Hi Guys!

Been gone for a while.

Plan on being back for real soon.

Poker has been "eh" lately. I think the games on Stars are pretty much fucked. I also think my game has been very ragged. I think I am going to go through position by position and situation by situation and define my ranges better and define the reasons for varying from the standard better. I've been flying by my ass too much and flying by my ass leads to confusion which leads to bad decisions which leads to holy fuck honey I lost a fuckload today. Not that I have lost a fuckload very often. I did have a craptacular session the other night. I was up a few hundred on the day and managed to lose 900 in one long ass session. Shoulda been a shorter session. Didn't quit well at all.

The Red Sox are off to a crappy start. Pretty much everything that could go wrong has. David Ortiz looks like he's toast. We knew that was possible but it's sad to see anyway. The problem hasn't been the offense though, it's been that the pitchers were teh suck. They won't stay that way and, in fact, have already pretty much come around. Since a crappy start by Beckett in Toronto the starters have allowed 1, 0, 2, 7, 2, 4, and 1 run. The seven spot was Dice-K's return to the rotation and his schedule was a little screwed up so I think it's reasonable to expect better. And frankly if we don't get better we're probably screwed.

As it is, we've got an uphill climb to the playoffs. Obviously it's still too early for a single digit deficit to be a huge deal but starting with this Angels series we've got a stretch of 20 games out of 23 against teams that have reasonable playoff expectations (Angels, Yankees, Rays, Twins, Tigers, Phillies) and if the wins don't start piling up we could very well find us in a deep deep hole a third of the way through the season. With New York and Tampa in the division you can't come out of a deep hole.

That said, we've won the first two against the Angels. One of the next two, two of three v the Yanks and we're off and running. Just aim to win every series and come the end of August you're in the mix.

And guys, be nice to BTimm if you see him. Ernie Harwell passed away. He was the voice of Tigers baseball for two generations and I'm sure Brian has a ton of memories. And Brian, I hope you have tapes for the kids, maybe some nice Alan Trammel action or something.