Twelve Hours Until Liftoff

It’s closing on midnight here in the ATL, and I sit in my basement for the last time in maybe fifty days.

Last year’s World Series is almost a blur now. I stayed ten days or so at the beginning when the Rio’s Media Room was a sleepy collection of only the hard core, with Pauly and Otis and PokerPages Justin stumbling around with me in the wee hours of the night. My wide-eyed wonder turned into bleary-eyed wander, as the cycle of the tourney wraps with the morning day-job calls and the three-hour sleep sessions attacking me quickly. I was on fumes as quick as an H2, and then I headed back for the Main Event.

My Main Event experience was so much better as I somewhat had a clue. More importantly, my INTP nature reached out to a support network of Team PokerStars Blog, of Otis, of Linda, and a few other key players in what became a sea of dozens of media types and thousands of players.

I’ve repeated a few significant problems from last year, albeit unavoidable. I am extremely busy with my consulting practice, with eight or nine marketing projects tied to a new product launch combined with a significant sales meeting now in Shanghai next week. Gone is my dinner with Fuel, Bayne, and the guys. I’ll be Vegas-LAX-Seoul-Shanghai-Seoul-Vegas, first sitting down Monday night and last standing up Friday afternoon.

I have a team of real writers to work with and learn from in Dan and Amy. I’ll be living in a home which, in theory, will be better than a casino hotel. I feel very confident that we’ll be able to help one another, and I look forward to that. I hope to play some as well, hope to satellite into a tourney or three, hope to cash in my first WSOP event.

It will be much harder to be apart from Sweetie and the boys than ever before. I’ll miss two months of their lives. For All-In and Hawk (formerly the Big Guy), that’s a blink of an eye. For the Little Guy, it is more than 5% of his life so far. I had to run some errands and grab lunch for all of us today, and he blurted out that he wanted to go with me. So I buckled and unbuckled him five times as we made our stops along the way, and he never stopped smiling or yelling out some observation along the same three streets I’ve traveled for the last seven years.

And with no time to take off with all the packing and planning and work still to be done, I let Sweetie convince me to get in our car, leave the boys with a babysitter, and head to dinner and a movie. Sacrificing four hours was something I didn’t need, but I’ll remember each of those 250 minutes gingerly over these weeks to come. We split an eight-dollar crabcake, followed by a not too hot Caesar salad and a sacrilegiously branded rack of baby-back ribs. The five of us had blundered through the parking lot that is rush hour traffic to refinance our house before I left, and all of that faded as I said nothing to Sweetie.

Our movie wasn’t a sequel; we slinked into our seats to see Waitress. Major buzz at Sundance, primarily because the Director, Writer and Co-Star had been murdered before the film premiered. I’m a moviegoer, and one of my favorite ways to spend an evening is to sit next to Sweetie in a dark theater. I guess it was a chick-flick, but that cheapens how good this movie was. At least, how good it was for me.

I have much to do tonight before I load my bags into the car tomorrow. I’ll hopefully knock as much as I can out then head to cuddle next to Sweetie for the last few hours.