I found a 3' fish skeleton in some shallow water, picked clean. We wondered about it and put it down as a fluke, until we saw 2 similarly-sized salmon in some clear shallow water a bit further down. In one spot, we surprised a blue heron who was wandering in the slow shallows, startling it into flight.

There's a commuter rail line that runs along the path for a while, and we were in a clearing when the outbound train slid past us. We waved like maniacs for no other reason than that someone might wave back.



I doubt I'd have had this kind of a day if I hadn't unplugged. It felt so good, I might do it again tomorrow.


*yes, A, I used it correctly in a sentence. You owe me a coffee *grin.

Played a little PLO8 with NutzCarson and DonK_Tuckfard tonight for a giggle. And it was a giggle for sure.

See, even the RNG has having fun:



Dems the most useless Quads evah, Bitches!

Well, this sucks.

A nice weekend, with plans, and I'm down with a bug. Not sure if it's something I ate or something a young lovely passed on to me. Doesn't matter. All I know is that I feel dizzy and lightheaded as soon as I get vertical.

And it's not dizzy and lightheaded in a fun way either.

I was looking forward to heading over to Taylor and Tawny's for dinner; I've been really MIA with them lately, and I always enjoy spending time with Tawny. We have a lot in common - knitting, poker, and a love of a good martini to name a few. We've also been thinking about taking some music classes together where she works.

But the weekend hasn't been a total loss. So far I've

• caught up on my sleep.
• written a lot.
  
• played around with the blog. The time has come to transfer it to the katitude.ca domain I've owned for over a year. Question: any thoughts on Blogger vs. Wordpress for this?
  
• knitted some
• did some marking (ick)
• spent some time updating/cleaning out/adding to my music.
• did I mention sleep?

Keith just came in with a gift to make me feel better:


Oddly enough, it does.

I've been informed that today is Clive Owen's birthday. In honour of that very yummalicious (TM Fuel) Brit actor, here's some eye candy for the ladies. Enjoy...lord knows I am.

And yes it has something for the guys too. A few years ago, BMW did a series of web-only ads/short movies entitled The Driver; the only common thread was the BMW brand and the driver, Clive Owen. The ads featured a number of star actors and directors, and were just kickass on stun. I was very distressed when BMW took them down, but thanks to YouTube, they live on:

The Star, featuring Madonna, directed by Guy Richie:



Beat the Devil, featuring James Brown and Gary Oldman directed by Tony Scott (you'll love the ending):

...I could take my beloved out for a realllly nice dinner tonight.

Good lord.

Now I'll be the first to admit, I have not been a very political person. Was not raised with political discussion as a kid, was too self-centered as a young adult (read: too busy killing brain cells to try and edumacate them), was too lazy as an adult. Don't get me wrong, I still did my civic duty and got into it around election time, but inbetwen elections I was just living my life.

But then I started working here, where everyone is intelligent, informed and well-read. Politics and social issues are as likely to be discussed in the lunch room as is the idiocy of the latest batch of grade 8's. It's pulled me up whether I like it or not. And in the last year, I've been following political discourse in the blogosphere and next thing I know, I'm watching not one, but two political debates last night on tv.

I feel like my head is going to explode.

I started with the Canadian leaders debate. Jesus H. Christ. Harper could not look any more surreal if he was made out of plastic (who knows, he just might be... would certainly explain the hair). Dion's English is good, but his pronunciation is painful. By the time I translated "garble swishy garble" to "sustainable development" they'd already moved on to another point. Layton was busy being the thorn in everyone's side. I tuned out Duceppe as the Bloc's refrain of "Quebec before all others" makes me angry. The one I was impressed with was May, who stood her ground, made some good points and made them well. Of course I could be thinking that because I was doing a subconcious compare-and-contrast to another female politician I was watching on an American channel.

Oh. My. God.

The twitter tweets and an IM from Astin lured me over to watch Biden and Palin. It was that painful mix of entertainment and embarassment. Kinda like when I saw Dumb and Dumber.

If there was anyone who gave the impression of being totally unprepared to stand in front of millions and speak eloquently and well for a party and a country, it'd be Palin.

Oh wait, it's not an impression, is it?

After that was over, I went back to the Canuck debate for the closing and the commentary. What to do, what to do. Do I vote the way my values and conscience want to vote? Or do I vote for a party I really don't like very much so that the party I really don't like at all has less of a chance of getting back in? Ah the joys of a five party system.

Valdez, Alaska was not what I expected.

Somehow I had it in my head that Valdez would be all tarted up like Skagway, a Gold Rush period piece of a town replete with souvenir shops and nature areas for the tourists. I had this image in my mind of colour, warmth and history as we rode toward it through the Thompson Pass, giving me something to focus on to avoid thinking about how cold, wet, and borderline freaked out I was by the thick fog and the road.

Instead, what we found was a working town. A fishing town. An oil town. Then a tourist town. The harbour at the end of Prince William Sound was full of boats, and the terminus of the Alaskan Pipeline was across the bay. It looked nothing like Skagway; an earthquake and submarine slide had wiped out the old town of Valdez in the 60's and the residents had rebuilt Valdez further along the bay, all modern and utilitarian.

When we arrived, the low gray clouds combined with the damp chill air seemed to give this town a certain noir feeling, dark and colourless, brooding even. I'm sure that the town is very lovely on a nice, sunny day, but I was still rattled from the ride and everything I saw seemed faintly ominous.

We found our hotel quickly, as one does in a one-main-street small town. The Lonely Planet Guide described our hotel, the Keystone, as a "modular relic of the pipeline boom years with lots of clean, cramped, prefab rooms". Note the lack of words like charming, or interesting, or comfortable. It was in the kind of place where we unloaded all the gear off our bikes lest it not be there in the morning. Our room was certainly special: dingy carpet and chipped pressboard furniture; floor, door and bed squeaked equally loudly; and bringing in all the gear made it just that much smaller. I could not stop the disappointment that settled over me. I was tired, cold, over-extended and done.

I was on my way out the main doors to get the last of the bags from my bike when I saw a slight figure in black jeans and hoodie hurrying away across the large empty parking lot. It registered immediately that he came from the direction of the bikes. There were no other vehicles around them, and my first suspicious thought was what have you done, you little shit. I'm ashamed to say I made some snap judgements. Had I left anything unsecured on the bike that he might have taken? Had I locked up the saddlebags? What was he after?

The boy looked to be about 16 or 17, and looking over his shoulder, he saw me come out of the hotel. He turned and watched as I almost ran down the stairs to my bike. How odd that he's waiting, I thought, quickly followed by more negative thoughts about teenage boys.

Then I saw my bike. There, in the exact center of the black leather seat he had placed a perfect pink flower.

I stopped cold and stared at it for a long moment. I looked up to see him still watching me, nervously, expectantly. I think he knew what I'd been thinking and was waiting to see how I would react. All I could do now was smile. And blink back a few tears, truth be told. I waved and shouted a very sincere "thank you". His face lit up as he waved back and shouted "you're welcome!" back, then he turned, put his hands in his pockets and walked down the road.

I stood in the cold misting rain for a few minutes just looking at the gift on my bike. I knew that I was thanking him for more than just the flower, and that he'd never realize it.Thanking him for testing my assumptions and proving them wrong, for giving me hope, and for making it all right.

Tonight I'm Mookie-ing and Dookie-ing as usual.

However, I'm drowning my sorrows a bit more than usual. While this is fun and it's making me lol for realz to hear the Buddy Dank radio clips from the Bash, this was not my original choice for the evening.

I was supposed to go my boxing class, and then go and see these guys:



Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It would have been a great show. If only I could read a fucking calendar.

Sigh.

You think too much. Stop it.
~ parents, grandmother, brothers, both husbands, many close friends

Yeah. But what if I like it?

I love taking something and turning it around and around in my head. Looking at it from all angles. Pulling the stray threads to see where they lead, see which thread will unravel the Gordian knot of a problem/situation. Playing the what-if game.

Love it.

And yeah, I know there's a downside.

I get so wound up in the stray threads that I become one with the problem/situation, so entangled I can't think about anything else. Time passes without me.

The problem is twofold:

1. the problem/situation becomes bigger than it needs to be. I ride through one very challenging and frightening mountain pass then in my head they all will be very challenging and frightening mountain passes. They weren't, and I freaked myself out needlessly
2. I actually end up talking myself out of something.

Not even three days back from the Bash and I'm already thinking about the December Vegas Blogger Bacchanalia.

Thinking too much.

Can I get the time? It's right at report cards and really busy - do I need the stress? What about money? Bankroll is laughable as it was all spent on the trip, and I still have to pay back the rest of the trip. And we want to get away for the holidays; where's that $$ going to come from?

Etcetera, ad nauseum.

Laid in bed this morning, starting to think about along those lines, then thought, oh no, not going to play this game anymore; life is too damn short. I will not talk myself out of this one.

Don't think. Do.

Asked Keith for some of his airmiles: granted.
Asked work for the time off: granted. I can only get Friday off but hey, that's better than nothing.
Flight arrangements: almost done.

So ignore the waffling you may have heard from me over the last while. I'm going to Vegas, dammit!

P.S. Anyone looking for a roommate? I'm not gender particular. And yes, I can sometimes keep my hands to myself.

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I got tired of the poker theme blog look on a blog that is less and less about poker every day. changed the look a bit to last until I get around to moving it over the domain I've had for over a year. Whatcha think? Colours need to be tweaked a bit.