You are, at this very moment, reading the blog of the #1 ranked Lunchtime Bowler for FNGS, and the greater St. Louis Park area, really. It's ok if you feel special. You are.

Every quarter my work division goes out for lunch, paid for by the company. A little something to say "Thank you for all the mind-numbingly boring work you do, day in, day out". I'd like to think it's also because we've gone 7.3 months without someone soiling their cubicle chair. Little victories.

The first time we had one of these lunches, we went to Dave and Buster's. I like video games, but all the games at the arcade sucked. Hey, I know! Let's throw in another shitty racing game that rumbles and kicks the player off in under a minute! Awesome. The most recent time before this, we went to Granite City, a pseudo-brewpub that doesn't brew on premise. They bring in a tanker truck full of beer that they brew off site and hook up a large hose to the side of the building. As you can probably guess, we weren't allowed to have any beer. It felt more like punishment than a reward.

This time, however, we went for lunch at a bowling alley not that far from our office. Classy! I've been at my job nine years, and we've probably gone bowling 6 or 7 times for various occasions, so everybody knows that I was the proud recipient of not one, but two college level credits in bowling--Bowling for beginners and Advanced bowling. The only difference between the two courses is that you have to average 160+ to get an A in the latter. In the former you just had to be able to name the differences between a bowling ball and a pin. I got an A in Beginner's because I'm smart like that, but I missed the same mark in the Advanced by 4 pins. I've never been more pissed to receive a B in college.

We knew that we'd only get to play one game, but what we didn't know, and what we were told when we arrived at the alley, was that the person with the highest score would get the rest of the afternoon off.

I could through the game, frame by frame, but you probably stopped reading this three paragraphs ago anyhow. Yet, you wouldn't be reading this if I hadn't bowled a 165, crushing everybody on my team, especially the women and that gimpy kid two cubes over that smells like carrots and CKOne. Who's the man now, dog? Me and that guy from Finding Forrester, that's who.

So, I'm sitting at home with a Surly Cynic that I picked up from the awesome new beer store The Four Firkins(oddly enough, it was right across the street from the bowling alley. Huh) and watching Germany make Ronaldo cry. Again.

It's been a good day.

If you look to the right of my main page(for those of you that only read through rss--click through), you'll notice that I am excited about two upcoming trips, so excited that I decided to add countdown widgets that make my site look that of a retarded 14 year old girl. I'm cool with that. I tried to move Pokeramama to Geocities first, then Angelfire, but I was told I didn't have enough twinklies of fairies farting pixie dust, and also that I wasn't allowed because my site didn't cause seizures. Fuck.

Up first is Summit '08 in Chicago. For those of you not in the the know, it's kind of like Fight Club, not in that "I'm not supposed to talk about it" sort of way, but that there's usually way too much testerone and randomly placed dick and to speak of it would make most of those attending sound really, really gay. This year I hear women will be tagging along, so that should keep most people in check. Most. I'm looking at you DP.

Drizz and I will be driving down from Minneapolis on Thursday night and staying somewhere around Milwaukee that night. Even with gas prices driving is much, much cheaper, and it takes about the same amount of time than it does to fly if you take into account getting to the airport, waiting for the flight, flight time and then taking the train into Chicago. Also, this way we'll be able to partake in some of that hot middle-Wisconsin rest-stop glory-hole action I've read so much about in my most recent issue of Men's Fitness.

Not only do we have to get a rental car and a hotel room near Milwaukee, I need find an efficient way to get a 6'4" guy in a wheelchair in and out of that rental car(which if my past rental car experiences are any indication will most likely be a pink PT Cruiser). Any ideas will be considered, because damn it, I'm stumped.

After returning from Chicago, my body will have barely enough time before October, when I'm flying to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver with my girlfriend. I'm giddy beyond what I'm able to convey. 1800 beers samples? I'll be lucky to make it through 1/50th of that. Even less if I do something stupid, like drink nothing but big beers. You know, Colt 45, Beast Ice, stuff like that. Almost anything you can drink out of a tube sock covered 40, really. Mmmmm...hobo malt beverage.

What else? I've been playing a little poker the last few days, which has been interesting. I deposited a whopping $50 and cashed out after I massacred the table for an insane $75 profit. Hey, it paid for my GABF tickets, ok? I never claimed to be much of a gambler.

If you want, you may call me the Anti-Grubby.

And for all those that read my entire site through a rss feed, I guess you really didn't need to click through. I explained everything that needed explaining. Thanks for the traffic, though!

It's Friday and my work day is over in exactly one hour and 35 minutes. Jealous much? I don't have any plans for the rest of the day except for watching both Euro 2008 games, but other than that, I'm open to suggestions. I do know that pants are completely optional the second after I leave work, however.

I played a little poker two nights ago with the minute amount of leftover money in my Full Tilt account, money that was well earned when someone paid me because my blog is just that awesome. I figured hey, what the hell, might as well run my bankroll up to $10k again, ho hum. That money lasted all of three hands before I got it all in behind and the asshole's hand held up. Can you believe that shit?

Rigged. Oh well, poker is homosexual anyways.

I'm on day number two of summer hours (4 nine hour days, 1/2 day of Friday) here at work and I'm already sick of it. It would be day three, but I took Monday off to clean, rearrange furniture, and make sure the wireless would allow me to Fark in every room in the apartment, including the bathroom. It does, but typing takes a particular skill that I do not posess. Yet.

All that has nothing to do with anything, really, other than I'm supposed to keep this schedule until September, and between now and then I could very well lose my mind.

I've been brewing since last August, and I finally hit that wall where I take a step back, take a break and wonder what the fuck I'm doing. The same thing happened with poker and writing, I guess--I realize that I'll never be the best, that their are people doing the same thing as me, better, with skills that I'll never posess. It's not that I've made shitty beer, or was a mongoloid poker player(HEY!), or a complete hack as a writer(fine, I'll let you have that one), but it still makes me pause a bit and question if I should take up other things, like collecting ceramic clowns, or even, god forbid, fishing. Let me explain.

There can be a lot of chemistry involved in brewing--water chemistry, chemical reactions and such--and I know absolutely nothing about chemistry. That frustrates me. The last class I took on the subject was in 10th grade, and it was for slow people. Not that I was necessarily slow at the time(my how things have changed), but I was definitely a lazy teenager, not to mention awkward. And I had a non ironic mullet. It's not that anyone needs a huge chemistry background to begin home brewing, but I like to know everything I can on something I'm interested in, and I'll never know chemistry. It's impossible.

With poker, it was all that pesky math. In writing, it was, and is, stringing together a coherent thought of words and phrases(also known as "writing", I guess).

I get to a point in all that where I've learned either all that I can, or to better explain, all I care to learn, and then I lose interest. There's always that roadblock that I just can't seem to get around. Perhaps I'm dumn, who knows.

Anyhow, I've got two new kegs sitting in the kegerator as of last night. I pulled one tap, only to be greeted with a glass full of hops. It smelled sexy, but I sure wasn't going to drink it. I poured it in the sink as a small tear slowly made it's way down my cheek, and I remembered that I hadn't fucked the beer up beyond hope, but I had left 2oz of pellet hops in the keg for dry-hopping. Whoops.

Wow, I am so rusty with this whole poker blogging thing. Perhaps I'll have to turn this into my catch all blog, rather than poker exclusive in order to add content. I've probably spent far too long copy/pasting to places like LiveJournal and Myspace (guh) because people on those sites haven't caught up with the whole RSS feed reader craze that's sweeping the webs.

I hear there's this big month-long "tournament" in some place in the desert, where the participants play a game with cards, called poker, with "chips" in place of money. It all sounds entirely fictional and also made up, but boy I do likes me some potato chips, so I'm inclined to believe it if the chips are of the kettle variety. Mmmm, mmmmboy.

It's tough to get excited about the WSOP since I've not been playing any poker for the last few months. It's great that many of the people that I've considered friends over the past few years, (even if they are of the crazy internet kind), are out in Vegas right now, whooping it up, having a blast, and catching feline AIDS from all the stuff floating around a nice chip stack. Now that I think about it, poker is a filthy, disgusting game. Yuck-o. But good for them!

The past few months I haven't really had the time, the money, or the desire to play poker of any kind. I've been spending a lot of time in planning the move in with the girlfriend, and that move just happened last weekend. Word of advice--if the only help you can find to move a behemoth of a couch with double recliners in it is two non weightlifting girls, it's better that you just try to sell the damn thing on Craigslist, because if you don't, you're surely going to wedge the fucking thing in the doorway of your old apartment, and spend well over an hour stumped on just how you're going to get it out without a chainsaw, Sawzall or a backpack full of dynamite. I chose a chainsaw full of dynamite.

Now that it's done, though, I should have plenty of time to sit behind, and curse at, my computer, while invisible idiots half way around the world do stupid things that defy logic. I might even play some poker, too! I may have to wait until my arms work correctly again first. I walked out of Costco with a 6.5lb bag of chicken and a case of Gatorade Rain today, which can't weigh more than 15lbs at most. At one point I thought I was going to lose both of my arms, that's how bad they ached, but I perservered when I realized that the BangBus would mean nothing to me after that. I'm a trooper, if nothing else.

If, in fact, I do start playing poker again, you may see in increase in postings, perhaps as much as one time a week. I don't want to go balls-out and give you too much of my wicked, wicked blog posting, don'tchyaknow. You can be sure that I'll be posting a lot of mis-formatted hand histories, where nothing lines up and they have that cool white text that builds suspense, saucy tidbits about the bad grandmas of poker, gross misuse of vocabulary and punctuation, flagrant disregard for anything and everything grammar related, and superfluous use of the word "fucking".

Who are you to resist it?