Happy Holidays
Ugh, long time no post.

In addition to the usual holiday craziness, things have been especially hectic in the Cheap Thrills household. The week before Thanksgiving, Mrs. Cheap Thrills had minor surgery (from which she is now fully recovered). That same week, my mom found out she had a tumor in her colon, which was removed the week after Thanksgiving. That was fairly major surgery, and we've been down visiting my family in Philadelphia for the past two weekends. But the surgery went well, and this very morning my mom got very good news on her test results -- there's no evidence that the cancer has spread. Hard to put into words what a relief that is.

And because I like to keep my posts as poker-related as possible, here's some wisdom I've taken from the past month: There's nothing like the ups and downs of Real Life to give you some perspective on the swings of fortune at the poker table!

The only poker I've played since Thanksgiving was the day after my mom's surgery. She was still pretty weak and delirious from all the medication, and after a visiting her at the hospital all day, B and I shared a couple beers with my aunt, uncle, sister, and cousin before hitting the sack. Actually, everyone else hit the sack, and I stayed up to kill a couple relatively relaxing hours playing low-limit 7-Stud. I've blogged a lot about the reasons we all love poker -- that session stands out as one in which poker was primarily a way to relax and take my mind off other things. And I even left a slight winner!

In addition to not playing poker, I also fell behind on my blog reading. Interestingly, though, in 2 weeks of letting the blogs slide there were only about 300 unread posts in my Bloglines blogroll. For comparison, when I didn't keep up with the poker blogs for about 2 weeks this past August, I had over 800 unread posts -- and I was reading fewer bloggers then. I think the holidays are slowing everyone down to some degree.

By the way, in catching up with all the blogging, I must give a big Thanks to everyone for all the posts about the WPBT event in Vegas. Very fun reading.

I haven't been playing much poker, but I have been seeing it everywhere: Is anyone else amazed by all the poker stuff being peddled in the gift stores this year? Chip sets are everywhere, and it just goes on from there to poker clothing, glassware, you name it. I'm seeing poker gifts everywhere I look. I guess anything that gets more players in the cardrooms must be a good thing, right?

I am definitely going to log some hours online this weekend. As I've mentioned before, I pretty much stopped playing poker in the winter months last year, and when I came back to the tables in the spring I was rusty and lacking confidence. I do think that there are fewer fish in the aquarium during the holiday period, but I'm determined to keep my game sharp (or at least not let it get too dull) through these hectic weeks.

I'd like to say that I'll post again before the holidays but the way I've been going I'm not so sure -- time is limited and for the restof the month my poker priorities are going to be first playing, then reading more interesting bloggers than myself, then posting here. So in case I don't post again, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
posted by James at 10:42 PM