Journalcon.

Beth and I signed up tonight. We’ll see you there.

The right phone call finally came: I got the job.

Whew.

I’ve been un- or under-employed for 10 months now. I was fine with it the first few months; I had a nice fat severance check, I had Unemployment Insurance, I had plenty of free time… The livin’ was easy. But then the Unemployment ran out. And then the fat severance check got skinny. And then there just wasn’t any money going into the household budget from me, period.

I sent out dozens of resumes and only landed one quarter-decent job, the DWP training job I’m now leaving, the one where I only work 3 days a week for far less money than I’m worth and on a 1099 basis so I’m responsible for my own payroll taxes, which just lowers my hourly rate that much more. It barely pays what Unemployment paid, and I don’t even want to think about the taxes I’m going to owe on it. It pays so badly, I feel like I’m moving backwards when I go in to work.

I finally wised up and realized that my resume sucked, so I revised it and sent out dozens more. I finally started getting interviews from the new resume, but they all yielded interview shuffle type results: We like you, we’ll call you … and then they never did. I was pulling my hair out — and I’m bald already.

It was really depressing. Beth worked really hard to be upbeat and cool about it, but my mood and our money woes were really starting to get to her. I think this may have been harder on her than it was on me. Maybe.

But… Whew. Finally, a new job. A real job. A job that I think I’ll like. A road job again, but only 50% travel and I’ll be home on weekends, so I think it’ll be okay.

And on top of all that new-job frosting, there’s a nice big, fat, red cherry on top with sprinkles: Mo’ Money. It pays–

(Well, hmm… I was going to include the double-digit percentage increase here, but I think that might not be wise. So let’s just say…)

–“a lot” more than my last “real” job from 10 months ago did.

Whew.

I’m still waiting to hear back from my job interview last Friday.

I left feeling like I pretty much had the job locked up and was halfway led to expect a verbal offer from them that afternoon. Here we are now, three days later on Monday afternoon, and I still haven’t heard from them. Now I’m not so sure. In fact, now my paranoid mind is going the other way with it.

And I’m sitting here waiting for the phone to ring. And so of course it’s ringing off the hook: telemarketers, the dentist’s office, the eye doctor’s office, Zoe’s friend calling to say “hi” from Hawaii, wrong numbers, voicemails from Beth about how to do laundry, etc. No lie: there have been sixteen calls today. Every single person with a telephone in the western hemisphere is calling me today — except the one I’ve been waiting for.

I hate prom.

We had to put one of our cats to sleep today. It was our oldest one, Gable, given to me 12+ years ago by an old girlfriend of mine, Kelli. My nickname for him was The Big Man. He was a tough old bastard and had a number of very expensive hospitalizations over the years, but he always bounced back. Because he was a tough old bastard. This latest one, though, was too much for him.

He developed a cyst in one of his eyelids and it was starting to get infected. The vet said surgery was the only way to treat it — cut it out rather than drain it. We had a long talk about anesthesia risks for an old cat like Gable and she said she thought he’d tolerate the procedure okay. And he did; it was the recovery that got him. He just stopped eating and drinking and got weaker and weaker. Then he disappeared for two days and I thought he’d gone off to die on his own. And then yesterday he turned up again, looking pretty ragged but alive.

We took him back to the vet, who thought giving him a blood transfusion and rehydrating him would perk him up enough to start eating again. It didn’t. In fact, he just deteriorated overnight while he was there. When we got there this afternoon, he was on oxygen, was mouth-breathing, and was obviously on his way out.

So we took a few minutes with him as a family, told him how much we loved him, gave him lots of pets while Beth and Zoe cried over him. Then we held him and said goodbye while the vet put him to sleep. He went easy. He went knowing we loved him. He went knowing he wasn’t alone.

I snapped these two pictures in his last minutes.

Beth saying goodbye.

Beth and Zoe with Gable, just before he went to sleep.

…and one last picture of The Big Man from when he was doing okay. This is from about six months ago, when he was on the mend from his pneumothorax hospitalization. Look at my tough old bastard, wearing his bandage with aplomb and style. Even a chest tube couldn’t keep him down.

I’m really going to miss him. He was a great cat.

I had another 2nd job interview today. Again, it was a mock training session. That’s been the pattern lately: do a standard interview, then be asked to come back to do a mock training so they can see me in action. The third step of the pattern so far has been “and then never hear from them again.” I’m hoping for a different outcome this time.

I switched things up for this presentation. Usually they ask me to do something on Microsoft Office: one place wanted me to do a presentation on pivot tables in Excel, another had me do something in Word. This latest place left the choice up to me, so I decided to “think outside the box” and do something completely different: I trained them on how to use a pen.

I felt a little bit silly, standing there in my monkey suit, doing 15 minutes on “here’s how you hold a pen” and “now let’s try drawing a circle,” but I figure it was something none of the other candidates were going to do, so it would make me stand out. I wrapped the presentation up by having them perform an exercise in pen usage: a game of Hangman, where the phrase they were deciphering was “Let’s hire Chuck!” It got a lot of laughs, at least.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed as I wait to see if it also gets me an offer.

I wish all those pesky lefties would leave Karl Rove alone. He did not leak Valerie Plame’s name to the press, okay? Yeah, he named her husband. And he named the company she works for. And he named the project she was working on. But he never said her name, okay? Jesus, just let it go already.

Warning: poker content.

I hit the Commerce again last night and played more $100 buy-in No Limit Hold Em. I got off to a rocky start and was down to the felt within half an hour, but one re-buy and a few hours later I cashed out up $160. Not bad for a few hours’ work fun.

Best hand of the night:
A young Israeli kid here on vacation is at the other end of the table, doing well. He’s catching some good cards; in fact he just took down a nice pot with pocket Aces. He’s on a rush and has the chips to back it up. The cards come out for the next hand and I look down at AK offsuit. The kid looks at his cards and puts his rack in the middle of the table, going all-in.

Me with my AK, I have one of the best starting hands there is in Hold Em. It’s the kind of hand that — if you’re going to play it at all — you play it hard pre-flop: you push all-in with it. That way you maximize your winnings when it hits, and when it misses you can at least take consolation in knowing you played it the best you could. So when I saw that AK I really, really wanted to go all-in with it. But that damn kid beat me to it, which meant he probably had a pocket pair — maybe Aces — which made laying my hand down a sensible play. But AK is pretty much a coin toss against anything but AA because if an Ace falls it makes me top pair and beats his pocket pair. The kid had just had AA, so it was unlikely he had it again, and if he was just betting Ace-high then I had the best kicker. And now there was a ton of money in the pot and I had a good shot to take it. So …. what the hell. Coin toss to double up? I called.

He turned over Aces. Oh shit.

I was in big, big trouble. AA is the top pair, so having another Ace come out on the board to pair my Ace would give him three of a kind, still dominating me. Only two hands would save me: Two more Kings to give me three of a kind, or Queen-Jack-Ten to give me a straight. Both were astronomical long shots. I was dead.

The dealer dealt the cards. The flop came rag, rag, 10.
Then the turn was a Queen.
And as I stood up and chanted “Jack! Jack! Jack!” for the river, the dealer turned over…
a Jack.

I made my miracle straight.

The kid couldn’t believe it. He was livid. I was stunned. That was a $450 pot that should have been his but was suddenly mine. It was the epitome of a bad beat.

I felt really bad about it. But not bad enough to give his chips back.

Yawn. It’s 6:30 a.m. and I’m just getting in from an all-nighter playing poker at the Commerce. It’s been a long time since I played poker but it looks like I still got it: I cashed in for $200 and cashed out for $625. Ya gotta love a winning session.

Warning: poker content.

I was playing No Limit Hold ’em at the $100 buy-in table. The best hand of the night was at about 5:00 a.m. Most of the players had been at the table for hours, so we had a rhythm going and the mood was very laid-back and relaxed. It was a friendly table. Then a new player showed up: kid in his mid-20’s, Rolex, slicked-back hair, staring at everybody hard, called the floorman over to let him know (loud enough for us all to hear it) that he was on the board for the $600 buy-in game if they were looking for him — basically, he wanted to make sure we knew the Real Player had arrived. He didn’t do much of anything for five or ten minutes, just checked and folded while looking at us hard, but poker-wise he didn’t make any kind of splash. Then he made a move.

He’s on the button, I’m in middle position. I get my cards and look down to find A8 offsuit. I call the big blind, and then when the betting gets around to the Real Player, he comes out with $50. Everyone folded around to me, and I had a hunch, so I called him.

I don’t remember exactly what the flop was, but it had a King and there was no Ace. I made a feeler bet to see where I was, something like $25. The Real Player nonchalantly went all-in behind me with something like $100. I called Time.

I thought about it for a looong minute. I remembered his show-off entrance. I especially remembered his conversation with the floorman about being on the board for the $600 game and I thought it was ostentatious bullshit — I didn’t think this guy had even seen a $600 table, let alone played one. I thought about how nonchalantly he went all-in — players often try to act strong when they’re bluffing a weak hand. And I took a long minute to look at him, sitting over there at the opposite end of the table, being very interested in something happening at the next table.

And then he yawned. That’s when I knew he was bluffing: yawning is a sign of stress.

He was representing a King and I knew he didn’t have one. I put him on maybe an Ace like me, but I halfway thought he didn’t even have that much. I thought that even if he did have an Ace, my 8 kicker might still be good. And I had a pretty big stack and could afford to lose if I was wrong. So I put him on a lying-ass-dog bluff and I called him.

Well. It turned out I was half right: he didn’t have a King but he did have an Ace — with a bigger kicker than mine, a 9. So I had had the right read on him, but the wrong kicker with my Ace. So he won the hand, took me down for about $150, and he was very proud of himself for it. He crowed about how shitty my kicker was and how stupid I was to call with it, and I let him have the moment and didn’t remind him that his kicker was very nearly as shitty as mine and that he’d been on a lying-ass-dog bluff in the first place — and that I had a read on him. I just paid him off and waited for the right hand.

About 10 minutes later, it came: I looked down to find KK. The way the table had been running all night, I would have bet out large with them pre-flop — but not too big to scare away any callers — and hope no Ace come on the flop. With Real Player, though, I knew he’d probably call me with anything, so I went all-in preflop, something like $225. And I was right, he called me with AJ.

When he saw my Kings, he couldn’t believe I was betting against his Ace with them. No way were they going to hold up; he was going to catch an Ace and I’d be busted. It was all over but the dealing. I guess he didn’t know he was only 13% to catch a second Ace.

The dealer dealt the flop. And then the turn. And then the river. And what do you know: not one of those five cards was an Ace. Which meant that my Kings held up. And when the dealer counted Real Player’s stack down, it turned out that we both had the exact same number of chips … and they were all mine now. And so the Real Player was busted and he tucked his tail between his legs and left the table and that was the last we saw of him.

I love it when that happens.

And now… Now I’m off to bed to dream of giant pots and spanked loudmouths.

More fun with flickr. Beth and I went to our favorite greasy spoon restaurant, Twain’s, for some late night chow tonight, and of course I took the new camera.

Being of negligible photographic talent, I’ve compensated for this by specializing in what I call stealth photography. I eschew the viewfinder and instead point the lens in the vaguely general direction of whatever and then I hit the shutter button. Et voila: artsy photography!

I actually manage to get some good stuff this way sometimes. This is my favorite shot of the bunch from tonight.

One last (maybe) test post via flickr.

This is a shot from the highest part of Beartooth Highway. The picture doesn’t do justice to how breathtaking it was in person.