Surfergeeks

K folks, new pics are up. A bunch in the Alex section, a few in the furries section, and a shot of our new couch in the house section.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Wow…if you ever want to see a hungry baby, just let him sleep an hour and half past his regular feeding time….yowsers!

Okay, this morning was the best yet! I was quite worried because last night the little bugger wouldn’t sleep. He *finally* fell asleep around 10:30 or so. I figured for sure I’d be up at 2:30 for the day. I was up at 2:30 but only to put his soother back in. I was then up at 3:30ish to change him. He then slept through until almost 7 and then I was able to stretch that until 8:00am!!! I am sooooooo impressed with how quickly Alex adapted to his new schedule. Hopefully he’ll stay on it now and won’t suddenly revert back to 4am awakenings.

So as day one rolls to a close, I was a little bit worried. You see, Alex at about 6:30pm and fell asleep around 9pm. Not very cool. I was sure that I’d be channel surfing at 2:00am trying to find the least annoying piece of shit on TV to watch while he wants to play. So, crossing my fingers, I head off to bed just prior to 11, fully ready to be up in about 3 hours. Well, around 3:30 I awoke to some little whimpers so I spring from the bed to see what was the matter…oh wait…wrong tale…let’s try again. I sluggishly get up and stumble into Alex’s room. I stick the soother back in his mouth and he promptly resumes sleeping. “Sweet,” I think and stumble back to bed. He then continued to sleep until 6:00am. That’s pretty freakin’ good if you ask me. Sure, it would have been nice if slept 30 minutes LONGER instead of 30 minutes shorter, but to go 11.5 hours without food and 9 hours asleep, I’m pretty damn happy about it.

So we (Alex & I – Nikki didn’t even actually wake up, which is REALLY good) get the little guy changed and make breakfast for him. After polishing off almost a full 8oz. he starts to drift off back to sleep. Good idea he has. The little bugger’s a smart one. He’s in his little bouncy thing and I’m on the couch. I watch Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons and then join him in his idea of sleep. We had a little nap and then Nic came out just before he woke up.

Just before lunchtime we bundle ourselves up and head out. We head downtown so we can get his application for a SIN card submitted. You see, we’ve set up an RESP for him and for it be registered he needs a SIN. (otherwise I guess it would just be an ESP, and that would just confuse people). So we got that submitted and by the time we got back, he was asleep again and has slept right through until now. He’ll probably be waking up any minute though as he’ll be wanting to eat in about 30 minutes.

All-in-all a mui beino day thus far.

Well, it’s Sunday. I’m officially done work for the next 35 weeks. That means that I’m officially in charge of Alex’s well-being for the next 35 weeks. Poor kid.

Today actually started off really great. Alex has, for the past few weeks, had this “fun” habit of getting up at 4am. At least that’s what Nikki tells me. So I figured I’d be in for a real treat this morning, my first day on duty. Around 3:10 he started to play with his soother. He would spit it out and then fuss and make me go in and stick it back in or else there would have been much screamage. I initially thought, “Great, he’s gonna have me up at 3:30am every day.” Not to be discouraged, I played his game. The last time I stuck the soother in was 3:58am. He then fell back asleep until about 5:30. Then he fussed a bit and dozed in and out until 6:30 when he was up for a change and breakfast. Fortunately, I’m the type of person that lives for the snooze button so his dozing was sorta like having a living snooze button. I had no trouble falling back asleep after each soothing. I was really hoping that I could stretch him out till 7:00 but I can’t complain about 6:30 – sure beats 4:00! Hopefully he’ll rapidly adjust to this new schedule and find that he enjoys it. {crosses fingers, toes, legs, arms, and anything else that can be crossed without too much pain}

The following comes directely from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) website:

The Foundation is committed to providing reliable information about paranormal claims. It both supports and conducts original research into such claims.

To date, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests.

They also have a forum where they post the correspondences between the applicants and the JREF. Some are quite amusing. It’s quite disturbing to realize how many people are out that think they can do something paranormal. Of course, there are a lot of people out there who just want to get rich as well (those are the ones who actually write intelligently, the crazy ones you can barely read what they write). I suggest you check out the forum and read about the applicants, it’s been keeping me enthralled for the past couple days.

Well, since we are on the topic of poker, I was just dealt my first royal flush online this morning. It was a sweet hand, seeing as my opponent pushed me all-in, making it easy for me to take his money!

Here’s the hand, it’s a little hard to read at first but once deciphered it’s easily figured out.

PokerStars Game #3265301969: Hold’em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02) – 2005/12/07 – 08:37:47 (ET)
Table ‘Nashira’ Seat #4 is the button
Seat 2: N1kita ($1.52 in chips)
Seat 4: BigWig_OZ ($7.38 in chips)
Seat 6: TSB123 ($1.98 in chips)
TSB123: posts small blind $0.01
N1kita: posts big blind $0.02
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to N1kita [Th Qh]
Beautylily has returned
BigWig_OZ: folds
TSB123: raises $0.10 to $0.12
N1kita: calls $0.10
*** FLOP *** [Jh 5s 3s]
TSB123: checks
N1kita: checks
*** TURN *** [Jh 5s 3s] [Ah]
TSB123: checks
N1kita: bets $0.10
TSB123: calls $0.10
*** RIVER *** [Jh 5s 3s Ah] [Kh]
TSB123: checks
N1kita: bets $0.38
TSB123: raises $1.38 to $1.76 and is all-in
N1kita: calls $0.92 and is all-in
*** SHOW DOWN ***
TSB123: shows [Js Jc] (three of a kind, Jacks)
N1kita: shows [Th Qh] (a Royal Flush)
N1kita collected $2.89 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $3.04 | Rake $0.15
Board [Jh 5s 3s Ah Kh]
Seat 2: N1kita (big blind) showed [Th Qh] and won ($2.89) with a Royal Flush
Seat 4: BigWig_OZ (button) folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 6: TSB123 (small blind) showed [Js Jc] and lost with three of a kind, Jacks

Wow, today’s (well, technically yesterday) been a Poker Roller Coaster Ride.

I played in a tournament earlier @ UltimateBet where the winner of the tournament would win their entry into the $1,000,000 Stone Cold Nuts II tournament in January. First prize walks away with their entry into the ’06 WSOP PLUS $225,000 (USD). The entry is $530. The way this tournament was structured is that is a $5.00+$0.50 buyin. There are also rebuys and one addon allowed. For the first hour of the tourney, whenever your chip stack drops below 1500 you can fork over another $5 to get 1500 more chips. Then, at the end of 1 hour, each player, regardless of chip stack, is allowed to pay $5 for an additional 1500 chips. I actually played fairly well and never needed to rebuy. (I saw one guy at my table rebuy 9 times!) Then, come the end of hour 1, I opted not to rebuy. I didn’t feel that adding 1500 chips to my stack would benefit me that much. Plus, I wanted to see how far I could make it by only spending $5.50.

Well, I made it to the final two! It ended up being heads-up action between me and one other player. Unfortunately, by this point, I was at a severe chip disadvantage. I had ~40-45K in chips and he had up around 120K. I caught AKo so I moved all-in. He called and turned over J9s. I was a slight odds favourite. My odds went up when the flop came AJK. That gave me two pair, aces and kings, to his pair of jacks. My odds then dropped significantly when the turn showed us another jack. The river, where I needed another A or K to appear to win, or a Q to split, denied me my opportunity to double up.

Still I finished in 2nd! So 1st place gets an entry worth $530 so 2nd place has got to pay out something sweet, right? Well, it paid me $30 – better than nothing.

Which leads us to tonight…one of the poker forums that Nikki & I take part in, talkingpoker.com, held a $10+1 private tourney for members. We both played in it. Nikki went out 11th. At one point, I was doing fairly well, actually holding chip lead briefly. Unfortunately, that was earlier on and I ended up going out 10th.

Not to be discouraged, Nikki pointed out that Wil Wheaton (yeah, the Star Trek guy) was holding a private tourney tonight as well. Well, since I wouldn’t need to be focusing on the Talking Poker tourney, I dropped down my $11 for it. Again, I started off fairly well but had a couple bad beats and made a couple poor plays. In that one I busted out in 11th.

So, for those keeping track at home – today I was up a whopping $2.50!!! Woot!

So for about 6 hours of entertainment I got paid $2.50. It’s like being paid to sit through the first two LotR movies!

Well, if you weren’t aware, I was job hunting and had a few options. One through TD directly and a few for TD through Spherion. Well, after a couple of them not panning out, I was offered one of the positions through Spherion. Starting Jan 3, I will be in training for Visa activations at TD.

So, once I’m done my Mat Leave, I will return to Stream just to give them my two weeks notice. Plus, I probably won’t have to put in too many hours as it’s over the Christmas holidays.