Sixty-six grand

I attended the house auction on Saturday, and once more I found myself priced out of the market. The bidding skyrocketed, finishing a whopping $66,000 above my limit. There was predictably a lot of patter from the auctioneer - "you won't want to come second" - but it seemed to me precisely the kind of auction you would want to come second in. To my mind the eventual buyers paid too much. I had an agent on my shoulder during the auction - I found that intimidating and it's something I'll have to avoid if I ever try and buy a property that way again. The highlight for me was a ginger-haired boy of around seven who defused the tension in the auction room by shouting out a rather high bid. The auctioneer didn't accept his bid, but I found it amusing that the final sale price was $1000 above that kid's figure.

I got caught up in a marathon badugi tournament on Sunday - after almost six and a half hours I finally bowed out in 39th place out of 6700 competitors, enough to qualify me for a real-money
tournament which I can play at any time. It was a steady but unspectactular accumulation of chips for me until the fifth hour, when three hands in quick succession defined my tournament. When my seven-high badugi was cracked by a five I was in dire chip trouble, so when I was dealt a jack badugi soon after, I had no real choice but to go all in. My hand was only a 57% favourite against my sole opponent who drew one, but thankfully it held up. A few hands later I caught a six-high to take out a sizeable pot, and figured I'd have just enough chips to make the crucial top 64 if I played conservatively enough. With steadily increasing blinds, "just enough" is more than you think. I was moved to another table and from then on the game became farcical. The biggest stack in the whole tournament was at my table - he/she would raise every hand so I had no option but to fold, as did pretty much the whole table, every hand. Hands were going by so quickly that there was a real danger I'd be blinded out, so I slowed the game down. When the field was whittled down to 64 I was relieved, though I did wonder if it was all worth it.

I got to work early this morning in readiness for my 8:30 presentation, only to find out I'd got the date wrong by two weeks. That just goes to show how disorganised and "out of the loop" I am in my workplace. Though it would have been nice to get it out of the way, on balance I'm relieved because I'd have had no choice but to use decidedly dodgy data. I doubt by the 23rd I'll have any more idea of what I'm talking about, but at least by then I might be talking bollocks about real data.

I've had some interesting conversations at work in recent days. Firstly there's Pam, the cleaner, who's obsessed with her kids' tennis. Telling her that I play tennis was a big mistake - she never stops talking about the latest trophies her three boys have won. Then yesterday I spoke, for the first time, to this woman who's writing a sci-fi trilogy. I have a lot of admiration for anyone able to write a book, but when she said she'd written the first book of the series in just six weeks - whilst holding down a nine-to-five job - I was blown away. And today I met someone who'd bought some shares in an Australian oil and gas company for five cents apiece a few weeks ago; they're now worth seven times that.

I'm still seeing the psychologist. I'm now getting on pretty well with her and we're even starting to develop plans and goals. Long may that continue.