Poker Wrap-up

This past weekend, we rented a sprawling manor in Clifton to celebrate my 40th birthday.

We had a simple dinner of pizza followed by the BUrld Poker Championship, where 11 people competed for the chance to win while eating atomic wings and chocolate-covered bacon. With an odd number of players, I instituted a rule where I automatically made it into the Finals (happy birthday to me!)

As is tradition, chocolate pie came out when 3 people were left in Finals.

The next day, Rebecca and I spent a quiet day in Clifton, doing some hiking, reading, hot tubbing, and having dinner at the Main Street Pub.

On Monday, we picked up Maia at the grandparents' house and took her home. She was excited about being back home, and even more excited that there was a birthday in the offing. She put party hats on most of her larger stuffed animals and then blew out my candles.

Just After Birth Day

Aren't you glad there's a space in the middle of today's post title?

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12 pictures of your day on the 12th of every month

6:32 AM: Showered and ready for work.

6:49 AM: Breakfast.

7:11 AM: At work in the main home office (versus the satellite home office in the basement).

8:43 AM: Good morning!

11:51 AM: Sub for lunch.

12:57 PM: Home from "school" and ready for lunch.

1:12 PM: Staging supplies for an away game Poker Weekend.

1:48 PM: Running on the treadmill and finally getting around to watching the third season of Stranger Things.

4:28 PM: Post-nap strawberries.

5:26 PM: Heat relief at the mall.

5:45 PM: She ate my entire biscuit.

6:29 PM: "Maia wash!"

Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken 20 years ago today, on September 11, 1999.

The Marching Virginians had been relegated to the end zone to make more room for paid seats as Michael Vick performed various somersaults to get the Hokies to the National Championships. This particular game was on Band Parents' Day, where part of the halftime show involves spelling out "MOM" or (if we wanted to mix it up a little) "WOW" on the field. My parents attended annually, resulting in endless packets of real photographs with negatives developed at their local Costco.

The team beat University of Alabama at Birmingham 31 - 10 after which I returned to my room in East Ambler Johnston to eat a Hokie Express chicken sandwich and play Starcraft.

Bad Book Day

We regularly get hand-me-downs through the ad hoc donation pipelines that magically spring up when you have a child. While this works wonderfully for clothes (I'm pretty sure we've never bought Maia a new outfit ever), it's less effective for books. The books that get donated by our friends tend to be the worst of the worst, like Rebecca's favourite about a pig that practices surfing on a surfboard on the beach and then magically surfs in the ocean and goes home satisfied.

One of the worst offenders in my opinion is the "first reader" series for Pete the Cat. There are more of these books than there are Family Circus paperbacks and they possess comparable literary qualities. Take, for example, Pete the Cat and the Surprise Teacher.

There are major spoilers ahead.

Pete's mom subs his class and spends the entire day taking them to the wrong classrooms. At the end of the day, they thank her with a giant sign covered in construction paper cat heads. So essentially, an awesome day in Pete's mind is the day he discovers that his mom is a literal moron.

Why would the school system hire someone who can't tell the difference between the playground and the cafeteria? Perhaps the titular "suprise" is that Pete's mom was able to get her teaching license in the first place without knowing how to read. Or maybe receiving the thank you sign is supposed to be more of a Godfather callback and the students are subtly telling her to get a new vocation using decapitated cat heads in a threatening way.

The worst of the worst (so far) is Pete the Cat Play Ball!, a book that can't even get the grammar in its title correct.

This book consists of over 30 pages of Pete playing a baseball game and doing absolutely everything possible except successfully hitting the ball. His team wins in the end, thanks to teammates that aren't content with mediocrity. There are two takeaway life lessons in this book: (1) associate with more successful coworkers to share in their glory without lifting a finger and (2) baseball is boring.