I just checked and my last real blog was Oct 8, 2009. The subject centered around the crushing defeat of the Detroit Tigers in Game 163. Maybe that defeat was just too much and it pushed me away from the blogging world. I was very emotionally invested in that game and on top of that I lost $5k. That was one of my bigger sports bets. It's probably more likely that I just tired of blogging. Whatever the reason, I decided to jump back into the ring today. Truth be told, I have some self serving reasons to start blogging again, but I won't reveal what those are at this point in time.

While I'm on the subject of sports, I cant help but mention my two Chicago teams - the Bulls and Bears. They have both been impressive this year and have me dreaming about glorious playoff runs. I should be careful about getting too ahead of myself though.

I might as well mention what the hell I've been doing for the last 14 months or so. My life hasn't changed a ton, but a few aspects have. I bought a condo in Lincoln Park. It's about 10 minutes north of downtown Chicago. It's a great feeling to have a place of my own and I really love the place. I will take some pictures and put them up shortly to give a virtual tour of the place. Right now the place is pretty fucking dirty and I don't plan on cleaning it until next week. We have a very drinking packed weekend and a number of people will be crashing here. It's going to get a lot dirtier before it gets cleaner. More on that in a few paragraphs...

Right now I have gone the longest without playing poker in 6 years. It's been at least a month since I've played a hand. Part of it is that I've been busy but probably the bigger reason is just no desire to play. I've wanted to spend my free time doing other things and I'm pretty happy about that decision. I'm a fantasy sports junkie these days and I spend a lot of time watching games. If you listen to our podcast, you know I've been betting a lot of games as well. That's gone horribly over the past couple of months so I won't get into that too much now. However, I'll be blogging about some of those bets as I go on.

I'm still dating Julia. We're coming up on 3 years. It's really crazy to think it's been that long. We have a great relationship and I love spending time with her. She's also to blame for my lack of poker playing. Women tend to do that to poker players.

So the sky is falling in the poker world, eh? I will say that if this bill passes I'm gonna grind like a mofo for 30 days. I imagine the games will be great. It's amazing to hear all the opinions flying around about the bill. No one really knows whats in it. "We gotta pass the bill to know what's in it," right? My take is that things will be fine either way and none of us can understand the unintended consequences of having the governments greedy fat hands all over our industry. I will concede that our industry is dying a slow death, but there's zero chance it will ever go away. There's too much money involved. Really it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. If only we lived in a truly free country and this wasn't an issue...

I've gotten really into politics/economics over the past year. The craziness of our society forced me down the rabbit hole. I dropped my life long republican tag and became a libertarian. I'll say my views are far from mainstream and I'm basically a doomsday conspiracy theorist now. I'd be lying if I said a lot of people around me don't think I'm totally nuts. Of course, I think it's society that's gone insane. I'll try to keep these views out of the blog for the most part, but I won't make any promises. I'm so appalled at some many things that are going on that I won't be able to totally keep that crap out of here.

We have a great weekend coming up. Tomorrow is our 4th annual Christmas party. Taylor and I started this 4 years ago as a Cardrunners party. Basically we had a huge, mostly empty, loft for our office and figured it would be a great location for a party. It was and a tradition was born. We're smart enough to have the party in a bar now and that leads to far less work on our end. The bar we have it at has a capacity of 200 and we hit that last year. Funny how many friends you have when you give away free drinks. Seriously though, our goal is to get as many as our friends/acquaintances together for a night. If you don't give away free drinks, it just doesn't happen these days. Everyone has their own busy lives going on. It's always a blast and I really enjoy seeing people that I don't get to typically see.

Some of our poker buddies are coming in town and were gonna go on a sports binge after the party. Saturday night were gonna go see Bulls vs. Timberwolves. Surprisingly enough, the Twolves are a pretty interesting team to watch this year. KLove is an animal and Beasley looks like an animal (not racist, just look at his damn hair). On Sunday we're going to see Bears vs Pats. We bought these tickets months ago and couldn't have wished for a better situation. It's really a huge game with two impressive teams involved. The only drawback is that the temp is going to be in the single digits for the game. I've never been to a game when it's that cold outside. I think we'll be riding the schnapps train to stay warm!

Damn this is getting long and I have a lot more I could say. I better save it or I'll have nothing to blog about in my future blogs (see oct 2009). I'll end by saying what got me to start blogging again was a random decision to get on twitter this morning. I'm enjoying it a ton so far and it made me want to blog again. You can find me at @andrewwiggins. I'll be posting junk like I do in this blog and looking to follow good tweeters.

Do we really not have a spell checker on this blog anymore??? Wtf?

Oh and Zimba, I'm gunning for you. I need to get back to the top on here. With Cole and Townsend gone at least it's possible. Ok maybe not. I just looked and Townsend has 500k. Wow!. I can pass Cole pretty easily though!