silly streaky

I play Spewday very badly. Finish 40th in both flights and am done by 9:30.

SuperTurbo was a matter of jamming ATs second hand into a openlimped AQo.

In the main I get overly cute, defend my blind with 86s and check/raise/call off 45BB when shoved on after an 854 flop and can't get there vs. TT.

I go on a ridiculous dry spell for the last two nights where I can't do anything in my usual SnGs... until I finally string together four firsts, including another $26 90-man, to finish things up way in the positive.

I do what I think are smart things - like flat AA to a preflop raise and make a delayed move on the flop - or raise/jam nut/nut PLO8 draws - and don't hold.

I do what I know are really bad things - like jam 42o into A3, or Q6 into AK - and get there.

So Bizaro Poker works best for me. And the roller coaster continues.

spew!

Because obviously she can afford a $25 bounty now...

I may actually get to play a little bit for the first time in forever.

Ireland - dublin, last set of pix...

So, by the time we got to Dublin, we were halfway through the trip. We stayed close to St. Stephen's Green, met up with one of our former exchange students from England - (redhead with an Irish father, so really Jenn's long lost little twin sister) and wandered around Dublin for a few days..

Christ Church Cathedral

River Liffey, which runs right through the middle of town

Whiskey tasting at the Jameson Distillery. Johnnie Walker, Jameson, and Jack Daniels. Not surprisingly, JW tastes like peat/dirt, JD like burnt corn/gasoline, and Jameson so light and smooth (triple distilling) that's it's almost too neutral, like vodka. Note to self, if you become a distiller, naming product J-something is good luck.

We liked our beverages. I'm still mostly a Scotch man, though.

Kilmingham Gaol. This, and Dublin Castle (no pix, oops) were some of the better historic sites we saw in Dublin. The Office of Public Works really has a bunch of top-notch guides walking you through Irish history...

Random band playing on the streets of Temple Bar.
To be honest, they were actually pretty good.

Wall of Fame in Temple Bar with the usual suspects (U2, Thin Lizzy, etc) - and a lovely CCTV camera watching everything. Hello!

The baby makes more friends in Dun Laoghaire. This old couple was so hilarious sitting on a bench near the harbor. They weren't following the open container law either..

Jedward. These jagoffs need to disappear. Quickly. I saw far too much of them in Ireland, count yourself lucky they have not spread across the Atlantic yet. At least they can sell a nacho to their fellow Irishmen.

Streets of Kilkenny - we took a day trip to get out of the city and popped into a couple of places..

like Glendalough, where BabyGirlHeff got to do another fun thing - touch the historic rocks around this 6th century monastic settlement. That, she loved. The rain, not so much. Very soaked after this.

and the view flying out of Dublin across the countryside and hedgerows as we left for the States.

It's been about a month since we got back - and I do miss it. I think, if we could find equivalent jobs in Ireland (doesn't Tiltware have a presence in Dublin - or maybe I would just pour pints because I'm so chatty and conversational with strangers, not...) or if we won the lottery, we'd move there in a heartbeat.

We'd definitely be in the sticks, though. Not that Dublin wasn't bad... but I'm around a big city, I know what they are like. We both preferred the Irish countryside much, much more.

Living somewhere out near Dingle or Kenmare... now that would be an interesting life. In this day and age, you're so globally connected - those remote places just don't seem that far away anymore.

I'm just happy I got the chance to see Ireland. That's probably the best thing about my wife - she ends up making me do things I'd never get around to under normal circumstances. I feel bad for my daughter - she'll never remember any of this as she gets older - unless we take her again, of course.

OK, maybe this week I'll get the chance to actually play some cards and make $$$ like LJ.

As it is, I've got to go to New York (not the city, the state) with my pop to catch up with family for a couple of days, so any WCOOP play is probably not going to happen. Even AIPS may be tight on Saturday, and I'd hate to miss PLO8... :-(

This is a really low-volume month for me. A nice change of pace.

hey, it's a non irish post!

the usual odds and ends...

- for a 14-9 competitive game, man that NFL opener was a little bit of a downer. When you watch and think about what people aren't doing, instead of what people are doing... well, it's not as fun, bottom line. Viking fan should be worried about a 6-10 freefall, that's for sure...

- not playing a lot because there's a ton of stuff going on around the house - school starting, work, etc... and with BabyGirlHeff hitting 1 soon, she's active enough at night to where I have a triage list of
1) take care of baby
2) watch TV/surf internet/ do something with my mind I can stop for a minute when she gets silly
3) play cards and try and focus while she needs my attention every few minutes.

So, yeah, I'd like to play and watch NFL and watch her... but I'm not a 20-something multitabling bot, I have limits, something has to give. Of course I'm still trying to figure out what miniFTOPS or WCOOP I can play in the next couple of weeks - I'll try to fit something cool in. I'm running well enough to where I paid back what I took offline for Ireland spending money, so at least I'm in a good spot to take a shot or two.

Why are people thinking the Redskins are a dark horse this season? WTF, have they been paying attention at all since January? 8-8 at best, and probably not even that.

Oh, and F DAN SNYDER for his money/publicity-grubbing Papa John's commercial with Jerry Jones. Jack Kent Cooke would never have done that. The DANNY can go screw himself just like he's been doing to the fanbase for the last 10+ years.

I'll wind up the Ireland trip with a Dublin/odds-n-ends post soon. Gotta move on with real life, you know...

Ireland - driving, from Kenmare to Dublin...

Driving in Ireland was... interesting..

First off, there's that driving on the left thing, with the steering wheel on the right. That was weird enough.

wishing this was Mario Kart Wii and I had that bullet power-up

And there there was the other issue our one-day delay caused... We lost the automatic transmission for the rental car and had to drive a stick shift... - which wouldn't be so bad, after all, I learned to drive on a stick and my first car was a 1971 baby blue VW Beetle.

Of course, I got rid of that car at 18 and have only used a clutch a handful of times since. So there was an adjustment period. Plus, I was sleep-deprived, the gear shift was in my left hand, the roads have like no shoulder whatsoever... did I mention they were a little narrow?

Driving these buses through the passes must suck.

So yeah, that first day or so, I must have stalled out/missed shifts every 10 minutes, almost hit a car in the first roundabout I came across, and probably scraped something on the shoulder five or six times. It was not a relaxing experience. Oh, it took me a couple of hours and looking it up in the driver's manual to figure out where Reverse was - I knew where it was, but figuring out where the interlock/catch was to slide the gearshift over into it was another matter.

But, every day got better and better, to the point that by the time we were leaving Dingle for Kenmare, I was a reasonably competent driver. By then, it was just the small things - getting used to pulling into traffic... I felt like I was driving the mirror tracks on Mario Kart Wii.

No, I didn't buy the hat. I'm not that good of a driver.

So, picking back up the trip, we drove from Inch Beach to Killarney -

Inch Beach, which is actually like five miles long. Irish humor?

and yeah, Killarney, as has been written about, was a very touristy town with a lot of tour buses and it felt... a little busy (it was a Saturday) and far more... commercial than anything we'd seen so far on the western coast. I grew up in Virginia Beach, I have a pretty good feel for a "resort town" - and it's not a favored atmosphere to hang out in, We did stop and check out Ross Castle, which was a pretty interesting restored 15th century stronghold

Ross Castle, on the Lakes of Killarney

and Muckross House, which is as much a monument to 19th century largesse and going broke to impress royalty as anything else - and then a really nice drive through Killarney National Park on the way to the B&B just outside Kenmare.

Near Ladies View, Killarney National Park

View back through the park at Moll's Gap.

Had a wonderful lamb stew for dinner with some pints, and a good night's sleep.

Sunday morning we decided to check out the fair in Kenmare - Jenn has timed this stop to coincide with the biggest fair of the year in Kenmare - which was a odd mix of a flea market, farmer's market, and bazaar with all sorts of stuff. If you were into pellet guns, tools, or animals (yep, for sale there too) you were in luck.

Main Street in Kenmare

BabyGirlHeff wants a pet. Not.

Since we needed to be in Dublin by Monday morning to meet one of our former exchange students from England for a few days, we skipped out on the Ring of Kerry drive most books recommend, and started making our way across the country. We stopped at the Rock of Cashel, which dates back from the 12th century, midday

Impressive. And pretty high up too.

Rock of Cashel with Hore Abbey in foreground - not as close a walk as it appears

and then got bit by the biggest bugaboo of the trip - no iPhone data because we didn't want to get hosed by Verizon international data roaming charges. We drove into Dublin - and then almost immediately got lost because while there are a ton of signs all over the road, the one thing there wasn't enough of were street signs for the actual road you were on. Yeah, they are supposed to be up on the corner buildings... but in reality, you only see them a third of the time... Ordinarly, you just fire up the Maps App and get to where you're going that way... but now, we were doing this manually, me driving, Jenn reading the map.

So, at first, we kept stopping short (oh, we're too far deep into the city, we must be past the hotel) and once we finally got our bearings on the map - then it became, oh, how do we get there (all the one way streets and "you can't turn right" here intersections) before we finally puzzled it out after an extra 60 minutes tooling around the city... then we had to drive out to the airport to drop off the rental car (didn't need it in the city) and come back....

By the way, you drop off the rental at a major Irish airport... by parking it in the garage, bringing the key to the desk and telling them the mileage. Very different from the American experience.

So, we spent that day driving waywayway too much. But we were in Dublin for the second part of the trip, and we had a friend coming in Monday. All was still good, even if we wanted to kill each other by the end of the night ;-).

Hello Dublin. Boy are you hard to find stuff in...

first loser is getting old....

Off day today, so I fire up a couple of tourneys on Stars, where I always run bad.

$33 PLO8 tourney with 96 players - and I finish second. Again. +$460 in profit, but this horrid headsup play is getting old.

This time, we get HU almost even in chips and over 40BB - and it's over in three hands when I get notched AJ93ss vs. A753 and I let myself get valuetowned by a solid player who never bluffed postflop - but I called the river all in anyway.

Yeah, I'm playing well lately, but man there are leaks galore. Stay away from blogger tourneys and I may be able to sustain a profit or something.. :-)

I'll find time for more Ireland fun posts this weekend.

how to light $40 on fire and waste three hours...

Tuesday:

Awesome, out first hand of the Spewday turbo, I jam KQs UTG for the 10BB starting stack, big blind calls with TT and flops a set. 30/30. HELLO GIGLI!

Regular Spewday, I lose half my stack second hand when I bet/threebet/fold the river in position on a AA9TQ board (I like never do that, period) - then hang out for another twenty minutes until I limp KcJc UTG, the blinds call, and when the flop comes AcJx8c, you're damn straight I'm raise/stacking off on the flop, limped pot be dammed. SB flopped bottom set and I didn't get there. 21/23.

Wednesday:

Registered for the VeryJosie, actually played seriously with the wifey on my left, and bubbled 4/13 when I stop and go AJ into JT on a Q9x flop and watch the straight fall on the turn. Boo.

By this time I don't even care about the Mookie. I log in late because of who else I see in the tourney, fire up the spewtard chip, and do silly things like open jam any pair or blackjack hand and barely pay attention. I jam 77 into 88 and spike on the river, 55 into QQ and lose, then finally AQ into AK and 77 and bounce 14 of 20.

I swear, I need to take these blogger tourneys just a touch more seriously. It's fun, but I really don't need to be lighting $40 on fire every week just for shits and giggles.