A Not So Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Lunch Yesterday

So, I arrange to have lunch with friend and former co-worker Roger Hansen yesterday.  In order to avoid walking in this God-awful heat, we agree to meet at the Wheelhouse at the Rivers Casino.  After all, the parking is FREE, right?  I run an errand in the morning and arrive at the casino an hour early.  No problem, because I figure I can easily kill sixty minutes with sixty dollars at a five dollar black jack table.  Piece of cake.

Well, after about five minutes and seven or eight hands were dealt, I was down to only three five dollar chips.  Only on one hand did I beat the dealer. I felt like a high school quarterback after he just  faced Joe Greene and the Steel Curtain in their prime.  It was amazing.  I staggered away from the table with my three chips, and found myself looking at a roulette wheel.  What the hell, I think, so I put a chip on red.  You guessed it.  Black.  Did that two more times.  Five bucks on red.  Three straight times the ball lands on black.

Sixty bucks down the toilet in less than ten minutes.  Some days, it just ain't your day.

So now I had about fifty minutes to kill, and I spent it people watching, and let me tell you, you see all sorts of slices of life at a gambling casino, and I'll just leave it at that.

Anyway, had a great visit with Roger, and a great pastrami sandwich at the Wheelhouse, which, in the end, only cost me about seventy bucks, but, hey, the parking was free!

I love you, Roger, but next time, let's go back to SoHo for lunch!

A Trip to The Rivers Casino

We celebrated a non-Steeler Sunday today with a trip to The Rivers Casino.  

Marilyn had received a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from the Casino for her birthday earlier in the month for dinner at the Grand View Buffet in the Casino, so we decided to take advantage of that and head on down to the norsside.  Let me tell you, the food at that buffet is excellent, and there is plenty of it, and the twofer coupon made this a terrific dining option.  It also convinced me of a realization I came to when we first visited Las Vegas in 1992, and that is that excessive and opulent food buffets inside of gambling casinos may not be the main reason the rest of the world hates America, but it has to be very high on the list.

After dinner, of course, we tried our hand at the games of chance available to us.  Marilyn didn't do so well on the slot machines.  I, on the other hand, managed to turn a sixty percent profit at the black jack table in little more than a half an hour.  Before you get too excited about this, I started with $50 and left the table with $80.  I only wish that I had the stones to start our with $500 and try to turn it into $800.  That will probably never happen.