The One-Night Stay-cation

I guess its that time of the year again. The itch to get downtown, reserve a cheap hotel room and partake in Main Street Station's finest microbrews without worrying about driving home. This time I'll have some company as I've reserved TWO hotel rooms! Yep, I have some downtown disciples joining me this time (Chris and other ex-roommates/friends). The Golden Gate Hotel/Casino is the place of choice this time at $28 per room + tax. That wasn't even the cheapest down there. I seriously could have gotten the Las Vegas Club at $19 per room of Expedia!

Anyway, just a couple quick updates for those few of you who still check in. I've had four shifts now as a floor supervisor and they've gone as smoothly as possible I guess. I was NEVER trained on how to supervise. I was just thrown into a pit on my first day and just started figuring everything out on my own for the most part. The most frustrating thing was figuring out all the computer stuff like making player's cards for people who accidentally dropped their card in the toilet and ordering fills for the tables. Rating players is actually pretty easy. The huge majority of the shift is just going from table to table collecting player's cards, entering them in, updating the racks on the table, "walking" players when they leave and VERY RARELY watching tables actively looking for weak dealers/mistakes and cheats. It's incredible how little time I actually have to watch games when I'm trying to administer to EIGHT tables. Yep, you read that correctly....EIGHT tables. The one main exception is when I'm assigned to watch a dice table for the whole shift, which has been 2 out of the 4 shifts so far. Watching the dice table can be pretty easy if the action is low, but on a jammed up dice table with 16 players and relatively weak dealers, its a chore!!! All-in-all, I'd rather be supervising than dealing. The money isn't all that good, but it takes less of a toll on you than dealing $5 blackjack for 8 hours and the money is just as good as dealing with an $80 tip day. Nothing to write home about but it pays the bills.

The other update is that my next vacation is very quickly approaching. I fly back to Columbus next Friday. The good news is that my two days off next week happen to fall on Wednesday and Thursday, so that basically extends my vacation by two days before flying to Ohio. I'm thinking a quick trip up to Zion or maybe some hiking in Mt. Charleston may be in the cards during those two days. Danielle and I bought the National Parks Annual Pass for $80 when we were at Bryce a couple weeks ago. It's actually a really good deal since the $80 fee covers BOTH of us, whether we're together or just one of us makes a solo trip to a park. Danielle has already used it once when she took a road-trip to Death Valley last week and I know I'll use it at least once or twice to go to Zion before the weather turns cold. I wouldn't mind getting back to Bryce this fall, but its almost too late at this point due to its higher elevation and colder temperatures. It can also get us into parts of Lake Mead Recreation Area where a couple hikes we haven't done are.

Just a quick shout out to Hurricane Mikey who has had some serious health issues this past week. I'm sure if you follow his blog or on T2V, you know all about this. Here's hoping for an eventual full recovery from this major surgery! Glad to hear you're still with us buddy!! I say this with only half tongue-in-cheek....if this had happened while you were still in Vegas, you seriously might not be with us right now. It sounds like those folks at Vanderbilt did a top-notch job!!!