I'm in Prague for the WPT. Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with too many poker details.

Day 1 was really good fun. The table was full of characters and although we literally could NOT bust anyone (1/2 the field went out on Day 1 but somehow nobody from our table did) we did have a lot of laughs. And beer. I'm not usually one to drink while I play but I couldn't be the only one NOT doing table rounds.

Day 2 started auspiciously when I busted a short stack in a flip but then QQ lost to AJ and AK lost to K3 and that was it for me.

Whatever.

I like Prague as a place to visit so having time off here works for me. It's also the last stop in my month-long work trip and I've finally come out of the huge black-hole funk that's been swirling around me recently. It's cold and bright and snowy here in the Czech Republic and I feel right at home.

Party Poker are hosting some very cool outings for their players on this stop. I missed out on the indoor sky-diving trips but I'm going to be one of the judges at tonight's Karaoke competition and there's a games festival with Wii Sports and Risk later too which I'll be getting in on. There is nothing like playing some indoor games when it's snowing outside. Just add whiskey. Instant party, imo.

So yes, I'm totally positive and back to my normal cheery self again, which makes this next part of the blog a little weird.

When you go outside and walk around Prague, it's gorgeous. The architecture is clearly some of the best in Europe but beyond that, it's also very friendly and welcoming. It's Christmas personified. It smells like donuts and cinnamon at the Christmas market. Everyone is drinking hot wine and smiling. Big fluffy hats and mittens make all the people look like fuzzy cartoon characters... it's non-threatening in the extreme.

That all changes when you get up to my hotel room.

If all you knew of Prague was the way it SOUNDS from my hotel window, you'd think that we were in a war-zone. I swear, it sounds like the zombie apocalypse out there.

My best guess to explain this is that my room is caught in some kind of weird temporal rift that reaches into some dark future or timeline.

I can barely sleep for the constant wailing of sirens interspersed with panicked shouting and periodic gunfire. I JUST heard a canon go off. Seriously.

Every time I get up to look out of my window, I expect to see a burning, post-apocalyptic wasteland.

If this is an auditory hint of the way things are going to be after December 21st and the Mayan thingamabob, everybody needs to get the hell out of Prague. Shit is about to go down here.

But until then, donuts and hot wine for everyone!

Ho Ho Ho.

So, apparently I lied in my last blog. I am NOT going to stop whining. Yes, I know. Lucky you.

But hey, on the upside, at least this proves that I'm not relentlessly Pollyanna-brand zippity doo dah happy about all things ALL of the time.

The past few weeks, I've been trying really hard to keep a positive attitude and just ride out this funk that I'm in. It hasn't worked. I'm exhausted and my immune system has gone on strike. All of the traveling and lack of a real home-base has kicked my ass and I am really struggling - struuuuuuuugling - just to do the simplest things.

It doesn't help that I've had a migraine for 4 days in a row now. I'm ready to wave the white flag and throw in the towel. I just can't figure out who to throw it to.

I was in Malta hosting the Pokerlistings Battle of Malta (http://www.pokerlistings.com/battle-of-malta-daily-show-piccolo-crowned-champion-video) and that was actually really good fun until the headache started creeping in. I genuinely like being in Malta and was able to work with a really nice crew of fellow Canadians. On the final day, I woke up with my eyes all swollen and my head thumping like a jackhammer. Thankfully, they let me wear sunglasses for all of the filming that we did outside, so I kind of managed to style it out.

From Malta, I flew to Casablanca. It was a 14 hour journey with a 6 hour stop-over in Rome. Airports are actually pretty restful places so I treated it like a day off. Sadly, when I arrived in Morocco after midnight, my transport to WPT Mazagan wasn't there. The desks were all closed for the night, the airport emptied out superfast and it was actually a really eerie place to be. My head was pounding and my vision was all fuzzy from the Migraine so even though I travel a lot, I felt pretty vulnerable being in a foreign country, not speaking the language and not really knowing what to do as I'd been told not to get a taxi for the hour long journey to the hotel.

Thankfully I wasn't there on my own or I think I would have had a total meltdown when this group of men in the airport started yelling and aggresively slapping the ground to get my attention. Traveling with a big bear of an Italian man brings a certain sense of security and once he came through customs and joined me, nobody even looked at me again.

We finally made it to the hotel after 3am (4am Maltese time) and from there I slept through the entire next day and night, totally missing Day 1a of the event which I'd planned to play.

I couldn't really justify not playing Day 1b so I dragged myself to the tournament room today and made a complete bollocks of it. I tanked the river of a hand where I thought the guy had bet 7k into a 2k pot. He'd bet 700 of course, and my huge nit roll with a straight (there were flush and full house possibilities on board) must have looked ridiculous. I doubled up early through some miracle but then managed to spew off almost 250bb with AK. Weeeeeeee. What a donk.

So now I'm sick, tired, headachey and totally angry with myself. And YOU just had to read about it. I'm not sure which is worse.

I know that I should look on the brightside. I'm in Morocco - in Africa for the first time in my life! - and I should make the most of it by seeing the area. But the idea of being anywhere loud or bright, hell even just moving quickly sounds like the most painful thing in the world right now. So I guess I'll just sit in my dark hotel room and obsess about having played like an idiot. Such fun.

I can't seem to write lately. I'm all blocked. It's not that I don't have things to say but somehow nothing is really coming out right. When I'm boring myself just by writing something, that seems like a pretty clear indication of the (poor) quality of the output.

I'm on the road right now and that might have something to do with it. I'm in Brighton for a few days which is fantastic - catching up with friends and sorting out errands - but as much as it feels comfortable to be back here, I'm strangely homesick for my friends in Santa Barbara. When I was there last month, I was homesick for here. Rubbish, I tell you!

A friend of mine the other day was telling me the story of being on a trek with a Buddhist monk (as you do) and how his one piece of advice to everyone there was to stop giving energy to negative things and choose instead to put effort into the positives. Excellent advice, that.

I have a hell of a lot of positives in my life so I'm going to stop being such a whinger and focus on that before someone slaps me.

And speaking of focus, I can do that better now as I've just gotten my first ever pair of glasses. Yes, as soon as being a hipster was pretty much all played out, it became safe for me to become one. Always trailing happily behind the cutting edge, that's me!

**In the previous entry, we found our heroine (it's my blog, I can call myself that if I like, suck it) leaving the security of her hometown in Canada to try her hand at living in England. She's a little bit impulsive, rather shy and has never been anywhere in her life.**




The first year that I lived in London was completely and utterly hellacious. And amazing. Both.

I landed a job in what I assumed was a normal inner-city school but which was later dubbed 'the worst school in England' by the BBC. My whole life, I've seemed to have a way of finding the most ridiculous and extreme situations, without even trying.

I'm not sure that I did any actual teaching that year. It was more about learning riot control than anything else. I was kicked, punched, spit at, had numerous chairs thrown at me and even a desk once. One student actually tried to light me on fire during a lesson although I'm pretty sure that he was at least half-kidding. And hey, if I accessorized my sweater with a jaunty little scarf, you couldn't even see the scorch marks. That's creative problem solving for you.

At some point that year, every window in the school was broken, over and over and over again. During one of my free lessons, I remember looking out of the window and seeing some students pull a car up to the back entrance of the school and carry off a couple of TV sets. Standard.

One day, while I was trying to teach, an older student wandered in and simply refused to leave my classroom. When I tried to insist, he used his size to intimidate me and push me up against the white-board where he growled and barked in my face, all while the class sat and looked on. When we tried to speak to his parents, we realized that his father had been on trial for murder. No, really.

My first foray into teaching was, in a word, extreme. If I'd been looking for adventure, I'd definitely found it. For a shy, permanently anxious girl who'd spent most of her life in a village of less than 1000 people, it was the most alien experience I could possibly have. Like being dropped into a Hellmouth where none of the 'normal' rules of life and behaviour seemed to make sense.

Despite the craziness of it all, I still managed to finish out my year in that school before moving on. I refused to quit halfway through, although that may have been down to dumb pride and stubbornness more than any really positive qualities. I must have done something right though as the school offered me a Head of Department position if I stayed on, with only a single year of teaching experience behind me. Of course, that was probably due to the fact that nobody else actually wanted the job.

It was at that crazy school in London that I first began to realize just how much pressure I could withstand. I figured out that there was a bit of Buffy in me after all. I wasn't the weak little girl that I'd always assumed myself to be. No, I hadn't transformed into some ass-kicking, wisecracking dynamo but my spine had a lot more Adamantium in it than I'd have guessed. (Yes, I'm mixing my superhero metaphors, deal with it.) The bottom line was that I could stand my ground and do what had to be done.

It was one hell of a lesson but it came at a high price.

The last 5 years that I've spent on the road for my job have been incredible. For a small town girl from Northern Canada, being able to go to exotic locations and experience cultures that only ever seemed to exist in books, was a treat of epic proportions.

I'm a very lucky person and believe me, I know it.

Poker has given a lot to my life and although (like many players) I sometimes have a love/hate relationship with this often frustrating game, I can't help but think how unrecognizably different my life would look right now if I'd never discovered it.

Poker and TV definitely weren't things that I grew up wanting to do. When I was a little girl, I never really had dreams of being a ballerina (way too clumsy) or a mom or a nurse, or any other of the stereotypical 'girl' roles that were the norm in our town. If anything, I wanted to grow up to be Jackie Chan. Unlikely.

My parents and my upbringing had instilled a deep sense of social responsibility in me, so my fondest dreams had me working towards women's rights in developing nations through providing more access to education. Non-profit work, but with the added twist of being a kung-fu fighting superhero. I wanted to be like Buffy. Only instead of vampires, I'd be kicking ass on illiteracy.

I ended up getting two degrees in University. The first was in Linguistics. I took a full degree in this area because it was the most fun I'd had in a long time and I'd developed an intellectual crush on the father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky. Yes, I was just that cool.

The other one was a very practical teaching degree. I never really had any great desire to be a high school teacher in Canada but a teaching degree seemed like a nice, safe option. It was insurance. It meant that I'd always have a job and some security. Even in my late teens, I knew these things were important. I was an eminently sensible and serious person. Plan for the future. Always have a backup plan. Cautiousness and prudence. These were my watchwords.

My desire to 'give back' was being assuaged by volunteering at a literacy project and helping to run a soup kitchen on the weekends. I have no doubt that I was one of those truly annoying, painfully earnest people with a cause. I was no fun. Capital 'N', capital 'F'.

And yet...

And yet somewhere deep inside I also knew that a teaching degree meant that I would be able to travel the world. It was just my backup plan but somehow it still held the seeds of adventure.

And so the first thing I did after graduation was look into the teaching jobs listed for far away places. I narrowed them down to two choices.

The first one was in a Dogrib settlement in the North West Territories, a place that was only accessible by snowmobile in the deepest parts of the winter. Their language was in danger of being lost because of assimilation, so I could also use my linguistics degree to work alongside the local people to help them preserve their oral history. This held huge appeal to me but let's be honest. It was going to be ridiculously cold. I'd grown up in the North so I was used to -50C weather (as much as anyone actually gets used to it) but I didn't love the idea of being frozen most of the year.

The other choice was to move to England as a Supply Teacher (this is what they call substitute teachers) and just hope that I'd actually find work once I got there. I'd never been out of the country before, let alone overseas. I was still very young because I'd managed to plow through both of my degrees in the time it usually takes to earn one. With all of that studying, I hadn't had anything even resembling a social life, so as a result, I was also unbelievably shy and vaguely anxious about everything. I didn't know anyone in England, had no idea where I would live and my entire knowledge of the place was based on what I'd seen on the British soap-opera 'Coronation Street'.

I was hardly a worldly jet-setter. It was a ridiculous option, really.

So that's what I did.

I should preface this great big whinging complaint of a blog by saying that for a lot of the people I know, my 'problem' would be seen as an exciting adventure. I get that. I really do. I'm one lucky bastard to have been traveling for a living for nearly 7 years, having incredible experiences that I'm so thankful for.

So, with all of that being said - OH SWEET ZEUS I WANT TO ACTUALLY LIVE SOMEWHERE SOON.

Yup, the big question I'm wrestling with right now (still) is that old chestnut - where on earth should I hang my hat?

I've asked people for input over on Facebook and twitter, in a kind of modern-day opinion poll. I've spoken to both official-type people (with many letters following their names) and those with first hand experience to get a range of options and I am finally narrowing this whole 'home' thing down. Finally.

Well, kind of.

A lot of people have suggested that I look into living in Malta, so that's what I've been doing lately. The amount of residency paperwork and tax-form legalese that I've been trawling through over the past few weeks has given me one hell of a headache and I still don't feel all that much closer to a real understanding of the situation.

My big problem right now is that once November 1st rolls around, I won't be a resident of any particular country. I am without a country. I'm like Tom Hanks in that movie where he has to live in an airplane terminal. Seriously, who on earth did he pay his taxes to?! It's not that I love paying taxes but I'd rather not get in trouble with back taxes and legal issues.

I've checked on this and even though I'm a British citizen, apparently they don't want my money. Wtf?

Because of my job (which is awesome and I promise you that I'm not being a douchebag and complaining about it,) I travel a lot of the time and therefore I'm not spending the required number of days to be resident in any one place. My suitcase is really racking up the miles right now. I have accountant friends (thank you, gods of the tax code) in 3 different countries trying to figure this out for me but in the meantime, I'm in a kind of limbo which has made me feel more unsettled than ever.

So I'm kind of burying my head in the sand a little bit right now. Maybe that sand will be on the shores of Malta, who knows.

Man, I hope that I figure this out soon.



And now to apologise for being a baby about this whole thing, here's a photo of a Buffalo dreaming about Las Vegas. No, I don't know why. These are the things that I do when I'm procrastinating instead of looking through more paperwork. Be thankful that I haven't just posted 17 photos of cats and called it a blog entry. My brain is mush right now.

It's amazing to me sometimes, the extent to which travel changes things like mood, outlook, understanding and health. Going from one country to another and being somewhat immersed in different cultures (although the culture of the traveling poker circus remains a constant bubble within all of that) means that I'm constantly having to re-evaluate things from a new and different perspective.

I was in Paris last week for the WPT and this morning, I've woken up in Malta. The difference between how I felt last week and how I feel right now is HUGE.

Most of the people I know love Paris. It is an incredible city on so many levels - architecture, food, culture. I was walking around the Champs de Elysee in my scruffy, hippy clothes which make me blend right into the scenery in Brighton and I was very aware of how those same clothes made me stand out like a sore thumb in fashionable Paris. It takes a while to catch the rhythm in each new setting. Culture-lag.

I'm not as big a fan of Paris as my friends are. For some reason, I've always been a bit melancholy in that city. I spent most of last week trying to fend off a migraine and that definitely didn't help. In the last year or so, I've started getting these really strange visual migraines where my head doesn't so much hurt (although that's definitely part of it) as feel like it's stuffed with cotton. Everything is a bit fuzzy, I can't get my eyes to focus through the weirdly psychedelic light show my brain puts on and I feel dizzily like someone has slipped something into my caf© au lait.

Maybe this is why I blew up during the tournament and crashed out in dramatically (bad) style. Or maybe (more likely) I'm just playing really badly right now. I started Day 2 with a good chip stack and then at times during play, I found myself really having to concentrate to remember my own hole cards. Not great. I got lucky in a few spots to build a good-sized stack and then had a brain explosion to make one of the worst plays ever to crash out of the event. Embarrassing. Sincerely embarrassing. "Dear god, I hope it doesn't make the TV coverage" embarrassing. Especially the post-interview where I vaguely remember trying to justify the unjustifiable. Bleurgh.

After busting, I retreated to my hotel and wrote on Twitter "sometimes playing poker for me feels like a monkey banging away on a keyboard trying to write Shakespeare." I've found that when I'm embarrassed about something, putting it out there in public actually makes me feel somewhat better about it. And it worked, kind of. And then I spent a full day in bed with the curtains closed, trying desperately to get the headache to leave me alone.

All in all, I was happy to leave Paris and fly to Malta last night. I woke up feeling like a new person. My headache is gone, I can focus my eyes and the optimism is back. Paris-Kara has been replaced with Malta-Kara and thank god, because she is WAY more fun.

I messed up my buy-in for this WPT and didn't send the re-entry on time so I've only got one bullet out here. I'll play Day 1b and see what happens. I'm going to try not to play like an asshole in this one. Yes, I'm setting my standards ever so high.

But that's a couple of days away and in the meantime, I'm in Malta. I fucking love Malta. Bring on the strawberry mojitos and reggae music.

Greetings from Brighton.

Just to catch you up, since the last time I posted here, I have had a birthday. So that means that I'm either a full year older or one day older, depending on your perspective about birthdays. Personally, I prefer to see it as being not older, but richer. And not in any of that 'richer in life experience' bollocks.

Richer in presents. Where it counts.

So yes, I'm back in England and if I squint my eyes really hard, I can almost imagine that it's summer here. Almost. My god the weather here is awful.

Every time I come back here, I miss it horribly. It's a really amazing place and without a doubt, it is the one place in the world that I feel most 'at home'. Now, if someone could just sort the weather out that would be lovely, thanks.

I'd move back here in a heart beat.

Sadly, 3 years of living in the sunshine of California has kind of ruined me for the beautiful melancholy greyness of England. I love it (I really do) but I don't think I could live here most of the year. Also, my health really suffers every time I'm here. The damp weather and the mold kill me and I spend a lot of the time stuck in bed with aches and pains. No fun. When I lived here years ago, I just put up with that because I didn't realise there was another way. Now that I know I can be healthier, choosing to live here and be less healthy would be kind of crazy.

This sucks.

Knowing the one place in the world that you feel truly at home and yet not being able to live there - that blows. Big time.

I definitely need to find a place to settle down soon though. Sleeping in a new bed every week might sound like a lot of fun to some of you (perverts) but it's starting to drive me a bit loopy. I'm a sleepwalker which means that I tend to be pretty restless at night anyhow. Being in different beds and hotel rooms with all of the different noises that individual buildings make, the different smells native to each city - that all just adds to the unsettled-ness. In order to make sure that I don't blithely end up going for a sleepy wander outside of my hotel room, I have to drag my suitcase in front of my door so that I can't open it.

One of these days I am definitely going to wake up in my pajamas in the middle of a casino. (note to self: buy better pajamas)

I haven't been doing much sleep walking recently but my unsettled nature is coming out in a different way. Nightmares. I am having every kind of nightmare you can imagine and have had them pretty much every single night for the last 4 weeks. It's exhausting. I have killed (and been killed by) so many damn zombies in the past month that I should get a merit badge.

So, for the sake of my sanity I will be ignoring my health and spending more time in Brighton. Two of my lovely friends have just bought an incredible flat here with views out over the sea and they've kindly let me rent their spare room for the odd days that I'll be around. I'm going to be on the road mostly but at least it'll be a base for me, somewhere to leave some of my things and a bed to call my own. It's going to be lovely to catch up with my friends all and reconnect with their lives. It's been far too long since I was around this part of the world much.

And it has to stop raining at some point right?

Right??

For the first time in years, I'm actually having a summer vacation.

When I was a kid, I'd look forward to the end of school. I'd count down the days until that moment when I could have the whole summer stretching out in front of me, to spend it doing absolutely nothing,

Not really 'nothing' of course, as there were always trees to be climbed, forts to be made and adventures to be had. I craved those days as a kid; waking up with all kinds of possibilities but no 'have to's.

I grew up on a big piece of land that was mostly forest. Our neighbours had large commercial farms, growing grains and cattle ranching, but our farm was very small - one cow, a bunch of chickens and various other animals from time to time like rabbits, turkeys, ducks, a horse; all on miles of heavy woodland. It was a kid's paradise.

There was never a shortage of things to do. I was lucky that while it was a very (very) small town without many people, there were kids my age within biking distance. So, we'd ride our bikes to each other's houses and make plans. Let's pack enough food for 3 days and take the horses to the lake and camp all on our own. No grown-ups allowed. Let's build a network of tunnels in the haystacks so that the adults can't find us. Let's hide food in a hole in the ground beneath the big tree so that we can all sneak out at 1am and have a midnight feast and watch the stars.

We would spend the whole summer like it was one beautifully long day, layering ourselves in mud, dirt, scratches and scrapes. We'd have epic adventures just swimming in creeks and making up crazy stories in our heads. Let's climb the highest tree to see how far we can see. Maybe there are marauders coming. Let's stockpile sticks and rocks as weapons. Let's build a wall. Oh, the saskatoon berries are ripe - down tools and let's eat until we're sick.

I hope that kind of summer vacations still exists for kids. I was surprised to find out that it still manages to exist for me in this Neverland I'm spending the summer in, in deepest Calabria.

This summer feels a lot like those other endless holidays. Wake up, find my partners in adventure and go spend hours doing nothing. I'm picking figs off the trees here and eating until I'm sick. I'm sitting on my high, stone window perch every morning but there's no imagination necessary in this case because I really AM in a far off, exotic land. I'm staying up late at night and watching the stars with the rumble of voices and laughter as my soundtrack.

It's bliss and I never knew that it existed.

A few months ago, I bought a light saber at a friend's garage sale. I was ridiculously pleased with my purchase and when I bragged about it on twitter, I soon found out that I wasn't the only one with an affinity for 'using the force.' BJ Nemeth who is an amazing photographer, podcaster, blogger, WSOP stalwart and media person extraordinaire brought his light saber to Vegas too. After throwing jokes back and forth at each other on twitter for a while, we decided to give into those little voices inside our heads (which turned out to be our 12 year old selves) and throw down, Jedi style.

It wasn't for any particular purpose. In fact, people kept asking us why we wanted to dress up and swing sticks at each other. The most basic answer was, 'why not?'

Life is short and being a Grown Up takes up the lion's share of it. Let's be honest, some of that 'being a kid' stuff is just too good to leave at the door between adolescence and adulthood. Life can be incredibly serious sometimes and of course, it often should be. It needs to be. But why not play?

And so, we played. We dressed up as modern day Jedi's, we took our light sabers into the back corridors of the Rio and we laughed our asses off, fully indulging our desire to play 'make believe'. Thankfully, our friend (and most excellent photographer) Melissa Hayden liked our idea and wanted to come and capture it on film. Eric from PokerPsyche.com saw us milling about at the beginning and he was sweet enough to come along and shoot the silliness too, which meant that we got even more great pictures from the experience. Melissa is a new friend for me. We'd spoken a few times and chatted on social media and we certainly had a lot of friends in common, but until this summer I never really had a chance to get to know her. For the record, she's an incredibly interesting and generous soul with a lot of diverse interests. She's a member of the poker circus and she brings her own flavour to the madness. I'm glad to know her. She created some incredible large-scale prints for us of her favourite shots of Jedi Master BJ and Jedi Master Kara. It may sound childish but it's one of my favourite memories of the past few years.

Without going into detail, the last 5 years have been undoubtedly some of the hardest and most painful of my life. They've also been some of the best. It has been extreme, this rollercoaster ride and that intensity has really distilled life down to the basics for me. I've traveled an enormous amount, reconnected with people from my childhood and met new friends who I will carry with me for life. I've somehow, through luck and good timing and hard work and a generally charmed life, managed to come to a place where I'm just incredibly happy and content.

Ahem. Back to the Jedi stuff.

So why bother? Sure we could have just talked about doing a Luke and Darth. We could have just traded silly banter and Star Wars jokes on twitter with left it at that. Why actually do it? It wasn't exactly easy. Bringing my light saber to Vegas meant that I had to forgo the ease of flying in and instead make the 7 hour drive myself so that I could put the damn thing in my trunk rather than facing security at the airport. And then we had to find the time - we're all pretty slammed during the WSOP. It's an intense amount of work and finding time when we'd all be free to do it, that took a lot of wrangling. Why bother putting the actual effort into it?

Simply put, that moment when I realized that I wanted to have fun more than I wanted to look 'cool' was an important one for me. I was standing there in my silly clothes, waving a light saber around and making the sound effects for it myself (BJ's was a newer model that actually MADE the sounds - very flashy) while laughing like I hadn't in ages. And I thought, "Huh. This is exactly where I want to be in my life right now. How incredibly lucky am I?"

As usual, I have some big decisions to make in the next few months. Where to live is at the top of that list. I'm leaning towards relocating back to Europe but wherever it is, I'm hoping to spend a little less time on the road. I did a count yesterday and in the past 14 months, I've spent a total of less than 3 1/2 months in my own 'home.' I love, adore, am grateful for my job and my life and the adventure it gives me but I want a little bit more time to 'play' in my own home, with my friends. I keep saying this but maybe this year I'll actually do it. It's my birthday in 2 weeks. That's a good time to think about new beginnings.

So yes, this summer is going to be about trying to figure out some more of these big questions. But it's also going to be about playing. There is going to be a LOT of playing.