An Epic Week; Stardust Implosion, Lake Days, and Skydiving
A note to those reading this blog: the pictures did not transfer over. You can see them on my pokerpages blog or my myspace blog.Oh yeah. I did play some poker. My my my... it's been quite a long time since I've blogged and nearly every day in the past week was deserving of it's own blog. So, we'll start from the top: Last Tuesday.
Lara and I went to Red Rocks to do some hiking and check out some climbing routes. The place is absolutely gorgeous, and I will definately be spending some more time there. On the way out I saw an off road trial leading out of the west side of the park and we decided to take it. I put the truck in some pretty gnarly spots, but we were able to finish the road/wash and make our way out... halfway between Pahrump and Las Vegas. We decided to do dinner in Pahrump, a small town outside of Vegas which is known for it's legal brothels. Good times.
Wednesday was highlighted by our first two softball games of the season. We are team (that other poker media company). Players include Mark Gregorich, Adam Speigelberg, Jim Shipley, Rick Fuller, Blake Pengelley, John Fruitkin, Topher, Jared, Danny, myself, and a few of Mark's friends. Such a fun squad! Suprisingly there have been no side bets won or lost, although I did offer the umpire $20 to throw Ships out of the game. He declined. We won both games by a significant margin.
Thursday I played poker and I played really bad. I made two bluffs, one for $1k and the other for $800 that never had any chance of succeeding. Dumb dumb dumb. I ran bad for another $700, and then lost $510 taking 5% of John Turner in the Wynn $10k. I was pretty frustrated with myself.
Friday was almost as bad, losing $2510, but this time I played very well. I got two outed for a $5700 pot. It was pretty dirty.
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Saturday I spent the day on the lake with Travis, Jared, Jackie, Kelly, and Lara. It was a beautiful day, everybody had a good time, nobody played hot stick, and we were off the water by 5pm. We had dinner at Jared's work where the Jim Beam girls were doing promotions. They were selling shots for $3 which included a free shirt and a raffle ticket for a bunch of prizes. Grand prize: two tickets to the NASCAR race Sunday. I won. Devo: run bad at poker, run good at raffles.
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Sunday morning I woke up having no desire to go to a race, so Lara headed out and scalped the tickets. Easy money baby... I headed in that night to do some work, and lost again. It was only a couple hundred bucks, but certaintly getting annoying.
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Monday came along and I had been excited for this day for a long time. Monday night was the night they were going to implode the Stardust. I have some special memories from that place and was sad to see the last of the mobster run joints hit the dust. Before heading over though, Travis and I played some 2-5 NL, and whaddya know, I actually booked a winning session, $751 to the good side.
Travis and I headed to the roof of the Circus Circus Parking Garage #2 for an up front view of the implosion. People began trickling in as it got closer to implosion time. At 2:30 am, the coolest fireworks display I have ever seen began right in front of me. At 2:33am, the Stardust went down. It was one of the absolute coolest things I have ever experienced in my life.
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Wow wow wow. Absolutely incredible. I shot video of the event too, and if I can ever find the bandwith to get it uploaded to youtube I'll be sure to post the link for y'all.
Travis and I closed the joint down on the roof of the parking garage and eventually made our way into the Circus Circus. It was quite a vegas moment in there. There was an unmistakable haze in the casino air. Several people like us were walking around covered in dust. And sitting at many slot machines were people with painter's masks over their face, punching buttons and pulling handles like it was just another night in Vegas. Quite strange.
The following day I drug my butt out of bed at 11am to go do more boring stuff. Brandon Cantu, Rick Fuller, Nicole, Angie, and myself were going to go jump out of a plane.
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Half of you just thought, "He's nuts." The other half thought, "Sweet!"
I have always wanted to go jump but have never really had the opportunity or the spontaneous drive. Today was the day. It was a perfect 85 degrees outside with a mild breeze. They put us in the room above and showed us a short orientation video. We then were put in jumpsuits, and then had super-duper harnesses strapped on. The furniture was definately in the middle of the room boys. Since they could only take up 4 at a time on the plane we were broken up into two groups. Rick, Angie, and myself went up first. Ang was going to be the first one out of the plane. I beat Rick at rock, paper, scissors and chose third. I was completely psyched the entire time and had zero fear whatsoever until while at our cruising altitude of 15,000 feet, Angie went out the door and was GONE. Vanished. She fell so fast that Rick and I literally could not see her. Rick knelt at the edge of the door and his instructor said, "Okay, ready? On three! One..." WHOOOMP. Out the door. Gone. OK. My turn! I shimmied over to the door and before I knew it I was tumbling completely out of control falling at 120 MPH towards the earth. Eventually my instructor gained control of the freefall and we were cruising in the "bananna position." It was so loud and incredible. The air was crisp. I had my breath literally taken away by the swift, cold air. My instructor taught me how to rotate using my hands and legs during freefall, and it was incredible. We fell for about 60 seconds and popped the chute around 5k feet. After a sudden jolt I was greeted by the sound of absolute silence. Here I was, hanging from a parachute, a human strap on for a 35 year old man, and we both took in the beauty of Lake Mead, Hoover Dam, Black Canyon, the Colorado River, Boulder City, the Strip, and the rest of the Las Vegas basin. Unbelievable.
We slowly decended to ground level, made a soft landing, and I was going nuts. Whooooo! So freakin sweet.
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So, not wanting this epic day to end, Rick, Angie and I decided to head out to the Lake. Bad news: when we got home the boat was already gone! Punks Jared and Danny had the same idea. Kelly said they left like 20 mins before us, so we decided we would catch them. Got to the lake: boat gone. Nobody's answering their cell phones. Bummer. Alas, quick thinkers that Rick and I are, we decided to rent a Sea-doo, scoot out to find the boat, bring the boat and sea-doo back, drop off the sea-doo, pick up Ang, and continue on with the day. Problem: we couldn't find the boat anywhere. We learned later that they had actually left an hour and a half before us, not twenty minutes before, and they headed to a completely different part of the lake. Oh well... it was still a sweet time on the lake.
On the way back we saw a huge column of smoke coming from the basin. There was a half-mile wide brush fire buring just off Boulder Highway and Russel. We went and gawked a bit, and then headed back to the house. I set Rick and Angie up on my bike and they headed down to the strip, and at that point Jared called, getting all my messages, and said, "Come meet us on the lake!" Punk. Tried that once. But, ok! I'm in.
It was awesome. The night air was super warm. We ended up doing a cliff jump at 12:30am. So sweet.
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Phew. Almost done. Wednesday, Rick and Angie returned on the bike, and we immediately returned to the lake. Another beautiful standard lake day. I don't understand how so many locals hate that lake! It'a absolutely awesome. We got back at 6:30, I showed them videos of the sense killers, and we were off to play some softball.
Tonight's games were a total joke. We won both games by over twenty runs and they were called on the mercy rule by the fourth inning in both.
Hope you enjoyed that blog... I sure enjoyed the week.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
posted by Devo @ 5:38 AM
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