How Do They Stay in Business?

This was a very fun weekend in Las Vegas, where the weather has been OUTSTANDING - 70+ and sunny for the past 3 days.

The highlight was Sunday night when Helen and I went to an amazing concert by Kenny Wayne Shepherd. If you're not familiar with this guitar wizard, he's a blues/rocker somewhat reminiscent to Stevie Ray Vaughn. In fact, his drummer played with SRV in the band Double Trouble. The drummer, along with two other members of the 5-man group, are from Austin, TX, a well-known musical hotbed. Shepherd is from Louisiana, while the lead singer is from Cincinnati.

The concert was at the Orleans, a locals casino located a mile or so west of the Strip on Tropicana. It's a really comfortable venue and Helen and I had great seats - 5th row on the center aisle. For the 8 p.m. concert, we arrived around 6 and had dinner at TGI Fridays - chicken fajitas for me and a grilled chicken salad for my date. We had a half-hour or so to kill before going into the showroom, so I played a little blackjack. That worked well - 1st hand was a blackjack and we won four or five in a row. In about 10 minutes, I walked with a profit of $65. For kicks, we played $5 in a Deuces Wild 5-cent poker game and frittered that away.

Earlier on Sunday, I spent about 3 hours at the Suncoast, winning $125 in blackjack, and watching the MSU victory over Illinois. I should have made a big bet on the Spartans, but didn't have that much confidence in them. I thoughtthey might stumble against the Illini, but they looked solid, leading almost all the way.

On Saturday I had a winning poker session at Ballys, a profit of $80 with no Big Hands. Just a solid session, picking up a few pots of $30-40 with two pair as my biggest hand.

To celebrate, dinner was takeout from the local Cheesecake Factory. Helen had her favorite BBQ Ranch Chicken Salad and I opted for CF's huge & tangy Buffalo Wings. To quote that great food philosopher Rachel Ray, "YUM-O!"

While I was at Bally's, Helen was busy around the apartment, doing laundry and talking with friends and family.

Another thing she did was go through all the previous blogs and total up how much money I've won during our trip. From Jan. 1 2009 to date, I've plussed up $2,374. Naturally, we've been busy stimulating the economy with that - ya know, paying rent, eating, shopping, etc. But that's a pretty good total for roughly two months. I've always had sort of a goal of a $30-40 profit per day (or $1,000 a month) to cover the rent and it looks like we've done that so far. With March and April still to come, I hope we can keep up our winning ways...

Today Helen would like to go shoe shopping, so I'm pretty sure our adventure will continue...