Gratuity for dealers and casino staff – $300
Pot-sweetener for my ladies’ home game – $100
New iPhone that is smarter, faster and stronger than my husband’s – $199
Cool accessories for my iPhone that is smarter, faster and stronger than my husband’s – $124
New battery for my MacBook – $129
5-piece patio furniture set with puffy cushions – $1,497
“Hey Pat, I’ll give you $100 if you’ll fix me a drink so I don’t have to get up off the couch.” – $100
Round of drinks and appetizers for friends and clients – $96
10% tithing to Local First Arizona* – $331
Spa day with my Mom – $256
Another round for my family and clients – $48
Two rebuys for Dirk’s home game – $40
Contribution to Ponyboy’s Africa Trip – $50
Taking my coworkers out for drinks to celebrate, TBA – $91
Burning through $3,361 of the house’s money in just under two weeks: Priceless.
Guess I gotta get back to work now.
*When I joined the board of Local First, I told our executive director Kimber that I’d give her a 10% stake in all my winnings. Prior to the Ladies State Poker Championship, my contributions amounted to $6 here, $30 there and a whopping $1.20 on one memorable occasion. It was quite a treat to count out $331 at the last board meeting, and one of our new members actually made a motion to send me to Vegas for a fundraiser. The Nays carried.

Being berated by professional poker player Annie Duke at the World Series of Poker Academy in June has its benefits:

That would be me doing snow angels on my bed in the $3,361 that I won for finishing seventh at the Fourth Annual Arizona State Ladies Poker Championship on Saturday at Casino Arizona.

Continue reading I’m No. 7! →

As the aunt-by-marriage of a rock star, I can truthfully say that I have partied with rock stars… but after last Saturday night, I can also say with some certainty: Rock stars got nothin’ on Nobel Laureates.
In my day job as public radio salesperson, I helped Dr. Lawrence Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, promote his recent Origins Symposium. Basically he invited about 100 of the world’s leading scientists to Tempe, locked them in a room and asked two questions:
What is the origin of the universe? What is the origin of life? Discuss.
Apparently all that thinking really takes it out of you because the attendees – among them, seven Nobel Laureates, the discoverer of Lucy, the sequencer of the human genome, and Lawrence (the guy that did the show on How William Shatner Changed the World) – all needed to kick back with a few cocktails on Saturday night. Little old me (on behalf of my sister-in-law, the swimsuit model) managed to procure an invitation for two: Fly, meet wall.
Read on, get smarter…

Continue reading Fly, Meet Wall →

Yes, you read that correctly: Kellee “Goat” Stooks and I, Stacy “Toes” Bertinelli (Team Limoncello), tried out for the Navy SEALs today. To say that we failed to make the team is something of an understatement. For starters, they don’t allow girls to become SEALs, but even if they did, neither of us is 28 years old (maximum age to apply), and after our performance today, I can say with some degree of certainty that we would not be among their hallowed legions.
But at least we tried … and we had fun … and we were quite entertaining in the process.
Which is to say: Each of us swam 500 yards – breaststroke or sidestroke only, because you can’t do the fly, backstroke or freestyle without coming out of the water, creating some splashy noise and making yourself into a nice target for a sniper. Then, after we managed to avoid drowning, we got to do as many push-ups as we could in 2 minutes, as many sit-ups as we could in 2 minutes and as many pull-ups as we could… period… and then we got to run 1.5 miles. Oh, and we were competing against aspiring Navy SEALs and Olympians who actually medaled in swimming in Beijing.

And we lived to tell about it – with photos!

Continue reading I Tried Out for the Navy SEALs – How I Spent My Spring Break, Part 3 →

We framed… we sawed… we hammered… We doubled the size of our backyard deck by ourselves and managed to stay married in the process. Behold, the Patrick and Stacy World Headquarters Backyard Deck:
Small, Petite, Decent but Workable Before:

Amazing, Awesome, Incredible and Humongous After:

Go ahead and admit it, you can’t wait for Mardi Gras 2010 to trip the light fantastic on that dance floor – and no, we do not contract ourselves out. Mom already asked. And yes, I realize we said we weren’t going to spend a lot of money on our fur-cation, so you’ll be happy to know that we paid for half our materials with the coins I rolled from our change jar ($450) – though we had to take it to four different banks to get it converted to paper. Now that’s what I call recessionary economics.
You can read more about this adventure, see pictures of Stacy using an actual saw and not amputating any of her own limbs, plus learn how to persuade your wife to help you build a deck… all after the jump.

Continue reading We Frame, We Saw, We Hammer – How We Spent Pat’s Fur-cation, Part 2 →