Blame it on the Badugi

It's been a strange week. I spent a large chunk of my work day yesterday on websites from the BBC, CNN, Reuters, you name it, trying to determine whether Michael Jackson really was dead. He was only fifty, but boy did he pack a lot into those fifty years. He polarised people; I always had a lot of sympathy for him. So much of what happened (as is the case for us all) was a result of his upbringing, and largely out of his control. He'd always been a very unusual bloke, but in about '95 (when he did Earth Song which I thought was amazing) he fell out of the crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down. So sad. (By the way I didn't invent that phrase; I heard it on TV and thought it would come in handy here.)

Today I got two new tyres for my car and ordered a case of wine for Mum and Dad for when they get back from Vietnam. They've both just had their birthdays. Mum's was one of those special landmark birthdays so she also got a box of expensive but very good chocolates. I got home just in time for the badugi tournament, and I qualified for the second time, finishing 54th after a head-spinning 6¼ hours. I came back from the brink on several occasions and was extremely fortunate to survive. One time I think I went all in with a queen badugi; another time I clung on by the barest of margins, making the worst possible six while my adversary had the best possible seven. At one stage I was down to less than a tenth of the mean stack size.

On Tuesday I had that presentation for real. It could have been a lot worse. As expected I got asked lots of questions I didn't know the answers to, but at least people could tell I'd put some work into it. The presentations overran so my boss, who was to go last, didn't have time to give her talk on the subject of "philosophy". A shame, because I'd really like to learn about Jung and Freud and all that stuff, but as it turns out it was actually going to be about the philosophical basis for pricing our products. That reminds me of the men's group which I'll be attending next week; the subject of Freud comes up a lot there.
That afternoon our team went go-karting as a team building event. It was the first time I'd done it apart from one very brief go when I was eleven or so. You think you're going at breakneck speed, and it would have been a lot of fun if I was with a different group of people. Unfortunately my colleagues are all quite competitive, and I lack the aggressive type-A personality needed to be good at that kind of thing. So most of the time I was at the back of the field, which normally wouldn't matter, but my workmates liked comparing grid positions, lap times and all that malarkey.

I'd been dreading Tuesday for a while so I'd almost forgotten about Wednesday which was exam results day. It was no surprise to me that I didn't pass. The pass rate, at nearly 50%, was a surprise, but my heart wasn't really in it and my head was often all over the place. So I now have until next Friday to decide what to do next, though I've already decided. I won't be doing another exam this year. At work on Wednesday I had a panic attack, my first for some time. Thankfully it only lasted a minute or two and nobody noticed anything untoward.

It's been very foggy here the last 24 hours, so the ships' foghorns have been going full blast. For some reason I don't mind that, just like I don't think I'd mind living near a railway line. Wimbledon will be on telly shortly, but as I've got the French club in the morning I don't think I can stay up all night and watch it, as much as I'd like to.