Wow, April has really blown by. I just checked my blog and realized that I have not made a single post this month – doh! This has been due more to a necessity of focusing time in other areas. Some of the time focus has been Poker good, some of the time focus has been Poker *meh*, but life good. So, here is what I have been up to:

Work Time
So work has picked up a bit. This is actually a good thing, given the current economic situation. I have been called in to help on a couple of important, sizeable projects, which means that my company has enough work to avoid layoffs like so many other businesses have had to endure. In addition, my wife, who works at a restaurant, just finished the lent season which is the most lucrative season, so business has been great for her as well. All in all, I am thankful for what we have (at least she keeps reminding me that we need to be), so I am running with that.

Homework Time
So apparently April is “give homework that is unbelievably challenging" month. I can honestly say that I am amazed at the type of work children are doing at such a young age. We have an 8 year old who is doing decimals and fractions as well as some very basic algebraic functions. She is obviously through all of the basic math functions in order to be here. While I may be old, I can honestly say that I do not recall tackling this until 5th or 6th grade before we crunched out these types of equations. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great that they are further ahead than we were 30’ish years ago (ugh), I am just glad that both my wife and I are fairly solid at math as it would be embarassing to be mathematically surpassed by a 3rd grader.

In addition to the 8 year old, we have an 11 year old and 17 year old that are both running into topics that are needing a little additional explanation, so I have been working with them as well. I have probably enjoyed helping our son the most (the 17 year old). He is into Calculus now (they categorize it differently than when I was in school, but it is probably a Calc 2? from my heyday), which I was always pretty proficient in, but have not used for about 15 years. So it is cool to see the old problems and how much I have actually retained there.

(No) Snow Time
No more snowboarding for us this year. My wife’s knee has not healed as quickly as we had hoped, so *meh*. She was not planning on skiing again this year, but she cannot really walk around on the snow with a bad knee, so “blah”. We did work on storing all of the snow gear for next year. I felt like we should have played "Taps" or some other sad song when we were through.

Poker Time
From a poker standpoint, the last two months been interesting to say the least. I have been on a slow dive with respect to All-In Expectation, which peaked at -30BI at about the first week in April. I have been fluttering right around there for the last few weeks.

The silver lining to this cloud is that this is by far the worst I have ever run, so I have had ample opportunity to put my tilt control and recovery measures to the test. I am very pleased with the results, as this type of bad run would definitely have busted me before. But despite the variance, I actually was able to grind up enough to make a move to the next level (of course, I ran behind in expectation and wound up having to drop back, but that is a story for another post )

I am going to try and keep playing through the rest of the month (time permitting) to see if I can hit 15k hands again. I am not sure how that will work with my other obligations, but we will see.

Video Time
I have been continuing work on the Tilt vids, which are coming along. Episode 3 is under review by the crackerjack unit of Quality Control people I have hired on the side (actually it’s the group that was dumb enough to answer when I im'd “you there?”). So Ep3 will be complete by the end of the weekend, and Ep 4 will be right behind. I have been putting the videos ahead of most other poker related items (including playing) to keep the series pushing forward.

So that's about it. I was hoping to get a few more planning and prep posts done as there have been some requests coming through PM's/Skype/MSN for these. The trick has just been fitting them in - we will see what the next week holds for us there.