Life as a single father (for a week)
So my hardest challenge as a parent has started. Sarah is off to Burning Man, leaving me with Moishe and the life of a single parent for a week. She lobbied hard to get me to go to, but I really couldn’t leave for a lot of reasons, including:
- I just got back from a week off work when I was in Vegas for the World Series Of Poker, and I’m taking another week off in September. That’s already pretty egregious to begin with, so another week for Burning Man is a lot of time off work.
- I’ve got a lot of complicated projects going at work, and I can’t really afford to leave them unattended for too long.
- I’m not that enamored with Burning Man, it would only be me going out to see our friends, and I just saw many of them on our last trip to San Francisco.
- I’m weirded out by the concept of leaving Moishe with someone else (besides Sarah) for a week while we both are off having fun. Given the choice of Burning Man or leaving him with a relative, I prefer to keep him myself. I feel like I’m a better parent when he and I get to go do things by ourselves, like go to the steakhouse for boy’s night out, or go to the zoo, or to Best Buy together.
So that’s what I’m doing for a week. Ironically 7 card stud (online) is the perfect game to play with a toddler around. Unlike Texas Hold’em, there is no benefit of position before the hand starts. You can sit out a hand and come back in next time and it’s fine. The same is not true for Hold’em. You play for an entire round, often waiting for the late position hands to make your move. Once you start playing an orbit, you’re in for 10 minutes of play.
Stud’s not like that. You play a hand, you sit out, play a hand, sit out. If you sit out for a couple of hands unexpectedly, it’s cool. When you’ve got a baby that needs your attention at unpredictable intervals, it’s the perfect game.
My crash 7 card stud self-tutorial is going well. I’m pretty close to racking up 1,000 hands in Poker Tracker Stud, which should give me a start at making some generalizations about my play. I’ve also been seeing many of the same players on Full Tilt, which means that I’ll have histories of their play. I’ll be able to analyze some of their strategies as well as my own.
I’ve got a real technology dilemna. My Playstation 2 is broken. I can replace it, but the Playstation 3 is about to be released. In addition there’s the Xbox 360. I want one, but Sarah’s forbidden me to buy it because she wants to save it as a present for a future date. It’s really just the zombie game I think she wants to give me, so I do have the unit itself as an option. I could play other games until she buys me that. I don’t really want to do without both for several months, though.
Anyone have any thoughts?