Fishing For Clouds

Good morning everyone.  Well it's been a little while since I've posted, and I just have excuses for you, and not good reasons, so let's get started...  :)  Although it's August in Las Vegas, the temperatures are finally starting to cool a little.  Okay, let me take back the word "cool."  We still have triple digits here, but earlier in the summer, the highs were around 115, and we don't have 110 degrees in the ten-day forecast...  :)  Today's forecast high is 96 degrees, and 106 is the highest expected temperature over the next ten days.  Tonight's low is supposed to dip down to 80, which is also the expected low ten days from now.  I think that you get my drift by now - it was warmer in the desert earlier this summer.  Thanks to Facebook, I recently realized that I've had the same mindset at this time of year for at least the better part of a decade.  I've lived in hot climates, and I've been counting down the minutes until the start of football season and the accompanying cooler weather.  Yesterday when I was "supposed" to be writing this blog entry, I was ordering some football jerseys from various online retailers because I'm allowed to wear them at work during football season.  My one-year anniversary at work is three weeks from tomorrow, which falls on the date of the Mayweather/McGregor fight, and the first four college football games of the year.  Seems fitting...

My poker didn't go as well as I would have liked this summer, but when things weren't going well, I showed discipline by reducing my number of sessions and saving my bankroll for the impending football season.  As far as gambling is concerned, I wager far more on sports during football season than I do the rest of the year combined, EASILY...  I haven't played much poker since the World Series ended, and have instead focused my time on studying for the upcoming football season.  If you've heard the rumor that I was released an hour early from work one day last week, and proceeded to head to a sportsbook and make my first bets of the football season (in addition to putting more money into my online betting account), there's only about 100% truth to that story...

My brother and I had a pleasant surprise last week as a family member visited us here in the desert without any advanced warning.  Our stepmom Brenda came to Las Vegas with her friends and surprised me at work, and I was able to keep the secret that she was in town until she saw my brother at work a few days later.  Talking with Brenda, I found out who one of my mystery blog readers is, as my blog stats tell me that I get several visitors from Facebook, but the amount of 'likes' that I get on my Facebook blog "ads" never seem to match the traffic that I receive from the social media site.  We all had a good visit, as Brenda treated Pete's family and myself to Johnny Rockets, which is a place that I had never dined at before.  How many times in the history of history has someone gone wrong with a cheeseburger and french fries?  :)

Although the calendar says that we're only halfway through with summer, the start of the NFL preseason, coupled with the lower temperatures here in the Valley, have me reminiscing back to my youth, when I spent the waning summer days dreaming about the future, and "fishing for clouds," if you will.  My friend Vicki has a great photographic eye, and her daughter is already living a life that most people can only dream about (that's a whole other blog entry in itself), so I thought that I'd leave you with a little photo of a young girl fishing for clouds...

Have a great weekend, and I'll see you soon...