Smokey the Magnificent

Today I won a game of poker against three persons all older and more masculine than myself. It was very thrilling. I only became the big stack late in the game when I got several hundreds with two pair, Queens high against two pair, Jacks high - and then Helpdesk Man got lucky when Flatmate Man went all in and it was just the two of us, heads-up, eyeing each other over the chips in a Tracy/Hepburn sort of way, and we both played uber-cautiously for a bit until we got hungry for dinner, bleeding chips back and forth because the blinds have been raised sky-high, and ended up both going all in on a very dubious river with a combination of bluff and to-heck-with-it, but he had a pair of sevens and I had a pair of eights, and hah!

Also, the pig is picking up some of the nuances of the game. I’m pretty sure opponents of child-led weaning might say that when a toddler can rap on the table to check on their mother’s behalf, while having the milks, the world has become a slightly scarier place.

Poker seems to have gone to Helpdesk Man’s head. Yesterday he came home proudly bearing a brand-new poker set, and taught two of my little sisters to play when they came over to be babysat. (He won, but it was neck-and-neck with the eleven-year-old for a bit. I went bust early and gracefully retired to the kitchen to cook. Beat him three times yesterday though.) Then he was up until 1AM watching the poker World Series on YouTube. Should I be worried. do you think?

In other news, today is Bacon Ice Cream Day. I made a butterscotch ice cream base and have candied the bacon by cooking it on foil with brown sugar sprinkled over it (yummy!). I’m a little nervous about adulterating the lovely butterscotch ice cream with bacon, but these things build character. I also made a French vanilla ice cream with crumbled gingerbread cookies in it, which is ridiculously yummy… and now I have twelve egg whites waiting to be pavlovified. It’s, like, the circle of life.

Tonight Helpdesk Man took it upon himself as the spiritual head of the family to teach me poker. I’d only played once before, a game of Texas Hold’em  during a rather disastrous dinner party, at which I was so distracted with a screaming four-month=old snortlepig that I tried to win a hand with three pair. Tonight was somewhat more successful. We played for beans - literally. Kidney beans. We didn’t have any chips and playing for cash seemed a tad redundant given that we share an account. I won several hands, but no games. The pig sampled our olives, played very professionally with the Jokers and kept hiding our beans in her mouth. Anyway, I liked it. I like the faintly Freemason-slash-Star Trek vibe it has, with the jargon and the rapping on the table and the hats and all. Makes me feel classy. What with this and the olives, I have come a long way from the bumpkin of yore, no?