Last Hurrah

A few days after the wedding, we hosted poker before everyone scattered to the four corners of the world again.

Around the table: Ian, Brian, Jacque, John, me, Fred, Lance & Kristie

Mark & the Snee's also dropped by after dinner

We miss you all!

p.s. Our little adopted kitty, who's lounging in the bottom picture, went home the next day. The owners were on vacation in Florida but came back to reclaim him. :( We were thiiiiiisssss close to scheduling him for shots and the snip-snip and buying him a food bowl of his own. Oh well. We're just glad he's back in a loving home.

Wedding Reunions

I love the feel of freshly cleaned and polished teeth, don't you? I almost hate to ruin all of my dentist's hard work from this morning, but it must be done.

Mark & Brianna's wedding is quickly approaching, and friends & family have already started to trickling into town. We went tubing with Brianna's parents down from Michigan, and Mark's sister over from Australia at the week-end. Karl is here from Mississippi, soon to be joined by Terri on Friday. Fred & Kristie fly in from England tonight. So do Jacque & Ian. Everyone else will be arriving over the next few days. Yay!

Tonight while all the boys are hitting 6th street for the bachelor party (or 'stag do' if speaking the Queen's English), the girls are indulging in half-price appetizers and martinis at 219 West. The 'hen night' was last week-end so this is just a chance for us all to re-group and get into party mode. The next few days promise to be action-packed with boat parties, rehearsal dinners, poker games, Barton Springs time, and much too much alcohol. Can't wait for it all, but as for now, I must go make myself downtown-presentable.

I'll try to update the blog regularly but as we'll have 3 house guests, I'm making no promises.

YouTube Superstars!

Brian tried bribing me with half his poker winnings to make that footage disappear. Silly, silly man...

Cruel and Yet Also Hilarious...

So along with our usual Wednesday poker night, we also host a white elephant gift exchange near the holidays. Gifts have to be in the $10 range. Everyone draws a number. The person who draws #1 gets to pick a present first and unwrap it in front of everyone. The second person can either steal the opened gift or choose a wrapped one to open. The third can then steal either of the two opened pressies or select a wrapped one. It goes on and on like that until everyone gets a present. Any single gift can only be stolen a total of 3 times. If a person has their gift stolen, they can't directly steal it back in that same round. Good stuff.

The presents range from really good ones - bottles of wine, gift cards to the Alamo Drafthouse, etc - to really crappy ones like, for instance, a dirty sweatshirt grabbed from someone's floor 2 minutes before the game (Lance!). And everything in between.

So Chris S brought as his gift a collection of lottery tickets. Four were real. One was not. The fake was a $10,000 winner. Greg and I were apprised of the situation beforehand so we'd have the camera ready. Of all the people at this game, Brian, the consummate gambler and lottery ticket scratcher, got those tickets (fantastic!) but soon had them stolen. So being the wheeler and dealer that he is, he struck a bargain with Aubrey. He would steal her cashews (yes, that's right - a giant tub of cashews) so she could then steal the tickets back and they'd split the winnings. Aubrey gets to unload the cashews. Brian gets to scratch off his tickets. Everyone's happy. (But none happier than me, Greg and Chris since we knew what was coming.)

I had the camera poised and recording when Brian saw he had a winner.

Oh my God. It was beautiful! I'll just have to post the video so you can see for yourself. Priceless.

Losers

My eternal poker losing streak continued to haunt me last night at Chris's. On the bright side, though, I did win the new 2008 Naked calendar for being the first person to go out that evening. And Greg pulled out second place so after carrying my dead weight, we still came out one kick-ass calendar and $10 in the black. WooHoo!

At the game was also our friend Jim, who just got back into town after 4 years in Hawaii. We met up with him for the first time since his return at ACL, and if I hadn't been prepared, I never would have recognized him. Since he's been away, he's completely transformed himself. When he left, he was an overweight somewhat unhappy guy. As my husband would describe it, he had a dark cloud hovering over him. Well, apparently that Hawaiian living has done the boy good. He's lost over one hundred pounds and is now a kick ass triathlete! His whole attitude has changed along with his body. We couldn't believe it. And apparently we weren't the only ones. Twice that night we reintroduced him to old acquaintances who insisted they had never met him before. It was priceless seeing recognition slowly dawn on them and then the shock. The most common reaction was a wide-eyed, gaping-mouthed Holy shit! I'm sure Jim's tired of that by now, but I love it. Good for you, amigo!

Poker Night 4

Oh my God. This is beautiful.


Two things you need to know to make this even better:

1. Brian is a 6' 7" Texan good 'ol boy in the making, and
2.

***Update numero dos***

FIRST

With triumphant grin


SECOND

Well done, Doug.
You've tripled your money. Kim should be well pleased.


THIRD

A very dejected shumma. :(

Does this look odd to anyone else?

My British husband playing Texas Hold 'Em with a Lone Star beer.
Look what Texas has done to him...

Right now my house is over-run with boys, 11 of them. The high testosterone quotient of this poker game makes it a bit more intense than the one I usally play. While they duke it out, I'm hiding upstairs at the computer and (mostly) minding my own business. But every now and then I get sucked into their conversations. There's smack talk, yo' mama talk, some slightly pissy whining talk, some vulgarity (I think some of them have forgotten I'm sitting up here). I feel like I'm getting some illicit, unauthorized insider's view into a world I'm not supposed to see.

Our realtor Mikey has obviously just lost, judging from the stream of cursing drifting upward. Greg is still in it after being almost the first person out and doing well by the sounds of things. I don't want to jinx him, but my curiosity is starting to get the better of me.

Yes, that is Greg you see flexing his muscles in the back. :)

***Update***

Doug Howe, current Chip Leader and Happy Camper
He is under strict instructions by his wife to bring home the bacon.

Poker Night 3

No bounty picture this time around. The last winner was Lance's recently ex'ed girlfriend's friend. Needless to say, we will not be seeing her again...

I opted out tonight anyway. Instead I'm shopping for Greg's birthday present - new wheeley luggage for our up-coming vacations. I know its cheating because they're a present for me too. That's why I've also ordered him an extra-special bonus pressy on the sly.

*update*
Set of 3 black Samsonite Silhouette Spinners for half price at TJMaxx!

There are few pleasures in life as satisfying as scoring great deals on necessary stuff for which you were ready to shell out major bucks. Yay! :)

Poker Night 2

Brian won the last game so now he must suffer. Its only fair.

Poker Night

We've started a recent tradition in our bi-weekly poker games. There is a bounty placed on the head of the most recent winner. Whoever knocks this person out of the game automatically gets 10 bucks, and the rest of us get to bask in the knowledge that justice still prevails in the world. (Monopoly money, of course, because gambling with real money is illegal, kids.) Lately it hasn't been working though. Lance, who when he first started playing was almost comically bad, has turned into a monster. An all-devouring, bully of a monster. Jeff is not much better to be quite honest. These two evil-doers must be taken down!