Got home after a 14 hr. day to find this Chritmas card in the mail from the brothers that employ me. Pretty good card and had the usual Christmas C-Note enclosed. The chip is mine. My assigned Pete is blue rather than the white one depicted here but there is evidence of reindeer slobber. Well, it does have 853,654 miles on it, so who knows what it's seen. (New Detroit Deisel 60 series w/over 400 hp though!)

Anyway, got me to thinking about chipping in '04. I took four different chips to the home terminal (about 250 miles away) a few weeks back just to show my dispatcher what I was talking about with chip shows and all. Both the bosses are coin collectors so we had a pretty nice talk about our hobbies while I was showing off. These two guys affect overalls, Carhart jackets and big old country boots but you better look out as both these guys know that slow talkin' just might hide their probable genius IQs! Oh yeah, they've been to casinos in Vienna, Budapest and Monte Carlo but missed out on the ones in Moscow.

Christmas coming and the little details are like ducks nibbling me to death and the traffic and wierd customer holiday schedules but I'm feeling good. I've had a great year and a lot of good things happened because of the hobby. Made several new friends through the board here and the convention. Got offered opportunies I would have missed otherwise. Met Annie Duke after all as well as a bunch of charitable local poker enthusiates. Lost a couple of valued folks this year but something as simple as collecting chips with a bunch of friends smoothed the bad days away. Hope you all found the same things this year. Merry Christmas!