The Holidays and the Month Ahead

Have not blogged in a while, one of my goals for 2010  is to blog more on a consistent basis.

If you know me, you are well aware of my lack of the holiday spirit. This principally comes from the fact that I have one of the world's smallest families and I am divorced myself. My Mom and Dad's parents were both very old when my Mom and Dad were born. This leads to a lack of living cousins, aunts, uncles etc.

.My kids, who due to divorce and their mothers remarriage, have about five Christmas' to go to, basically get spoiled at every one of them. The true spirit of Christmas for them should be to donate time/presents to those less fortunate. Still working on that and both of them being in affluent schools with competition for ipods, cell phones and the coolest laptops does not help much.

As I get older Christmas has become so commercialized and materialistic, it just puts me totally on life tilt the last two weeks of the year. I went the gift card route this year and shopped in about twenty minutes at the grocery store for the cards. My son ended up with what looked like a deck when he laid out all his gift cards he received this year.

From a poker standpoint, I had been playing ten days a month of live tournaments and/or cash games in Vegas in 2009. Frankly I was crushed my last two trips and have not been to Vegas since Thanksgiving. I honestly don't think it was a ton of poor play on my part, just my time in 2009 to experience some negative variance. Tons of bad beats but you have all heard them before. Basically it wiped out some profits for the previous 3 months, but it really didn't put a dent in my roll. I did decide that December might be time for a break and my self imposed live ban ends on 1/1/2010.