Tonight saw one of the best value games being held in Blazin’ Aces in a long time which may have cost everyone €80 to play, but $50 is being reimbursed onto our Ladbrokes account. I haven’t checked the exchange rates in a while, but I’m pretty sure the dollar hasn’t jumped in value to make paying €80 for the $50 transfer worthwhile in itself, so the €3,000 prizepool in the tournament was also well worth playing for!

When the tournament started, I asked for a cup of coffee and took my seat. For about three orbits of the table, it’s like I have butter on my hands because I just can’t catch a card! I was just about to complain out loud when I find Queens in the small blind. The crying baby gets the bottle I think to myself as I see 4 players limp into my small blind. I make the obligatory raise and get just the one caller – the button. We see a flop of 5-6-9, with two clubs on board and I bet out 1500 which is around 2/3 the pot. I get minraised (and a bit) to 3500. I kind of freeze for a moment. Surely he’s raising his button with tens and better preflop so his range for raising the flop like this must be made up purely of sets and flush draws with the overs, but never something like AK or AQ which he probably would have raised with preflop. I really want to fold, but I call which is horrible, I know. The turn completes the flush draw AND the straight draw and I check-fold when he bets 3000… into a pot of almost 10k.

A few orbits later and I get my coffee. I take a sip and see two queens again. Alex raises under the gun to 550 with blinds at 100/200. He’s fond of the minraise and a bit in all kinds of positions at the table so I wouldn’t read too much into that. I’m a sat a few seats behind him, in early position, and make it 1800. It’s folded around to the small blind who calls. He’s just arrived at the table and I have never seen him in my life but I tend to assign new players to the table a pretty generic range of hands until I see evidence to prove otherwise. I think it’s quite prudent to do this at the table as it means you don’t get into any nasty spots with players whose tendencies you have no idea of! Anyway, I rarely think that a new player to the table is going to flat call a 3bet and then call a shove, so when Alex ships from under the gun when action gets back to me, it’s usually going to be followed by a fistpump. In this case it wasn’t. He had Aces.

I didn’t even have time to finish my coffee!

I eagerly await the $50 to arrive into my Ladbrokes account, but in the meantime I’ll have to try find something to keep me occupied and I think I’ve found something in the form of a gym membership. Running around like a Duracell bunny on Wednesday reminded me that I like to exercise so I looked into joining the local Kingfisher gym and have been offered a day pass to check out the place before committing. They offer some great Student deals so I look forward to trying out the place tomorrow! Even if the place isn’t to my liking, I at least get to kill a few hours before work!

I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been bitten by the Guitar Hero bug that’s caught hold of so many other people before me! While it’s mostly a party game to throw on when you have people around for beers and what not, some practice in your spare time doesn’t go astray! Let’s face it, none of us want to be that person who can’t even complete a song on Easy!

I was rocking out to Muse’s Knights of Cidonia, desperately trying to get my hand through what could well be considered a decent proposal for the “Finger Olympics”. All was going well, and I was really getting into it (banish all imagery of me alone and jumping up and down in my room from your minds please). All WAS going well until I experienced a sound that almost convinced me that I had just stood on the tails of a thousand cats!

I looked around… no cats. I looked back at the TV and the solo that I was well on my way to nailing had paused on my screen. And still there was the screeching! I assumed it was just one of your average system crashes so I put down the guitar for a moment and restarted the Xbox. Nothing. Nothing but a flashing beam of red light that is. I nearly didn’t want to have a closer look, afraid of what I was going to see. I suspect that I felt the same way a driver feels during those few seconds when they realise they’ve just hit a dog only my own experience was going to be far less gory to face – but just as painful!

Sure enough, 3 flashing red lights greeted me when I turned around the Xbox to have a look. I wasn’t quite sure what the 3 red lights meant exactly beyond the fairly obvious fact that it was fucked! Luckily for me, 360s have a three year warranty to cover this very problem. Unluckily for me, or perhaps appropriate for me, I’m cheap and bought the 360 second hand and now I didn’t know where I stood with it. An afternoon of calling Microsoft and Gamestop didn’t really appeal to me but I knew that I had to, otherwise I’d just leave it on the long finger – a solution that I’ve grown far too fond of despite realising that it’s not really a solution at all!

That was two months a go.

In the two months that my 360 has been “resting” beside my TV gathering dust, I’ve learnt that GameStop won’t accept any responsibility because it’s past their own warranty. Not having a receipt doesn’t really help my case either and Microsoft refuse to even acknowledge that there’s a problem as the 360 is registered in someone elses name and for all they know, is stolen! They won’t do anything unless I can send them a picture of me, the xbox and the receipt – together, like one happy and broken family! Now I couldn’t even tell you where my Birth Cert is, let alone a receipt for something I bought nearly 2 years a go. I could check my bank statements to see when I bought it and then go into GameStop and ask for a copy of the receipt for be printed out but I need to enter in a code from my own secure code card to access my statements. A secure code card? Sounds important. Also sounds like something I’d lose as soon I get it!

So to bring you up to speed (and to remind myself of the hoops I have to jump through), I have to ring AIB to ask for a new Code Card. Fast forward a week and I’ll hopefully be able to check my statements online and discover when exactly I bought it. I can then get a receipt from GameStop and then send off all the documentation to Microsoft who’ll probably take a week to respond with something like “too blurry, send again”. When I finally get the all clear from Microsoft, I can ask them to send me out a box. When that arrives, I put my expensive brick into it and send it off to Germany where some technician is going to blow some air into it and declare it as being as good as new. Some weeks later, the courier will arrive at my door with the resurrected xbox and all order will be restored!

In reading back over that, it all sounds like an awful lot of effort to go through. I’ll even speculate that the prolonged exposure to red tape and bureaucracy could make me violently ill! It’s only a 360 for Christ’s sake. On the one hand, I shouldn’t be worrying about it too much, but on the other, I shouldn’t have to jump through more hoops than there are at Crufts just to get a replacement!

Fuck it, I’ll just get a new one.

Problem solved.

Now have a song.

As I’m sure anyone who’s ever accidentally stumbled online at 4am will know, I’m quite the nocturnal creature. I’m usually in bed by midnight, because to be honest I have nothing else better to be doing. I always find something to distract me though and the fact that I have my laptop beside me and more recently a Guitar Hero controller close to hand as well, only serves to ensure that I’m never asleep by anything that even resembles a civilised hour!

Over the weekend I found myself overcome with a brief bout of insomnia which saw me wander the streets of Waterford until 7am Sunday morning with nothing but the odd tumbleweed to keep me company. This was all after bringing a friend home who’d probably seen better days after leaving a club! You’d have thought that carrying dead weight for a mile would be enough to tire me out, but all it did was make me miss my beloved Apache Pizza and become so hungry that my stomach became a beatbox. Centra eventually opened at 7:15 and I fell into the trap of actually believing that they’d have the breakfast roll I was so desperately craving at the ready! Instead I settled on what was probably a three day old sandwich and set off on the trek home. If only I could sleep…

The walk home sure did make me tired. By time I got home, I felt as if my feet had not only worn through my socks but had also had a fair go at breaking down my shoes! I confess that at this stage, all I wanted to do was drop onto any surface that would support my weight and just hibernate until sometime around Christmas, it didn’t even have to be comfy – as long as I couldn’t roll off it or have it bite me, I was considering it! However, two things kept me from drifting off into slumber land. 1) I was due to work in a few hours and 2) I spent the last tenner I had in my wallet on that blasted gone off sandwich! So my choices were somewhat limited. I could either stop, drop and fall unconscious for about 14 hours and worry about having to live off the crumbs in between the cushions of my couch for the rest of the week when it came to it, or I could “play through the pain” and fire up the Xbox for a few hours before heading to work with a flask of coffee so strong that it would have the consistency and taste of tar! I chose the latter, albeit without the flask.

Now the first few hours weren’t actually that bad. In fact, I even text one of my friends who I knew was lumbered with an early shift, boasting that I had it easy, doing nothing but sitting down on MSN while every now and again signing someone up to Ladbrokes. I couldn’t help but laugh when they text back saying that they were running around with trays of drinks and food with the sweat pouring out of them! God almighty must have been watching though, because seconds later my boss came over and sent me in to deal on a table! Oh Christ! At this stage I could barely even remember my name, let alone how to deal cards! In fact, on the very first hand I sat in, I collected the antes from the table before dealing out a flop. “We’re all playing the board so?” I heard one player say, somewhat inquisitively as it dawned on me that I hadn’t even dealt cards to the players! Now usually these situations go from bad to worse but this was rock bottom and I figured that things could only get better. They just had to!

How I struggled through the next few hours is beyond me! I was just cruising through the night on autopilot, in desperate yet rapidly waining hope that someone would spot that I looked to be aging at a rate of 10 years for every hour I sat in that dealer chair robotically calling out the words “Pass”, “Fold” and “Raise” over and over again. What I had at one stage would have been at most a 5 hour shift was fast approaching 14 hours! It was at this stage that I really started to regret boasting about my “easy shift” earlier on. It was only then that I decided that I should ask to go home. 10 minutes later and I was home and taking off my clothes with my trusty bed just inches away, inviting me in. I’m sure you’re aware of the old cliche of falling asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow, well here’s a new one for you; My head didn’t even have to hit to pillow to fall asleep! I know it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but the very fact that I still had one sock on the next morning means I’m not making it up!

I managed to squeeze every bit of sleep out of this occasion as I possibly could and I finally woke up 15 hours later, which was probably the total combined amount of sleep I had got the week before! My only complaint (oh here he goes again) was that I had these really vivid dreams that were about Saturday night which in itself isn’t too bad, as long as I can remember that they were dreams, but roll on a few days and I completely forget which had led to a few “Did I?” moments complete with temporary paralysis that lasts a few seconds when I look back at the night! The trick is to not think about that night though and I’m near certain that the copious amounts of tequila that I intend to throw back (but hopefully not up) this Saturday will see to it that last weekend (and the vivid, freaky memories) becomes a thing of the past!

After waking up and looking at the time, I quickly realised that college that day was a non-runner, especially given that it was 6pm. I was still quite tired so I just took it easy for what was left of the day and I managed to fall asleep for midnight Surely a record for me! And then, something strange happened to me when I woke this morning after getting another good nights sleep. I felt oddly energetic, enthusiastic and dare I say it, happy! Perhaps 4 hours a night isn’t enough after all! Making college in time for my first lecture will probably go down as one of my milestones of the year. It wasn’t the rush in at the last minute type of punctual either as I even had time to get breakfast – another first!

This evening I played in my regular 5-a-side game and for the first time since the games inception, I wasn’t begging to go on goal after 5 minutes of play. It was as if I had a giant Duracell stuck to my back and I even jogged home because I fancied the work out. Can I really put all this down to getting sleep? Well, it’s either that or I’m drinking some funny water!

I’m going to conclude this post with something new to this blog – a song. A song that I fully believe will be both a chart topper AND an Indie floor filler this Summer. They’re a band called Phoenix, who seem to have a knack for releasing fantastically playable Summer soundtracks. This song is from their forthcoming album “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” and it’s called 1901. Enjoy!