I left work pretty early Friday; I was pretty exhausted from a long week and the weekend was just too tempting to stay away from. So at about 3:30, I was out of there. Drove home, slacked off for a few hours. A couple of guys from my band - the dixieland jazz band - came over at 6pm and we had a few drinks before we headed out to the gig we had that night. We played in a fighter jet hangar - they had their dinner in there - which was pretty cool. I’ve never played Sweet Georgia Brown 10 feet away from this kind of puppy before:

(It’s a JAS 39 Gripen)

We didn’t start playing until about 10:30, and we were done maybe an hour later. Because our drummer had taken his car there, he couldn’t have any drinks (we have very stringent laws and fairly principled attitudes about alcohol and driving in Sweden; having “just one beer” and then driving is frowned up on and nobody I know really does that. Ever.) so we felt kinda sorry for him. We decided to ask for a case of beer that we could bring with us instead of drinking them there at the party, and then we packed ourselves into his car and went over to his place. By the time we got there, however, it had gotten to be around 1:20, so me and the trumpet player - the only other two besides the drummer who didn’t go home immediately after the gig was done - kinda felt that maybe just one beer is enough and then we’re out of there too. Where did those days go when we stuck around the after-parties until 5 in the morning? But I’m not 21 anymore.

Got up Saturday, felt pretty okay - that’s another perk of not having stuck around to finish all the beer before I went home. Had breakfast, and decided to play some poker. No, actually, I decided to play a lot of poker. I was going to sidestep my 100 hand rule this morning, and play with only short breaks for 3-4 hours straight.

I really should have stuck with the 100 hands.

The end result was a loss that swung between -$650 and -$350. When I finally got up, I think I was stuck $450. I did have a fair share of bad luck, so some of it can be attributed to that, but what I found interesting was that after about an hour, I could really feel that I was no longer on top of my game. Generally speaking, I became too loose. A form of tilt - probably not at all independent from the fact that I was stuck about 50 BB - got stuck and stayed there. So after my hours were up, I decided that from now on, I’m sticking with 100 hands. If I lose my job one day, and decide that maybe I’ll try to make a living playing poker until I find something else to do, I might have to learn to play more than 100 hands in a row before taking a break but for now, that’s the way it’s going to be.

Last night, we went over to the above mentioned trumpet player (Olle) and his fiancée (Maria) and had dinner. Lori - the American ex-patriate - wanted to do something Thanksgiving:ish so she made cranberry sauce and mashed sweet potatoes to go with the sirloin that we prepared. Sweet potatoes are pretty “exotic” here, and I think very few people who don’t have some connection with the US have ever had them, and not all grocery stores carry them. Also, I was to understand that Lori felt that she had done a bad job with the cranberry sauce; it apparently wasn’t thick enough. She was supposed to boil them for longer than she did, she explains. I thought it tasted fine but I could sort of see what she meant about it being too runny.

Today, we haven’t done much. We were going to go to the grocery store, but decided that we didn’t feel like it. We have stuff at home to make dinner with tonight, but if we don’t get there tomorrow I think we’re going to start running out. There’s always sandwiches, I guess.

We watched the last half of a movie we started watching yesterday, and I played some Civ4. Then, I decided to play 100 hands and try to soothe my bankroll a bit from the brutal punishment it received yesterday. It… did not… start out… well. I was swiftly down $150 in the first 25 hands I played. This time, it had nothing to do with tilt, I just happened to catch a few consequitive good-but-second-best hands. I groaned a bit to myself, but fought it out. Then, nothing happened for 20 hands, and then WHAM! I caught a set on one table, a straight on the other, get paid off with TPTK in the next hand, call a bluff on the river with ace-high, and a few more decent hands, and… All of a sudden I’m up $150. I still have a ways to go to get back where I was yesterday morning, but when my 100 hands were up, I left with $123 more than I sat down with.

Oh yeah, and I cut off my hair today, using my trimmer. I’m now (again) sporting a half-inch buzz-cut. Oh, sweet joy of coifure convenience.