Busy with the camera

I went to the Goldstrike last night for my poker fix. I called ahead, but they didn't answer the phone! It rang for five minutes, so I gave up. I figured that maybe they had changed their number.

When I got there, I found out that the number hadn't changed. I guess they were busy and no one bothered to answer (which is unusual). Now, there was a waiting list for the Omaha game, so I got on it and played some $4/8 Limit while waiting. I don't like to sit at a NL game when I know I'm going to be leaving soon. Getting a read on your opponents is part of the +EV and, instead, I could play mindless poker in the limit game.

After nearly two hours, they hadn't called my name, so I checked. When I sat at the limit game, they took me off the Omaha list! Can we all say fubar! Now there were another five names ahead of me! Yuck, and double yuck. I never made it to the Omaha game.

Hands from a limit game aren't as much fun to recount, so I'll just give you two collages of photos I took last night and today, and a single photo I took about a week ago. Besides, I ended up down for the night in the limit game which is pretty hard to do. Talk about fubar -- I'm just sayin'.


The Goldstrike Casino (above) is where I play most often. I've photographed it so much, my photos of it start looking the same because, um, they are the same! Click to enlarge the image unless you're sick and tired of looking at the Goldstrike (which is likely the case).


Spring has sprung, as they like to say, at least in MOJO's area of the world. My Knockout Roses already look like they are going to be awesome. I'm told by one of my bridge partners, Kate, that the best fertilizer for them is something called Rosetone. It is organic and used once each month during the growing season. Last year I couldn't find it around here. It was expensive to order online, so being the cheapskate that I am I used something called Pennington's (which worked well, I must say). When I walked into Home Depot about two weeks ago, they had Rosetone and it was inexpensive -- $11 per 10 pound bag! If you're a Knockout-type-person, this is good news for you.

Can anybody guess what the two flowers in the hanging baskets on my front porch are?

In houston, I took indoor photos of some bridge players and blogged about it in a piece called Faces. I was disappointed in how yellow they were. This is because your camera adjusts for something called white balance, but incandescent lights fool your camera and they end up with more yellow than you want. When I got home, I read in my book how to adjust for that. The photo below is a test I made of the new (new for me, at least) procedure I had to do to handle this.

I have two bookcases in my bedroom, and this is a shot of one row of books. I wish I had thought to do a before and after, but, trust me, this is an improvement. Do you see Do Elephants Jump? by David Feldman? If you read his bio from his web site here, you'll notice he lists duplicate bridge tournaments as a hobby.

Do you see the backgammon book? Wow, that brings back memories. It used to be so popular. I mean, everyone played. At a bridge tournament, between sessions, players would whip out their boards and there were always be a couple of game going with kibitzers watching.

Do you see Hooray for Yiddish? Besides being interesting, it's a very funny book.

Do you see Word Wizard? It was written by Richard Lederer. If that name sounds familiar to you, yes, you are right. It's Howard Lederer's and Annie Duke's father. The book is loaded with bloopers, puns and "other word magic," as Lederer says.

Happy Easter or Passover or whatever holiday you might be celebrating!