Just spent the last few days in Vegas. I’m actually currently still in my hotel room at the Venetian, as I have been up all night and have some time to kill before we head to the airport for an 8:30 AM flight.

Where to begin? Just a few hours ago, we were locked out of our room by the hotel staff for outstanding balance on the room charges. I’m not exactly sure what took place when Laura checked in, but something went afoul with the credit card transaction, coupled with a failed attempt to call our room to alert us of this issue, and we were subsequently locked out of the room.

After waiting in line (always fun at 3am), the front desk lady tried to tell us that our room keys had been somehow “demagnetized,” and that they would never “lock anyone out” for having a room unpaid for. I paid in cash, but insisted on discussing the technological probability of two room keys becoming mysteriously “demagnetized” while my other magnetic stripe cards in my wallet were still functioning.

The manager explained the front desk employee was simply “misinformed.” Not much else we can say there, except that she was clearly lying, but the manager wasn’t budging on the story.

This was the only bad part of our three-day excursion, but as it happened towards the end, it put a real sour taste on our experience at the hotel.

Most of our time was spent in the poker room, where we did reasonably well. It’s a mostly wonderful room, and there were enough bad players to make it profitable.

Favorite player during the trip was a guy we’ll call Cheech — he looked enough like Mr. Marin to warrant the nickname. Cheech would continually take terrible hands and call almost any bet you make all the way to the river. However, Cheech managed to walk away from my table after several hours with at least $1300 in his hands, thanks to some ridiculous play from regularly solid players who had been fleecing him most of the evening.

This one play goes as follows:

Cheech raises, rest of table folds up to the two guys to my right. They hadn’t looked at their hands yet, and decide to both play the hand blind. I actually missed the beginning of this hand while I was in the bathroom, but got back in time to watch the post-flop debacle.

So I get back and there’s about $200 in the pot on the flop, and Cheech is betting big, ending up all in for about $250 of his own money. Both other guys continue to play blindly to the river, and Cheech shows ten-six, which is good for a pair of sixes. Other guys are ready to flip over their cards, and do so one by one, but no cards pair and Cheech takes down a monster $750ish pot. Insanity. But not bad, since he didn’t leave the table immediately.

Shortly after that mess, Cheech won another huge hand from one of the aforementioned guys, and ended up walking away with at least $1300.

I didn’t do badly, but it was a little frustrating to stay around into the wee hours of the next day (11am) and not do serious damage to that guy’s bankroll. But, it was fun and something I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

The previous night, we met up with Eric and his wife Stacey for dinner and Zumanity. I’m not a huge fan of Cirque de Soleil-type stuff, but the show wasn’t too terrible, although it was obviously overpriced. We definitely had a good time, though.

I also had absolutely no luck at the blackjack tables. I tried counting, but at the first table I played, an extremely drunk, loud southerner was making it too difficult to concentrate. At the second table, an extremely drunk, loud random jackass was doing the same. I moved to a third table shortly after realizing this guy was making my head hurt, and he promptly followed me to that table.

I went through about $300 playing $25 hands (lowest available limit at the Venetian at that time) in about 90 minutes, and only placed a handful of increased wagers resulting from the running count.

Nothing much else to say about this trip. It was a pretty solid way to blow off three days of downtime during the holiday break I get from my job. I just don’t think we’ll be returning to the Venetian after the bullshit they gave us this morning.

And in movie-watching news, we went to see The Spirit on Christmas day, and it was quite enjoyable. It’s hard to not get a kick out of Samuel Jackson in Nazi attire.

WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception is another documentary I’ve watched recently. I found myself nauseous from some of the events that took place during the early part of the Iraq war circa 2003, involving the media’s coverage of the war.

Basically, it’s all propaganda. I have made assumptions previously about the use of propaganda by the US government in the American media, but it’s all pretty clearly documented in this film.

The best part is that I probably sound like a “conspiracy theorist” or whatever, but I don’t really have any reason to not believe that the mainstream media is clearly run by the government, and it’s pretty sick.

Hooray, America. Barf.

I’ve got a pretty solid amount of credit card debt, about $20k. Most of it comes from frivolous spending during my marriage for crap that I would never buy for myself, but that’s not the point of this.

Most of it is on a Citi card, which I’ve had for several years. It had mostly gone unused up until a couple years ago, when I transferred most of my debt over to this card thanks to a nice, low APR transfer offer.

That offer finally expired a few months ago, and I was getting raped by their 17% APR on my balance of about 15k. That’s $200 a month just in interest charges.

I called a few weeks ago to get that lowered, and the “best they could do” is 10% or so. I took it. It’s still way too high, but it’s saving me about $70 a month.

I mention this primarily thanks to a wonderful documentary I watched last night, Maxed Out. I wish I had seen this when I was 18. It’s pretty hilarious how banks target kids in college and hand them credit. I was suckered into that shit, since I grew up with no money, my parents didn’t give me very much after high school, and I had no discipline with spending money.

The key now is to make sure this doesn’t happen to Adam. I’m not sure what it takes to instill a solid sense of money management into kids.

I enjoyed being in Omaha around Christmas last year — it was my first trip back in several years during the holiday season — but the drive was equally not as good.

I looked into getting a flight for me and Adam, and they were just a bit much. Add in the fact that I\’d have to get a hotel room somewhere, the cost just became a little too steep considering I could spend the same amount and fly somewhere warm for a longer time period. And since I have the week between Dec 25 and Jan 1 off from work, I decided I\’d head back to Nevada for a few days with Laura.

I would like to plan a weekend trip to Omaha sometime in the coming months, however.

If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that hot chocolate is a fucking delicious beverage.

I drank it a lot as a kid. I used to order it when we’d go out to eat, every place from Wendy’s to Bishop’s to Perkins. Then for whatever reason, I stopped drinking it.

Lately, it’s been almost a daily habit. It’s amazingly great. I don’t know why I felt compelled to journal about it, but, I did. Blogtasticfuckyeah!