Hangin' Out the Shingle

I have returned... from the first wave of vacation trips I promised myself during August. There was the 12-day trip to northern Wisconsin (which I'll reprise next month), followed by a short four-day jaunt to the camp country north of Muskegon, Michigan.

I won't bore you with too many details, though I did tangle with a deer near the end of my Wisconsin trip. It's the fourth deer I've biffed with my vehicle, though as with two of the the other three instances, it did only minimal damage to deer or car. This time around a big doe tried to jump over the front of my Yaris and didn't quite make it. She shot out from the brush on one side of the road, angled in front of me, and I was dawdling and slowed down just enough to make it perhaps a net 10-mph collision. She flipped on over the front hood and into the ditch on the right, knocking the Toyota emblem off the front of the car as her rear legs kicked over the hood. Other damage to the car included a couple of scratches and one small chip of paint removed.

By the time I went back to pick up the emblem from the road, the deer had already regained her feet and vanished deeper into the woods. I don't think I hit her hard enough to damage anything internally and I don't think any of her legs broke when she flopped over the hood. It's an everyday hazard up there; I believe my brother-in-law has hit 12, most during his years as a third-shift sheriff's deputy. And, it's been quite the wildlife habitat around my sister and brother-in-law's house of late. Among creatures sighted during my stay were whitetailed foxes (numerous), weasels, turkeys, hummingbirds, a timber wolf, and a small black bear. That's in addition to the more run-of-the-mill stuff like deer and rabbits and such that are everyday sights.

Poker? Sure, I've played a bit. Went oh-fer-two in the horrid northwoods Indian-casino tourneys during my stay up there. Played online some, too, with not much good happening there either. I'm sure I'll be around for the WCOOP stuff, and maybe the mini FTOPS, too. Elsewhere, I checked the news headlines every so often and all I can say is, "What a blecch month for poker." Seems I didn't miss much.

So, it's time to start looking for new gigs. I can write, edit, do business analysis, create basic web code, and of course I know the poker business reasonably well. I'm willing to travel, as always. In the meantime I have two or three minor things lined up that'll let me keep my hand in until better times return. I'm experienced enough to know that some things are beyond one's control, and one simply has to move on. In the near future, I'm also going to address a few topics here that I was forced to hold back on in recent months.