Kicking off 2011

1 comment ● 2011-01-18

Welcome to 2011 everyone! I hope you all had a good break and are ready to crush whatever you do this year Yes this is a cross-post from my old blog, going forward I will be posting here at PokerNetwork

My holiday was fantastic, exactly what I needed really. I spent a little over two weeks in Western Australia, and the weather was mostly in the mid to high 30s (occasionally hotter), mostly dry with cloud-free skies. We started off with a few days at one of Mell's friend's house near the city, where we celebrated a verrrrrrry early morning Christmas with their little daughter, who had left cookies and milk out for Santa and must've had 30 presents to tear open at the crack of dawn. With everyone else attending to the Christmas breakfast, I spent most of my morning assembling a Zhu Zhu Pets Magical Princess Castle for her, and felt pretty damn accomplished when it finally all snapped together

After that we drove a couple hours north to a country town called Gingin, where my dad has recently moved after selling up his property and businesses in Port Hedland, a mining town up north. He literally lives in the middle of nowhere on 20 acres of property, and so all his side of the family were up there having a traditional Yugoslav Christmas lunch, which included a big pig on the spit, honey roasted ham, slow roasted vegies, some of my nana's sweetened dough balls (no idea what the Slav word for them is), and plenty of alcohol in the heat.

I'm pretty sure it was a bit of an eye opener for Mell sitting in the middle of nowhere in 40C heat, drinking on a balcony while eating roast pig, but if that wasn't enough we took these bunky old cars out for a spin, that the previous property owner had left in the garage. The one I drove, beer in hand, cousins hanging onto the rollcage, was a busted up old Diahatsu 4WD with old signs riveted into the rollcage for a makeshift roof, no reverse, no footbrake, a rusted driver's seat floor and the battery sitting clamped together on the passenger seat floor. We were having so much fun I forgot to take a photo of this complete piece of shit lol, but I managed to get it thru the bush up to the banks of Moore River, which was barely flowing given the heat and how far we were inland. Mell snapped this one of me and my cousins, I don't think she was gonna get in the water hehe.

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After a rough night's sleep on a single bed in the heat, we then made our way back into the city where we had a birthday barbecue for Mell's 25th, then three hours south to Dunsborough/Margaret River where we spent the next ten days with two mates in a great apartment right on the Dunsborough strip. After all the festivities of the last week I was totally ready to wind down, so I did exactly that. My daily routine mostly consisted of going for a morning run, wait the 25 minutes for two ordinary and expensive coffees (WA tourist towns are really backwards compared to the East), head back to the apartment and cook up a beastly omelette, spend the midday hours down at the beach swimming and reading, start drinking mid-afternoon, decide amongst ourselves what movies we would watch that night (I still have an old membership at the local video store from years ago), cook up the barbecue then read and drink wine till I fell asleep. This, friends, is my idea of bliss

In terms of books, I got through Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (a more intelligent thriller than I was expecting, probably won't bother with the rest of the series unless someone convinces me otherwise), Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream (a factual rundown of what happens in your body over a 24 hour period - very interesting!), The Candy Machine which was a really detailed book on the rise of global cocaine trade and the flawed approach to drug enforcement in the US, and I've just started Rose Treman's The Road Home - so far so good.

Anyway that's an exhaustive trip report, here's a few pics from wineries and our favourite swimming (Eagle Bay) and drinking (Bootleg Brewery) haunts.

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I then spent the last three days in Perth hanging out with mates and sneaking a few more hours at the beach before it was back on a plane to Melbourne (binked business class for 11 bucks, just to chew up the last of my frequent flyer points from the old Macquarie days, zzz).

Since I've gotten back I've felt super jetlagged and found it hard to focus so I've only played some small MTT sessions with a few close calls but nothing much to report. Instead I punched out a few thousand hands of 50nl sixmax across Party/FTP as a bit of a warmup and have played well and run awesome, up 12 buyins I think. If I get a few more hands in I'll post a graph at month's end.