February 7, 2007

I am starting to get back to normal. We spent a week in Las Vegas. Unlike most people, this didn’t mean staying up to all hours of the night. We actually screwed up our internal clocks by getting up early every morning. We were meeting for breakfast at 5:00 AM which is like 4:00 AM Alaska time. It wasn’t that hard to adjust since we took a red eye out. The first night we were ready to go to sleep really early anyway. It made sense to get up that early since we were hanging out with easterners who would have had a tough time returning had they adjusted to Las Vegas time. We actually prefer spending our time in Vegas shifted to the early hours. The casinos are relatively quiet, empty, and smoke free in the morning. The rowdiness is just getting started when we go to bed.

We spent the first half of the trip with Kim and John, Kris’ sister and her husband. We haven’t seen them since we left Ohio, but we keep up to date through e-mail. It hardly seemed like over a year and a half since we last spoke in person. We just picked up as if we had just seen them last week. We spent the second half with my parents, an equally seamless transition back into direct contact. We spent the week gambling, visiting, and taking in the experiences of Las Vegas.

I had my biggest payout percentage ever, 3000:1. Too bad I had only bet three cents. I was playing one of these silly penny games that give you 30 ways to win on each spin as long as you bet each line. Betting 30 cents on each spin is a nice small amount, but eventually you get down to having an amount that is less than 30 cents. The first time this happened, I played 3 lines, 1 cent per line to use up my remaining 3 cents. It was the first time I hit the ‘bonus’ round. I hit for 128 pennies. A few spins later I was back below the 30 cent level. This time my final bet was to put 3 cents on one line, hoping to use up the useless extras and move on to a different machine. I hit the bonus round a second time. I was given a choice of more spins with a small bonus mutliplier or fewer spins with a higher multiplier. I chose the highest multiplier which gave me 3 spins at a 15X multiplier. On the first spin, the first three symbols were wild followed by two nines. I had no idea what that meant, but lining anything up five across has to be good, even without a 15X multiplier. I sat for a few minutes watching the score climbing up. I began to look around the screen and found an indicator that said my payout was 9000. I sat stupidly and watched the score count all the way up to 9000. I don’t think I hit anything much on the last two bonus spins. I made a couple more spins to run the score down to an even 9000 and cashed out with $90. I wish I had bet a quarter or a dollar.

Gambling is stupid. I know the odds are against me. I know the more I play, the more I will lose. The new machines are an obvious manifestation of this reality. You bet more, win more, and just slowly watch your money slip away. Sure, if you manage to hit a big payoff, you could walk away a winner in the short term. Most of the time, though, I was playing machines that would pay only a few hundred dollars if I hit the biggest payout, hardly enough to end up taking money home. So why do I do it? I really don’t know. I do know that I was never bored gambling, even after seven days. And when I hit for a couple hundred on the last day, I felt like a winner, even though it was just regaining some of my losses for the week. Damn, I am stupid.

I used to gamble hoping for a life changing amount of money. Even though I made much more back then, a much smaller amount of money would affect my life positively. If I brought home a couple hundred of my gambling allotment, I considered it money that wasn’t part of the budget. Since I was much more of a consumerist, it wouldn’t take me long to find some purchase that matched up with the amount I brought home. Now, I really can’t find that many things that I want to spend money on. Free money is a daily reality with no real effect. Where a few hundred dollars of gambling winnings used to be a fun spending spree, it would now take many thousands for me to change my current course in life. Maybe if I could spin the reels and have it come up with lifetime health coverage, it would really change things.

In spite of all this reflective negativity on gambling, I really enjoy it. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

We missed very little skiing with our vacation. We skied the Saturday before we left. We met another co-worker of mine and skied with her all day. Her style and preferred terrain was a pretty close match to how we ski. She is a little slower than us, but I suspect with just a little practice she will catch up to us quickly. We also hooked up with yet another co-worker of mine who is a ski patroller. She was conducting some ski patroller training, but we crashed the party and followed along with a dozen ski patrollers down some new lines on North Face for us. It was another great day with new snow and great conditions. Things were falling apart fast, though. The temperature was getting warm. While we were away, minimal snow fell and record temperatures were hit. We were supposed to ski on Sunday with my boss and her daughter, another lesson for me to teach, but she caught some flu bug that is going around. Kris and I decided to take Sunday off and recover from our trip since the skiing was not going to be too good. This might be the first Super Bowl Sunday that we haven’t gone skiing in a long time. It is pretty lucky that the week we picked for Las Vegas happened to be one of the worst skiing weeks of the season.

I had a birthday while we were in Vegas. It started off nearly perfect. I was somewhat disappointed when Kris remembered it was my birthday after we had been up a few hours. My disappointment wasn’t that no one had remembered earlier, my disappointment was related to the fact that I hadn’t remembered myself. I was blissfully unaware of what day it was and my bliss was interrupted by the reminder that it was my birthday. I don’t hate birthdays, I just don’t have much use for them. I was enjoying the fact that it was just a day like any other day in our continuous stream of the vacation lifestyle. I don’t think I ever forgot my own birthday before.

We are still amazed at the feeling of coming home to Anchorage. We don’t have that sense of dread that we used to get at the end of a vacation. It was good to go on vacation. It was good to be on vacation. But it is also good to come home. This is partially because we have unburdened ourselves of the obligations that drove our daily lives in the past. We bore the financial burdens that made going to work a necessity and the burdens of responsibility that we had placed in our personal lives, the house, the property, the animals, the cars, and the other possessions. Life feels relatively carefree now, like a vacation. It is also good to come home because Alaska is still an amazing place to us. The air is not brown, the scenery is incredible, the population is really small. I think I saw more people on the roads in Las Vegas than we have in the entire state.