It's NOT a Beautiful Day...

...in the neighborhood. Wow, the last 24 hours have been really gypsy curse-esque. Last night, I played poker at the stoner game-of-the-week. The previous night (Monday), I took second at a smaller game. This netted me a cool $45. Don't get me wrong, it was totally grueling. When we got down to four guys, I was the overwhelming chip leader, but I lost big to all three opponents, but managed to stay in the game for the last hour and finally prevail as runner-up to Simon. Last night was similar, except that I lost 60% of my chips on the second hand of the evening. By my own estimate, I should have been out by the fourth. But I rallied and began winning hands. Once I had enough chips, I started knocking guys out. My cards were mediocre and my luck was middling, but by the time we were down to four again - two of my three opponents were returnees from the previous night - I was chip leader. When John went out, we were three. I still led in chips, but ID was coming up in the world. Then came The Hand. I went all in, hoping to steal the blinds, which were substantial - 3,200/6,400. I didn't expect to get called. I had ace-ten suited. ID called me with pocket sixes. I hit an ace, but ID snagged a third six. I lost 18,000 chip on that single six. I'm still smarting from that. All that remained was for Jason to knock me out, which he did the very next hand. If I had won, I would have knocked out ID, split with Jason, taken championship honors and won over $100. I did everything right, played a very determined game, gambled like a crazed animal and still lost. Bummer.

I'm not sure why, but I slept very poorly last night - maybe three hours total. It wasn't because of my honorable mention finish. It was just because. I got up at the regular time, went to the gym, worked out till I was woozy and then headed home. On my way from the gym, I accidentally rubbed my eye. I've worn hard contacts since the eighth grade, so any sort of eye rubbing causes those lenses to pop clean out of your eye. That's exactly what happened. But it was an accident! It doesn't matter. I immediately stopped, got down on my hands and knees and started searching for my errant contact. Believe it or not, that sort of thing has happened to me before and I've managed to find it. It's actually occurred about half a dozen times. The most dramatic was when I was crossing 2nd Ave. at Lenora. My contact popped out, I immediately got down on my hands and knees and found it before the light changed. This time, I was doing the same thing. Several people stopped to ask if I was OK. I admit, it looks pretty weird. Two women actually stopped to help. That was mighty nice of them. Unfortunately, I didn't recover it. So now I'm back on the glasses, which are tremendously thick. I look like Mr. Science, or like that blog photo of myself on the left plus 36 years (but with slightly better hair). The real challenge here is getting a replacement contact. My hard lens prescription resides with my former eye doctor in Ballard. Since I last saw him, he has retired and, uh, died. But I'm sure my records live on somewhere. I called them and they of course want to do a full eye exam. Ahem, no health insurance. I hope they can work with me on this. Yeah, so the last 12 or so hours haven't gone so good. And on top of everything, I forgot to post an After Hours clip last night. That's the first time I've neglected to do that on a weeknight in nine months. That should also tell you how exciting my life is in general. So just to sum up: despite my best efforts, I'm not $100+ dollars richer, I have to wear large, thick glasses and I have to sweet-talk a healthcare worker into canceling my eye exam. Just dandy. I can't wait for what will happen next. Being a Slav, I'm always instinctively bracing myself for the worst, but I'm uniquely surprised and stunned when bad stuff goes down.