Back to blogging…

OK, it’s been a while, but I’ve got a perfectly good excuse: the website ate my blog! I spent about 45 minutes last week working on an update, and when I hit the Post button…nada. My mentor Scott K suggested that I first compose my blog in a Word document, then copy & paste into blogdom…thank you, Scaaaaaaat! I do good blog now Scaaaaaaat!

Now to give a short update on the last two weeks: drove to Boston for the ESPN reality show tryout, chickened out and instead hung out at Jillian’s and Cheers (formerly The Bull & Finch) for a few hours with my lovely wife; missed a couple days of work last week due to a combination of stomach bug and major case of the blahs; went to the podiatrist Wednesday morning due to a severely ingrown and infected left big toenail…which seemed to both cure my bowling slump and lift the gray clouds hanging over my head lately.

Up until just yesterday I was going to skip the next pro tour stop at Holiday Lanes in Manchester, where I pretty much spent the majority of my adolescence. But now I feel that I can muster up the confidence to allow myself a decent shot at qualifying, so I’m mailing in the $100 entry fee this weekend. I’ve never bowled well there on the tour, but it’s my favorite bowling center and I know I’d have the “home field” advantage if I qualified for action on Sunday. It’s so hard for me to just concentrate while staying relaxed, instead of trying too hard, getting too emotional, charging the foul line, and overthrowing. I know what I need to do to bowl well, I just need to allow myself to do it.

After hearing about my good buddy Dave winnng a quick $500 playing online poker, I recently decided to try my hand at it as well. I went to www.pokerstars.com, wired $50 into my account, headed off to a $2/$4 Texas Hold ‘Em table…and lost it all in about an hour! Dave had made it seem so easy; why couldn’t I win a hand?! I swore off online gaming forever, or so I thought.

I logged on the other day to play for free (they give you “funny money” to play at just for fun tables), when I realized that 50 cents remained in my account. I actually found a $.02/$.04 table, and quickly doubled my stake up to an even dollar. Come to find out, they run tournaments for as little as a buck. So tonight I entered a $1 tournament, trying to stage the biggest comeback in all of gambling history. With almost 600 entries, first place paid $146. However, I came up 135 places shy of the win. Although I placed in the top 25%, only first through 54th won money…so my venture into the questionably-legal world of online gambling is officially over, for now.

Friday Five

1. What vehicle do you drive? 2003 Nissan Maxima, metallic gray

2. How long have you had it? Since Memorial Day weekend, and I’ve already logged 8,000 miles…drove it right from the dealership in Hartford down to Baltimore.

3. What is the coolest feature on your vehicle? My personal favorite is the radio controls on the steering wheel. The 240-horsepower engine comes in handy as well.

4. What is the most annoying thing about your vehicle? The fact that I was totally misled by the sales manager about trading in my leased Altima for the new car. I just had to fork over $750, when I was repeatedly assured by the jackass-in-a-cheap-suit that I’d have five full years to payoff the remaining amount due on my lease. I feel the blood boiling just thinking about it…

5. If money were no object, what vehicle would you be driving right now? That would be a toss-up between a Cadillac Escalade or Hummer H2. Yep, I’d be one of those environment-hatin’, OPEC-supportin’, gas guzzlin’ mega-SUV owners!