why I haven't been around much ...

I've heard from some of you readers out there, wondering why I haven't been around much, why I haven't been commenting much, why I haven't been posting so much, why I haven't been blogging at my usual times.

The answer is simple: Poker.

No, not my real, live cash games and tournaments.

Online poker.

There's finally a decent client out there for Macs, so I've been playing it to get my gambling fix. I've even skipped the last three nights of real poker to play online.

I've been playing when I get home and into the night. Actually, into the early morning hours. Been staying up till 3 or 4 a.m. playing. Been playing when I get up, all the way until I have to leave for work. Been coming home for lunch and playing then.

The major part of it is the poker, but there's an added feature that I've kind of been missing for a while -- chatting.

I was an inveterate chatter when I first got online. And that held up for years and years. Usually it was in a chatroom at Chathouse or Chatalot. But people kind of disappeared from those places, at least the people I used to chat to. I also chatted a lot on ICQ and Yahoo IM. There were times I was in a chatroom and holding up conversations with multiple people in multiple IM programs. But most of those have gone away too.

I used to have about 20-25 people on ICQ. Now there are six. And I only chat with only two of them on any kind of regular basis, and even then it's not really the same, mostly because none of us spend the same kind of time online, or the same hours online, as we used to.

Same with Yahoo. I have 19 people on my Yahoo IM. And, again, there's only a few I chat with there on a regular basis ... heck, I wouldn't even call it regular. Semi-regular.

But four of those have been added in the last few days. And yes, all of them women. All of them from chatting in poker rooms, being a little flirtatious and teasing ... then exchanging Yahoo IM's and chatting there a bit. I even had a short phone conversation with an interesting woman from Las Vegas, until my phone died.

Side note: I need to get a new phone. The handset battery doesn't fully recharge, so I only have about 10 mins of talk time there. And my cell phone has been cutting out in my apartment recently too.

I really miss flirtatious chat. I found out just how much thanks to the online poker rooms. It's one thing to do so over e-mail or in comments, but that instantaneous thing is lacking there. It's not really chatting going back and forth with comments in either of those two mediums.

OK ... that's enough blogging. Time for a quick look around the blogosphere and then back to the poker rooms!

OH ... but I didn't forget the early HNT from Guam ...

A bemused DZER.

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