Road Trip Day 16 - 2007-08-04

Check out a few pictures I took today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10306971@N03/sets/72157601245697340/

Today I tried to sleep in nice and late, so that I could play poker later. I achieved my goal and woke up around 1:00. I got a call from housekeeping asking if and when I'd like my room made up, and that struck me as somewhat odd. I have a do-not-disturb sign on my door, and they call me? What if I was sleeping? That doesn't make much sense.

When I headed into the lobby and passed a shoe shine booth, I decided to get my shoes shined, because they were looking scuffed and not at all shiny. The shoe-shine guy was nice, he told me about how he spent his time in the '60s traveling the country working for the civil rights movement, how his grandmother was a slave, and how he used to be a blackjack dealer back when there were no women or black folks dealing. He was a really nice guy and the shoes look great. They are almost too shiny! I'll bet that'll wear off after a while.

I got some "breakfast" at this P. F. Changs-ish place nearby, which was pretty tasty. Beef with asparagus! I am attempting to eat some vegetables at least. I wanted a decent meal since I knew I'd just be eating the crap they bring you at the poker tables for dinner. I came back up to the room, updated the blog, read a little more Small Stakes Hold' em, and then headed to the tables.

This was at about 4:00PM, and I ended up playing until about 8:00AM! It was quite a rough ride: I was down about $100 right off the bat, but gradually worked my way up to being about $140 in the black near the end. As the evening turned into morning, the table I was playing at broke up and we had to move to another table. People gradually left this table too until I was playing with just 4 other people. I don't play great shorthanded, but it was still fun.

Then I headed back to my room. The plan was to sleep for 4 hours to get a complete REM cycle in, then to hit the tables again for a few hours and go to bed earlyish. I had reported to maintenance that my toilette was only flushing every-other time. It was one of those fancy pressurized ones that sounds like a jet engine. When I got back to my room, I noticed that it looked different, and indeed, they had replaced the whole thing!