Too funny sometimes how plans are made and then dumped because of weather.  Such is the case for me today…as the old expression goes ‘Raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.’  If you’ve never heard it before, don’t fret, I’m sure there are lots of sayings we all haven’t heard and are probably the better for it.  It was a steady downpour all day.  There are pools of water standing on the property.  The Riotmeister and I made it an indoor kind of day.  He goes home tomorrow.

The yard project is on hold due to flooding and super gumbo concrete that refuses to give up its hold on anything it touches, like your shoes/boots.  Only four trees left to move – one big one that is close to 13 feet tall and the other three are around 6 feet.  I seriously want to get this out of the way…weather permitting.

Glenda and I have been sweating each other in the micro buy-in tourneys and she made it deep into the 3.30 R $40K guaranteed on PokerStars last night.  I made the $ in that tourney too which was nice because it paid the freight and gave me a few extra dollars for the next one.  I finally gave up sweating her around midnight because I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.  I like the $3.30 R with the huge guarantee because 1st place is always around 8 to 9K – sometimes bigger.  Yah, I know, haven’t won that spot yet but I’m not giving up on myself.  The only places that pay decent $ for all the hours are the final table so I keep setting my sights for that.  I’m still in awe of what people call raises with.

I had a couple of my poker nightmares dreams last week.  I really don’t get it.  They are so bizarre, like in one of them I was playing a poker game with Russ Hamilton.  I can remember feeling shocked that he would even show his face in a poker room, and someone at the table was talking to another player about Russ being THE cheater behind the Ultimate Bet Scandal but Russ never looked at either of them or responded even though he definitely could hear their conversation.

The other one – I was playing poker with Phil Ivey.  Nope, it wasn’t a high limit thing, it was apparently a low limit thing as I was completely comfortable playing.  But a jabber jawed railbird and his girlfriend came up to gape the game and kept talking.  I think I (perhaps someone else but you know how spotty dreams are) told them be quiet – they were irritating me.  And Phil interjected and said that he wanted to visit with them and they pulled up chairs.  Doesn’t sound at all like the Phil that wouldn’t even give the WSOP Media five minutes when he busted out of the main event, or the way his ‘Get the hell out of here’ attitude has been reported about the media and press.

But hey, a dream is a dream, how does one control them?

I did make it out to hike the desert with my neighbor Amy for a coupla days – before the rain set in.  We have a pattern that we hike back and forth that loops behind a low hill with a mountain rising on the backside of it and the loop is a 4X road that takes us right back out into open desert.  The mountain and hill have no cover as in trees and heavy brush, they are pretty barren.  The desert we hike does have clumps of dying mesquite that are filled with mistletoe and idiot fucktards have dumped some of their garbage in and around those clumps.  It’s sickening.  Furniture and miscellaneous crap, and a lot of tires, dot the landscape in the clumps.  It’s all BLM property.  The worst of it is that the dump is only about 5 miles from our houses, to go to this area takes another 2 miles or so, and the dump is free…no charge…so WTF?  Every now and then we come up on a new bunch of someone’s garbage, sometimes dumped right in the 4X road that we walk the loop on.

As we hit one section of that road, we went to look at the sinkhole to see if it had grown.  It has, It’s deeper and looks like it has started to branch out at the bottom in one direction; although it doesn’t appear to have increased much in size in the surface of the ground, it’s deeper.  I’d put it at 8 to 9 feet deep now.

As we left that section, we got another eyeful.  The neighbors behind our properties had told me that they saw a cougar just off of Murphy (Murphy borders the BLM property and is about 1/4 mile from our houses).  We’ve also seen coyote out on one of our hikes and they are known to frequent the houses for garbage, etc.  One time we saw a mass of big brown feathers strewn over a 100 yard area – probably blown by the wind after the fowl was devoured – and at first I couldn’t figure out what kind of wild bird would have feathers like that.  Finally, it registered.  A chicken, something like a Rhode Island Red made lunch for someone or several someones.

You can never be too careful – and this creature was definitely out somewhere where he shouldn’t have been.  We thought about the fact that he might have been shot and pitched there by someone wanting to get rid of a nuisance, but there were no tire tracks anywhere in the area.  There were a lot of soft marks of movement around him and the meat on the bone is still very red, which means his end wasn’t that long ago.  I put a lot of thought as to whether or not I would post this picture and decided I would…obviously….or the build-up wouldn’t be here.   The dog is DEAD! I don’t find it to be hideous or disgusting, but if you have any problem with death, deadness, carcasses, or any such thing, I ask you to not click on the picture.  Of course most of you will.  Even though you’ve been warned, you will still look.

Now Moi is wondering, cougar or coyote?  Coyotes do have a tendency to pack and they can be damned dangerous when they do.  And when I told Riot about cougars, he wanted to see a picture of one – obviously we went to the computer and the internet.  I searched cougars.  Kee-rist!  The definition is an older woman lurking/hitting younger men…usually about 8 years older than the guys.  D-A-M-N!

Tomorrow I hope to do better in tournament play, and yes, I will be playing.  G’nite!