Got back from Mexico on Thursday late night. Mexico was so nice. It was nice for my pastey white skin to actually feel the sun for once. We "ran well" on the trip as everything fell into place without any hitches. The flight to Cancun airport via Atlanta was all on time, the baggage arrived without issue, then off to customs...

We walk into the huge customs area, and we look to our left and right and see nothing but insanely long lines and about 3 clerks. Great... To our surprise, a new clerk sits at his desk and the security guy says "new line forming here" -- Missy and I smiled at our good fortune, the people in adjacent lines scowled at us as we walked up to front of the new formed line. sweet.

After that it was short ride to the resort, where we ended up spending every day except one. We arrived and got a glass of champange on arrival, then went to check in where we got another glass of champange, then they drove us to our room where a bottle of champange was waiting haha...

The food and service was better than anything I've ever experienced. We were real close to the beach too. Here are some pictures:

Here we are sipping some champange when we arrived




Here are some pictures of our Casita Suite, it was pretty "baller" ;-)
































After getting settled in the room, our trip mostly consisted of eat/sleep/read/snorkel/beachbumming. It was great. It was sooo relaxing to not have the internet or poker to steal my thoughts away from the natural beauty that exists down there. I loved hanging out on the beach, where we spent so many hours doing nothing but reading/listening or simply watching the ocean in our Cabana:













We also tried sushi for the first time. We liked it for the most part. We had three types: Volcano (california roll topped with spicy red cream sauce with raw scallops), California tempura (fried california roll with avocado, sashimi, and something else), and lastly Kampai (raw eel on top of some veggies and rice). Unsurprisingly we liked the fried one the best, but the Volcano was also pretty tastey. Missy was not a fan of the eel, I thought it was ok but a tad too fishy tasting. It was an experience. Yes, we know, we're losers for never trying sushi before now.





Missy having fun with the locals


Me checking out the waves during the storm


Missy monkeying around


Me having fun with the a different type of "local"


We also went parasailing which was a good time and we went to a natural water park called "Xel-Ha" (shell-ha) which was fun. Going to xel-ha was the only day we actually left the resort. Most of the time we just had plenty of fun chilling in the Cabana and having Paco bring us a cerveza or frozen margaritas :-)

One day we decided we should check out the pool and get one of those colorful drinks. They looked better than they tasted, but it was fun nonetheless.





You can see our Casita from the pool here, it's the one on the far right, second floor


So that's about it... now back to the real world. Trying to finish out the month strong in poker, as well as working on the new site I'm working on with my uncle. I'll have a big write up about it when it goes live. Hopefully my blog readers will get some use out of that site, even though it's not poker related. Additionally, I'm looking forward to taking on a couple more students and adding some extra coaching hours.

I read the Jim Cramer book while on the honeymoon. I was pretty impressed but I'm still such a novice that I'm not ready to jump into the market without some additional studying and learning. I'm trying to work stock market study into my daily priorities but I feel like I'm already pretty busy with poker and the website. Hopefully I'll stick with it as an additional hobby. Anyone have any suggestions on stock market forums? I'd like to find the "2+2 of investing" to help the learning process. If you guys have any suggestions of a site like that, I'd like to hear it.

I'll leave you with the sunset on our last night in paradise.



Aaron

In about 9 hours Missy and I will be getting settled in for our flight to Mexico for our honeymoon. We have about an hour layover in Atlanta but we should land in Cancun airport around 11:30am, and hopefully on the beach sipping a margarita by 12:30 :-)

The last two days have been pretty crazy trying to get everything ready to go for the trip and putting in a few hands before I go. I'm up about 8k so far this month, so hopefully when I get back from our vacation I can make a few more bucks before the end of the month. I decided since the internet costs down there are so insane, i wouldn't bother taking my laptop with me. It's probably better that way, anyway. I'll have plenty of things to keep me busy without the serious business of the internets .

I had to finalize my 2nd quarter taxes the other day since I missed the payment deadline of June 15th (wedding/vegas/etc a little distracting). Wow was it depressing to look back at the killer months I had in Jan/Feb/March and compare them to April/May/June where everything seemed to fall apart. I'm confident that I'm getting back on track and despite the games continually getting tougher, I hope I can at least match my "salary" from the first 6months of the year by the time december 31st rolls around. We'll see. I'm definitely not going to put in as many hands in the next 6 months as I have in the previous six. Both by choice and because of other responsibilities I'll be taking on in the near-ish future (in addition to the website(s) with my uncle)...more on that sometime in August probably.

Anyway, I think I'm going to put in one last mini session before I take some tylonel PM and try to recalibrate my sleep schedule so the 4:15am alarm clock doesn't kick my ass too badly.

If I'm not too worn out, I'll throw an update on the blog next Thurs or Fri with some pics of mexico.

adios amigos,
Aaron

I thought I'd throw a quick update on the blog just to let everyone know I'm still alive... (as if there was any doubt).

I've been working real hard on this website with my uncle. Lots of coding into the wee hours of the night, which has taken my mind off of poker -- definitely a good thing.

Missy and I leave on Thursday at 6am for our honeymoon. We're headed down to the Riviera Maya, Mexico. We're staying at El Dorado Royale, in a Casita suite. Should be a blast. 7 restaurants to choose from, pools everywhere, beach, parasailing, snorkeling, drinking, and more. Our Casita suite is supposed to be pretty baller. We'll see. The only bad thing is internet is ridiculously expensive there... like $8 for 20 minutes or something crazy. I'm still planning to bring the laptop but no plans for playing poker (Missy is happy about that, obv) but I'd like to get a blog or two with some pictures up there.

I bought two books for the trip. Not sure if they are any good. First one is a poker book called: You're Own Worst Enemy It's by the 2+2 guy Alan Schoonmaker, he's written a lot about the Psychology of the game. I read his other book about poker psychology a few years back and thought it was decent. I figure I'll give this one a try. It's supposed to have some advice for ways of dealing with running badly, etc. Seems like something I could get use out of ;-)

The other book I bought is Jim Cramer's Real Money. I have no idea if this book is any good or not, but I wanted a kind of n00b intro into investing. I hate going to a book store and looking for books in a subject I'm not real well versed in, because if investing books are anything like poker books, there's bound to be tons of absolute crap out there. For example, I see Cramer on TV, he's a wacky guy, seems to know what he's doing... so naturally I go buy his book. Think of the novice poker player, they see Hellmuth on TV, he talks about all these bracelets he's won, is a big name and seems to know what he's doing. The novice goes and buys his book, not knowing that Play Poker Like the Pros is utter crap. How can the poker novice know any better? How could me, the investing novice, know any better? Time will tell I suppose.

If anyone has any advice on good beginner/intermediate level investing books, let me know. I saw The Intelligent Investor which I've heard great things about, but it seemed to be a little heavy for a newbie like myself. If I don't hear otherwise, I plan on that being my second investing book.

good luck,
Aaron

Sorry for the virtual abandoning of this blog, but my life has been a whirlwind the last couple weeks. First, and most importantly, our wedding on June 30th went off without a hitch. Wedding festivities started back on June 27th when my parents got in town. We had fun doing last minute wedding preparations and hanging out before everything got too wild. That whole week I didn't play poker except for maybe one or two quick sessions online, and of course the all nighter at the Bellagio. With family in town and the wedding, I had more important things on my mind then the latest AA less than KK ai pf...lol.

So when June 29th rolled around, my groomsmen and the rest of the family were making it into KC. I made tons of trips back and forth to the airport. The family had a suite at the hotel we were staying at specifically for food and drinks for the wary travellers to enjoy... sandwiches, chips and dip, customized M&M's with our names on it, hell even bottled water with our engagement pictures and wedding date on it. Sick huh? It was a good time, and before we knew it, it was time for the rehearsal that evening.
Here we are rehearsing our exit




Roger, Grandma, Me, Missy, Mom, and Dad applying the bunny ears




After the rehearsal we had our rehearsal dinner at Smokehouse BBQ, which was excellent as always. The rest of the night was just catching up with old friends and a few beers. Good times. The next day we were running errands all over the place (5 of 8 tuxes had a problem...wtfffff) so we got that all squared away, then it was time to head home and get dressed and off to the church for pictures. We had a videographer and a photo-journalist doing the pics... using a photo-journalist is def the way to go because she does way fewer "organized" pictures and more candid ones. We don't have those pics yet but I expect them to come out well. We used the same chick that did our engagement pictures which we were very satisfied with.

So the rest of the day went by pretty quickly... before I knew it, we were done with pictures and walking down the aisle. Missy's hands were trembling with excitement. Our preacher really came through in the clutch, giving us a sick good sermon where he actually made TWO poker references. Is that cool or what? At one point he was talking about how the unpredictability of marriage is what makes it both hard and exciting. Then he drew a parallel to Missy's job being unpredictable, and he said something like "And take Aaron, he also very familiar with unpredictability in Software Consulting OR ... dramatic pause ... any other activity Aaron participates in for fun and/or profit". Of course the congregation starts cracking up. It was great. Later he made some reference to God's love being "All-In" which he slipped into the message in a subtle but funny way.

So after all that we exchanged the vows, rings, kiss, and away we go in the limo w/ a bottle of champange and off to the hotel for some last minute photos and the reception.

My first dance with Mrs. Wilt...onTilt ;-)



After that the rest of the reception is mostly a blur, saying hi to everyone, eating, cutting cake, and other standard wedding stuff. It was a great time.

The next day we had family and some friends over while we opened gifts and had some sandwiches. Mom and Dad stayed in town until the 3rd, then we helped Missy's grandma move, then it wasn't until probably the 5th or 6th when I played my first July poker session online. Poker isn't going much better than in June. I've been thinking about some of the things I might need to do to change my game, and hopefully by the end of the month some of these adjustments will help me get out of my funk. This bad run has really lasted way too long. I think I've gotten away from dictating the action at the table and I think that's hurt me from the perspective that my image has tightened so I'm not getting as much loose action to offset a lot of these beats/setups. Essentially with my game tightening down to "stop the bleeding" I've put myself into a situation where it's tough to win unless you run decently. I haven't ran decently in quite some time, so hopefully getting back to a more aggressive style will pay off with uncontested pots and with a looser image.

Aside from poker, my uncle and I have finally started getting some traction on a new website I mentioned a couple times this spring. We've set an initial date of August 12th to have our first Beta version up and running. I'll give more details on the nature of the website when it gets closer to that time...don't get too excited though, it's nothing poker related. I've been trying to re-sharpen my programming skills since poker hasn't been as good to me as it once was. Perhaps I'll get a programming contract again this fall. I haven't decided yet.

Will try to keep this thing updated a bit more, although we're headed down to mexico for our honeymoon on July 19th. The laptop is going with us, so perhaps I can blog a few pictures while we're down there.

Aaron