I did!  I’m happy to announce that the biweekly PokerWorks 8 Game tournament ran with 6 players.  I couldn’t make it but did check back to see what happened.  The results:

PokerStars Tournament #159379356, 8-Game
Buy-In: $5.00/$0.50
6 players
Total Prize Pool: $30.00
Tournament started 2009/05/17 21:00:00 ET
Tournament finished 2009/05/17 22:52:37 ET
1: yestbay1 (Grapevine), $15.00 (50%)
2: grupper (**), $9.00 (30%)
3: Tom Bayes (Murray), $6.00 (20%)
4: cmacc85 (waycross),
5: djhomeschool (Denton TX foo!),
6: nonSensible (Mason City),

Nicey-nice and thanks to everyone that made it!  I’ll see you at the next one.

*****

It’s been a very busy time for me lately, having Riot spend 5 days with me and then heading for Vegas to pick up my son and his family, leaving Riot with the Parentals, and heading back out to my new digs, was kind of an exhausting day.  We made it though.

We spent Monday starting out for a trip to Death Valley.  I hadn’t fueled and as we hit a long stretch of dead road and no cell service, I had a goal that I would only go a bit further and then turn back…I had no idea what to expect or how far we would have to go to actually arrive at the entrance.  When we hit the fee station, we turned back.  At almost the same time the Steed developed an incredible shimmy.  We were putzing along slowly and talking about a notice I’d received from Ford that not enough air in the front tires could create the problem.  The problem was I had put more air in the front tires when I got the notice.

As we limped back across the desert, we decided to pull over and Josh would see about letting some of the air out – I had a tire gauge in the truck but it’s a flim-flam and won’t register more than 55LBs.  While he was out looking, he discovered a major case of dry rot in the left front tire, to the point that it looked like a piece of tire might peel off and become one of the ‘gators’ you see from trucks along the highways and byways.  Back into limp mode, we crept along at about 35 until we hit Pahrump – made a coupla phone calls and I decided on GoodYear.  Apparently we had lost one of the balance weights on the wheel but the left front tire was in almost scary mode so they swapped it out with the spare and balanced the tires for me.  I ordered tires – they will be put on tomorrow early a.m.  Gee…I love beefing up the economy.

The following day we had massages scheduled for Josh and Jennie and we decided to head back out to Death Valley.  At one point we were -910 below sea level.  Crazy, huh?

I want to go back again and hike some of the trails in fall or winter when it’s much cooler.  We drove the 20 Mule Team Road, went through the museum in Death Valley – and listened to one ranger tell a group of people that Pahrump and Las Vegas were the enemy because of something to do with commercial and BLM land – and I got my old fart’s parks pass for life.  Yippee!  My birthday this month put me into the age bracket.  I’m fine with that, I’ve been wanting one of those passes.  The ranger even gave me a partial refund on the fee I paid to enter the park by giving me the pass free.  Sweet!

The whole Death Valley experience was quite amazing, and of course I don’t have the facts…but I did take a few pictures.  I want to go back on a day that isn’t cloudy – and keep in mind the clouds cooled it off a bit which helped us.  The old Borax Mine was in this area – the 20 mule team thing:

We stopped at a ‘get your last drink of water here’ general store and picked up a few things and headed back out the way we came, with a few detours.  There are mines in the area that are closed – including gold mines.  Not being a fan of mines I wouldn’t go into one anyway, so closed works for me.

We stopped and climbed one overlook that had very impressive views of the terrain:

Much further along the way home we had seen a road that went to Dante’s View.  We took it.  The last few miles of it were almost straight up and the road was extremely narrow – not sure what I would have done if I’d met a vehicle coming down.  There are several trails from that parking area and we did manage one that led to an overlook.  With the cloud cover it made for very liveable temperatures and plus the fact that we were over 5,000 feet up helped a bit.  The cloud cover didn’t give me the ideal photo shoot though but it will have to do:

And it’s time to move my butt and get a few more things done that I thought I’d never get back to.  More later