About two weeks ago my hiking partner, Amy, and I started out across the desert heading towards a small mountain that’s about a mile and a half from our place. The ground was dry in most spots but there were a lot of ridges on our route from the previous rains and quad vehicles driving through it, and the paw prints of many of the dogs/or coyotes that went through before us. Those ridges had dried into rough obstacles and as we were walking along, Amy stumbled and took a fall. Luckily she had been a diver and tumbler as a youth and managed to roll into the fall so that she only scraped up one side of her arm and ended up bruising the top of her hand and her thigh, but she got right up and was completely able to finish the walk with no long-term after effect.

I told her that if we walk together long enough I would fall to, because I seem to do it  quite well, and have taken many a tumble as I’ve been jogging, rollerblading, and even fallen over on my bike, which is posted about two months ago on Tango when I was out riding my dirt bike in the desert terrain.

Not to worry – we started out walking on Monday and decided that we would walk on the street because the desert was to wet again, and doing what I’ve done periodically for the last 15 years, I turned around and walked backwards. That may seem quite strange but I probably put in over 1000 miles walking backwards during my walking trips, even in the desert and on the city streets in Las Vegas, it’s just a little thing I do; it breaks the boredom of a walk and changes the stress on certain muscles of your body as you move.

So it was.

For some reason halfway through my stride back it felt like I stepped on the shoelace of the foot that was lifted, but that wasn’t the case as my shoelaces were not untied. It’s too difficult to even try to remember or explain – but it felt as if my foot stopped in midstride and I was going over backwards, so I threw my left hand behind me and it took the weight of my fall. I did end up landing on my butt but stayed up off of my head and the flat of my back and most of the weight went onto the palm of my hand. Of course it hurt like a son of a bitch. I was pretty sure it wasn’t broken and we continued to walk.

My wrist hurt so bad I felt like I could almost be sick, but we finished our walk which was a little over 2 miles and I complained several times about the pain that felt like a toothache magnified by 1000 in my wrist. One of the weirdest parts of the walk was that as we were walking, something booted right into the back of my ankle about 20 minutes after the fall, of course I jumped and turned and there was a small dog that ran up behind me – without growling or barking – and bumped into the back of my leg. I screamed at him to get the hell out of here, probably more out of being startled than anything else, but in thinking back, I’m really lucky he didn’t run in between my feet and cause me to take another fall.

As soon as I got home I went in and wrapped the wrist and put ice on it.  I spent the entire day icing and keeping the wrap on it and it hurt so bad I could hardly stand it. I know I’m complaining a lot about the pain but unless you’ve been there, you have no idea how badly it hurts when you bruise a joint or have something happen to a bone in your body. I had pain pills and I found that if I took one and took two Motrin two hours later, it seemed to stave it off so it was halfway bearable – but no matter how I laid my arm or wrist or held the hand, even with it wrapped, there was no relief from the pain. About the time I decided I needed to see a doctor to see if I had some real damage, it was after 5 PM and there was no way I was going to the emergency room and pay them $300 just to walk through the door.

That was just the beginning.

About every two years or so my computer decides to do a belly up flop, with its dick in the dirt, and I usually end up buying a new one, or having to reformat the hard drive, or install a new operating system. I had actually been expecting this because I had started to have issues with programs loading, with everything running slower, with problems publishing articles into the CMS on PokerWorks and a variety of other things which makes me realize it’s time for the whole system to go to hell. I had already picked up Windows 7, and had been doing backup for the last 10 days because this time I refused to lose all my information and go crazy with it. So… here I sat with the pain from hell, and complete and total computer frustration.  I had work to do, and I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, but couldn’t get it to work. So I dropped everything and went to the computer backup. Crossed my fingers (on my right hand of course), took a deep breath and was going to upgrade to Windows 7 but it wouldn’t allow me to upgrade, I had to do a complete install and lose everything that was on my hard drive. Okay!

Amazingly the install went quite well, and then I also found that when Windows 7 installs, it saves your files on Windows.old on your hard drive. Along with that I have a USB 1 TB hard drive that I have backed up all my image files to about a month ago and the majority of my documents and other files that I did not want to lose. I thought I was going to throw up when I booted up Windows 7 and it didn’t recognize the 1 TB drive. That’s when I actually broke into sobbing tears and couldn’t stop crying for about 20 minutes. I think that crying was more out of frustration, pain, and because I’m hard as nails a crybaby at heart and can’t handle pain, and during the crying, I clicked on the terabyte hard drive and managed to find a way into it. Holy shit! Life started to look a lot better then but I still couldn’t stem the tears for a while.

I started reinstalling programs, and made up my mind that this time I would not install or download anything from the Internet that I did not need. I made a vow to myself that I would keep this as my work computer and I also have Carbonite backup which I have to reinstall but will have it running soon and hopefully will never have to go through this stress again when my computer decided it’s time to die – I may help it with a bigger hammer. So all of that out of the way – in between being so tired that I couldn’t stand myself and still in so much pain that I couldn’t deal with life, I had made up my mind I was going to the doctor’s office by 8 AM in the morning. I got some work done on PokerWorks, gobbled down another pain pill and went in to die for about five hours.

I went to the Dr., had x-rays taken and nothing appears to be broken, he did tell me that I needed to see an orthopedic Dr. because it’s possible I could have a slight fracture underneath the thumb that isn’t visible from the x-rays, and I had a huge lump on the outside of my wrist but he said he thought it could be a ligament that was bruised or a muscle that had a contusion. So I was given a wrist wrap – they didn’t have a splint that would fit me – and sent to Walgreens to get another prescription filled for Hydrocodone. There’s something I have to say about drugs right now, I think we should all take brownies, because the drugs even taken with food, help relieve the pain but they also make you feel as if you’re going to be sick. Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t like that terminal queasy feeling like, OH My God what did I just do to myself?  It reminds me of drinking too much chocolate wine.

That day after seeing the doctor was about the same as the first day, total complete, mind-boggling pain. No way to escape it, no way to change it, no way to make it better, or have it even dissipate for a little bit. I’ve had three children. The first one I was in labor with for over three days and ended up with a broken tailbone at the time of his birth, the second one I was in labor with for 12 hours, the third one I was in labor with for 36 hours, and I can tell you that pain is mind-numbing.  It leads one to believe that there will never be anything that stops it and you will just die having labor pains. But at least with labor pains you get a break in between them until the very last part. With this type of pain there is no break, it just goes on and on and on. Of course I got very little work done, because I was still installing programs and getting things lined out on my computer so I could get back to work, and now I have to train Dragon NaturallySpeaking all over again, it won’t translate fuck but I will get it trained.

I put up a post last night and about halfway through it, I said something that led Dragon to believe that I wanted to leave the page, I got the pop-up script asking me if I was sure I wanted to navigate away from this page as I had changes that hadn’t been saved, and before I could do anything, the page disappeared. So I lost the whole post. I gave up and went to bed. Now that I am much wiser, I’m translating this into Word and will copy/paste into WordPress. So aside from pain, time to get on with life.

Tomorrow afternoon I will be on my way to Las Vegas, to attend a long overdue card party with some of my old friends.  It will be hosted at Gary and Marie’s house. On Friday morning at 9 AM I will be down at the Nye County Courthouse explaining to the judge why I failed to show for my jury summons. I can hardly wait.

Then if things work out right, I will be driving back into Las Vegas to pick up Riot. I haven’t seen the boy in three weeks now. I can tell you Granny is starting to miss him a ton.

Obviously I haven’t posted about the PokerWorks family tournament, so I will now:
PokerStars Tournament #247601352, HORSE
Buy-In: $5.00/$0.50 USD
8 players
Total Prize Pool: $40.00 USD
Tournament started 2010/02/28 22:30:00 ET
Tournament finished 2010/02/28 23:38:24 ET
1: clearspine (Boulder), $20.00 (50%)
2: djhomeschool (Denton), $12.00 (30%)
3: ThunderBob (Harrisonburg), $8.00 (20%)
4: NumbBono (West Des Moines),
5: cmacc85 (waycross),
6: PokerWorks (Pahrump),
7: PokerHack07 (Alturas),
8: Alexe55 (Marina Del Rey),

It was a ton of fun and I got busted out by Clearspine – read his report.  He finally confesses that he loves to beat me – who didn’t know that?  I don’t think calling was a bad move with his hand vs. what my board was showing so I didn’t consider it a ‘bad beat’ although I did type ‘draw artist’ in the chat.  I completely bluffed him earlier when I had 2-3-4-5 showing in stud 8, I had 10-8 in the pocket…that was fun.

The Goat was signed up earlier but ‘unregistered’ before game time.  *sniff*  Andrew should have his new podcast up by now, I intended to go listen to it but haven’t made it yet with the fog that’s been going on.  Billy Monroe AKA ThunderBob, made it and we had a laugh about the ‘hover car of the future’ after I was busted.  It’s kind of a private joke as we both played a Omaha tourney in the WBCOOP event.  He didn’t know how to play the game and I gave him a brief on it a few minutes before it started, then we were sweating each other, I think he said it was a dumb game or something like that and I told him that I had heard for years it was the game of the future and still hadn’t gotten its just due.  To which he replied, ‘The hover car of the future!’ and I still laugh over it.

We had a new face at our table, NumbBono, thanks for playing and a big thanks to Alexe55 and cmacc85 for always making it too.

Here’s the deal, I have 33c left in my PokerStars account and have no plan to deposit for awhile.  I vote Full Tilt for the next one.  Andrew, will you set it up?  Jan, just make a deposit.