CARDRUNNERS

I love Christmas. I hope everyone has a great Christmas or whatever other holiday you celebrate this time of year. This truly is the greatest time of the year in my opinion. However, I'm pretty disapointed in the weather this year. I'd like for it to be cold and snowy. It's been like 40 degrees everyday lately. Oh well, worse things could happen. I'm with my family now in Michigan. We are in Detroit until the 26th and then we'll go up to our vacation house in the northern part of lower michigan. I'll be there until the 30th. My family is staying up north until the 2nd, but I wanted to be in Chicago for New Year's, so I'm flying home on the 30th.

We had "our" christmas yesterday. We decided to open our presents at home before we came to Michigan. In the past, we always celebrated christmas morning at my grandpa's, but he passed over a year ago and we have sold his house. Therefore, we are staying at my aunt's house. I didn't ask for much this year. I mostly wanted a leather coat and I knew that would pretty much take up all my gifts. That was ok with me. The coat I got is nice. I'm deciding if I'm going ot keep it or exchange it for another one. I'm gonna try it out the next few days and see if I like the look. I also got the new Nas cd. It's great. The new DMX cd isn't as good as I'd hoped.

Bears won today, but looked awfully shitty. They looked bad last week too. I hope they can get it together. If they go to the super bowl, Taylor and I are going to go.

Over the next few days, I'm going to come up with some new year's resolutions. I can tell you my first resolution is to actually stick with my resolutions I come up with this year. I'm usually pretty bad about that. I feel like New Year's is a great chance to make some improvements in your life. I really am working on thing like working out more, reading more, etc, so I'm going to include those in my resolutions and actually stick with them. I know another thing I'm going to focus on is playing a lot less poker in the next 5 months. I only have one semester left of school and therefore, I just don't want to be playing poker. Anyway, I'm going to make some more specific goals. I'll share them with you come New Year's.

Tonight is our company Christmas dinner located at Elements in SB. www.elementsrestaurantandbar.com/ I have yet to purchase a "white elephant" gift. I'm not too concerned since you can't really go wrong with anything.  Last year I brought a Chuck Klosterman book, despite the majority of gifts being something no one wanted.  This year I think I'm just going to walk into Blockbuster, close my eyes, and pick something to buy, regardless of what movie my hand finds.

After dinner I'm debating driving back up to Chumash for some Friday night poker.  Tonight would be a great time to go because I don't have work tomorrow and can stay up there as late as I want.  Additionally there could be some drunk money in the room which would be nice.  In regards to poker, specifically live vs online, I can already see convenience being a huge struggle for me.  The 45min drive followed by a mandatory 4+ hour session, is insanely time consuming.  If I continue to find it very profitable, that should sway the apprehension I feel about making the drive a few times a week.

Tomorrow I'm driving back up to San Francisco for a brief holiday break with my family and friends.  I hadn't made the drive once in 07, and now I'm doing it twice in a week.  Hopefully I'll remember to borrow my roommates radar detector, as I prefer to get up there as fast as the car will allow.  Here's a good spot to add, fuck you King City high way patrol.

A few of the things I hope to accomplish this short trip home are: hitting up my 2nd favorite pizza in the world (behind Chicago's Lou Malnati's), Toto's www.totos.com/index.php, Christmas shopping; haven't started Christmas shopping so I'm going to need to do that some time soon.  Perhaps play at Lucky Chances which is 5min away from my house and is supposedly a very profitable place.  Meet up with JP while he's a cop (and maybe go on a ride-a-long?)  Go to the 49ers game to watch them hopefully keep it close against the Bucs.  On a positive note Patrick Willis is a future HOF linebacker.  Enjoy time off from work.  Devour Christmas-eve and Christmas dinners.

I'm eager for the new year to get here.  I have already started looking back on 2007 and my past year's accomplishments and memories.  I've also begun new list of resolutions for 2008 that I'm excited about.  I'll make a post about both in a few days.  The holiday season really slows down business and I'm excited to begin traveling again.  We have a ton of projects set up in the first quarter of 08, which will leave me on the road nearly all of January and February.  Anyways, enough of this boring entry...

Happy Holidays!

It's Christmas day and we're sitting around a roaring fire watching Shrek 3 with the kids after a very active morning.  It took several hours to get through the mountain of presents for everyone.  Our family really overdoes it at this time of year.  The dads then assist with the assembly of the various toys.  The grandmother's and wives are in the kitchen preparing the Christmas dinner feast.  The kids are playing with some of their bounty of toys as they watch the movie.

What may seem like a typical Christmas setting in the U.S., is really something to be very thankful and appreciative.  Much of the world isn't as fortunate as we are.  While I work very hard 7 days a week, I am very blessed.  I am visiting my sister's lovely home, surrounded by family who love me.  I am able to do my work at my laptop as I hang out with everyone.  The food is wonderfully prepared for us.  I earn a good salary that supports my family and afforded some nice gifts this year.  We will be flying back to Oregon tomorrow night and celebrating another mini-Christmas.  The kids still have another week or two off from school to enjoy.  I'm feeling a bit better today, lifting my spirits somewhat.  Being appreciative of how fortunate we all are is key to a good perspective.  Too often we find areas to complain about what is lacking.  For me, life is good and I am thankful.  As Mrs. Zimba joked at dinner last night, I'm a wine glass 'half full' kind of guy, rather than half empty.  What are you?

Merry Christmas all.  It's pretty hard to believe that it is Christmas time again.  The saying holds true that it seems the older I get, the faster time goes by.  Next thing I know I'll probably be married, 30, and with kids.

Anyways, nothing really exciting during Christmas around here.  My family does not celebrate Christmas so there isn't too many events or get togethers.  I did go to my girlfriend's family's festivities and they went over very well.  It was nice to see everyone, she has a very welcoming and large family.  This morning was spent at the girlfriend's house as well to watch her immediate family celebrate Christmas together too. 

I had a plan of totally immersing myself in poker today and just playing for several hours online, followed by a trip to the casino with a buddy and playing through the night.  I'm not sure what it is, but I just really feel like I'm running extremely badly so I'm going to quit.  I might play a few random tournaments here and there, but I think I'll make it a point to finally quit Stars' cash games.  I don't know what it is about the site, but for some reason, the cash games just beat me up.  It really wears and me and screws with my confidence.  So hopefully it'll be Stars for SnGs and MTTs, and FTP strictly for Cash games.

I'm also curious to see how the casino will be on the night of xmas.  I can see it being totally packed, or completely dead.  I'm hoping the former because then that means some fish are out and the games will be easier. 

I'll write a casino report tomorrow and hopefully have some good news.

Happy holidays,

AJH

Christmas time is a nice time of the year.  I went to my fathers and enjoyed the season with my family, of which included my brother whom I hadn't seen, not spoken with in over 7 years.  After my mother passed away, my father met a lady and brought her down to meet the family.  It was at that dinner that my brother announced that my then 10 year old daughter was no longer welcomed at his house. Apparently when she was around, he felt he could not act the way he thought he should, and for that matter we could not either.  His idea of fun is cussing and getting hammered.  Not a nice site for a 10 year old.  So, the best solution was to tell his niece she was no longer welcomed.   That put a strain on the whole family thing right there.

Fast forward to Christmas 2007.  I am begged by my father, after 2 trips to the hospital, that we should come up.  He puts it out there that this may be his last Christmas and it would mean allot if we came and had Christmas as a family.  He assured me he would keep my brother in check.  My brother is an alcoholic, and a bad drunk at that. I agreed, but my wife and daughter were very skeptical.  They agreed to go for the love of my father, and for me.  I was thankful but worried.  I really cherish Christmas and I didn't want my families Christmas ruined by my brother.

Well the day arrives and things are going well, but there is a tenseness in the air.  My sister and her family is there.  She has 2 boys, 9 and 11.  Because we never spend Christmas together, we elect to purchase gifts for the kids  and pick names for the adults.  Well par for the course, and after 7 years, my brother does not give a gift to my daughter, which sends shock waves through the house.  Again he blows it!  All he had to do was to acknowledge her being there with a simple card, but nothing.  My daughter is in tears, my wife is at the height of her Mexican temper, and there I am trying to do damage control.  When I asked my brother what happened, his excuse was, "I didn't know she was coming".  Well that went over as well as a fart in church.  So long story, short, Christmas was as expected and it is good to be home. 

Microsoft screwed me up with their freaking update of Windows Media Player, but I am back at it and I was able to catch a couple of minutes of the Daut44 20 table video.  i am still trying to catch my breath.  As a guy who four tables, I can not even think I would see myself at 20 tables.

Hey guys,

Merry Christmas! I hope you guys all had a good day w/ the people that you love. I've been getting gradually sicker over the past few days. I just got back from the dr., and I have walking pneumonia...ugh. So I'm on a potpourri of antibiotics and drinking a lot of water and catching up on BS television. I must've watched A Christmas Story 4 times yesterday.

As far as poker goes, unless the games were REALLY good, I haven't been playing much lately. I think I have logged 500 hands in the past 8-9 days. There are several reasons for this. Besides being sick lately and having lots of family stuff to do re: Christmas, I'm at my folks' house right now, which means A) using my mom's laptop instead of my desktop, B) having to live SOMEWHAT on their schedule, and C) no PT. Being sick is probably the biggest reason for my lack of hands lately, b/c I also have a double ear infection and I think it's messing with my inner ear. Either way, it's making it to where I can't stare at the computer for a long time.

I'm going to New Orleans on friday to watch UGA beat the shit out of Hawaii. If anybody wants to bet the game for a fun and reasonable amount, PM me, I'm down. Obv I'm taking UGA w/ the spread, but I'll also take over/under, which I think I'll get more action on, since I disagree with everybody's opinion of "Hawaii is gonna put up 100000 points!".

On the coaching side, I think I might have snagged a new student, but we're having a little trouble communicating b/c of the holidays. However, I do have a 2hr video lesson to sift through, so I'm gonna see how much of that I can do before my antihistimine kicks in. Peace!

Vint