It’s only 9 PM, but it feels like it should be 3 AM to me right now. I expect to be in Las Vegas by about 7 AM tomorrow. That’s really scary, it means I have to be up by about 5 AM and on the road by 5:30. It’s time to take the Silver Steed in for a maintenance checkup and some work. Of course it’s going to be costly… what the hell else would one expect? And of course it’s going to cost me a few hours of sleep. I don’t even know why sleep is coming into the picture right now because I sleep in such weird patterns at times that I’m up at five on some mornings anyway – but the fact that I have to get up and be out all day is the part that bothers me the most.

Since I’m going to spend the day in Las Vegas doing who knows what, while the mechanics do who knows what to the Steed, I decided I would call Carole and see what she was up to for the day. I admit that I called Marie first, because I was looking forward to lunch and possibly playing poker for a few hours. But when I called Carole we decided that since she’s having computer problems I would see if I could fuck hers up too help her with a fix. She’s going to pick me up and we will do breakfast first. Of course, if I don’t fix her PC, she may not give me a ride back out to get the truck. What are friends for if you can’t use them?

The wrist is still a bit tender, I do have an appointment with an orthopedic doctor but I couldn’t get into see him until the 17th and I may cancel. The wrist is improving, obviously, and I’m managing more and more pain free movement with my hand and fingers each day. I figure if I waltz into his office a week from now, he’ll take a look at the x-rays that my regular doctor took, and probably tell me that nothing appears to be broken, and then charge me $120 just for that moment in time.

I have been out a few times walking with Amy since the fall, and today I turned around and walked backwards again for a short time. This time my shoelaces were snugged up and tied to the outside of the shoe. I finally figured out how the fall happened, I had big loops in my shoelaces, and these jogging shoes have a wider base on them than the form of the shoe, and they also have sucker type of treads, I figure an edge of one of those treads caught in the loop of the lace and just stopped me in midstride.

When I was talking to my sister about it on the phone, she told me I was going to have to start wearing a helmet and knee pads and elbow pads when I walked… we both laughed our asses off over it.  On the falling down issue, as stated in a previous blog, Amy had taken a fall in the desert when we were walking, and I took the fall when we were walking on the pavement. Across the street from us, our neighbors were pulling out of their yard as we were returning from a walk. I offered to close the gate for them and that’s whenI found out that the wife had taken a fall and cut her face and had just gotten the stitches taken out a short time before. The fall must really be in the air in this area. Sounds like a woman thing too.

I did a complete format/clean install of Windows 7, and started loading programs, and everything works — including Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The reason it didn’t work when I installed Windows 7 the first time was my own fault. I had Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 which worked fine on Windows Vista but I failed to check if it was compatible with Windows 7, and when I tried to install it from the disk, it wouldn’t install. Being the computer freak that I am, I know there are always ways to get around doing certain things with computers, all you have to do is find the backdoor, so I pulled out a Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9 that I had and installed it and then installed version 10 over it. Version 10 actually worked but after a few moments it would come up with a user error. Searching the Internet I found that there was a newer version of 10 that was out for Windows 7 and when I downloaded it from the Internet and tried to install it, it would hang on the install and I couldn’t get past it. Once I had made up my mind to completely format the hard drive and start over, I had a better attitude about the whole thing. And now that it’s done my attitude is really good about it because the computers running much faster and isn’t bogged down with all the old stuff on it. Of course it’s downloading updates like crazy so every time I turn around my computer keeps shutting down and restarting and that’s a little bit irritating, but it’s a way of life with Windows I guess.

I’m really irritated that United States citizens cannot play on Party Poker. Party Poker has a ton of action going on right now – like packages to the WPT events – and here we sit in the good old US and don’t get to play any of it. And on the subject of poker, don’t forget we are playing the PokerWorks Family tournament on Full Tilt Poker this Sunday night.  More on that later

It’s time for me to be asleep. I hope there’s no snow when I go over Mt. Potosi. in the early a.m.