OK, so I've been very negligent in updating this site the past few weeks. It's been crazy-busy; my standard excuse. :-) You may have to poke around a little bit, as I'll go through and update a bunch of the places I've been to in the past few weeks.
The past 10 days, I've been in Sacramento again, working with our partner Amdocs to do a system installation, and training. It has not gone well, but by the end of the week we got where we wanted to be. Since I was staying over the weekend, I decided to spend the weekend in Lake Tahoe, rather than in Folsom.
Lake Tahoe is beautiful - I thought it was nice in the fall, when I was there in September, but winter is definitely the best season. On Saturday, I went up to Squaw Valley, and went skiing for the day. And what a glorious day it was! Sunny, not a cloud in the sky; no wind; and pushing 15-20 degrees at the base of the mountain. The snow was very soft, slushy spring show. Makes it tough to ski, as it's so soft and heavy. But better than ice!. I haven't skied much in the last three years (OK, once, in the last three years thanks to all the injuries), and it just killed my legs! It's nice that the skills don't totally abandon you. I found this really great run that I skied all day - only to discover at the end of the day, that it was a black diamond run. But damn it was fun.
Saturday evening I had a very fun poker night. Lost money, but it was totally worth it. So I'm playing the 3-5 no limit game at Harry's, and a seat opens up directly to my left. I hear someone mention that he'll "take it", and look over to discover that Phil Laak, is sitting into our game. No for you non-poker players, Phil Laak is known as "The Unabomber", and is one of the best poker players in the world. Way out of our league! And, as it turns out, a very nice guy. We chatted while we played (and I didn't lose any money to him!) - he was up for a boys weekend, skiing at Squaw Valley as well. And he was really nice to all the people that came up to him, to ask for autographs. We ended up playing together for about 3 hours I think, before I made a horrible call, and lost my buy-in. But I was really impressed with Phil - seems like an all around nice guy, and obviously a hell of a poker player. I think I learned some things watching him/playing with him, which was very cool!
I'm sorry to say there will be no pictures for this trip - but I will update the site with pics from Charleston and Ottawa later this week.