Grab bag: sober poker, cache machine, and the wrong side of SD

It's been a couple of weeks. Time for a few bullet points to catch up:

• Sober players make bad opponents: I played at Palace again just before Christmas; several of the players were home on Christmas break from college or wherever, they brought their A game, and they weren't drinking. I was up about $70 after two hours, then the deck ran cold, I ran into a set, and walked away from the table down $100. Bah.
• Cache machine is Saturday: I've got the plans and route finalized for the Vancouver (WA) Cache Machine event, and this one feels like it's gonna be one of the better ones of the 14 I've organized. I got a call from the Vancouver PD today in response to a couple of questions I had about parking locations, and they were happy to be aware that we were coming to town. The route seems like it's pretty solid, the caches seem doable, and it's a good mix of micros, pocket parks, and quarter mile trail jaunts, with some history lessons tossed in. Should be fun.
• Bad bell curve. No biscuit: I played through my December $200 bonus at PlayersOnly last night -- and lost $250. I don't have my spreadsheet with me right now, but that's close to being 2 standard deviations off of the expected result. I'm OK with that, because even when you're gambling with a positive expectation wager, you're still gambling. Sometimes, rarely, the coin will come up heads 10 times in a row.
• Back to Happy: This month's Gambling Journal says that Happy Days is back to their ask-at-the-cage 2x$10 match plays for January. Apparently, I will be, too.
• ...and taxes: I closed down my 2007 spreadsheet last night with a third year of profitability. If you add the the PlayersOnly bonuses and the Happy Days match play bonuses together, that's pretty much my profit for the year. Everything else seems to be a wash: poker wins, poker losses, $30 on the ponies, a few bucks at charity bingo. Not as good as 2006 or (/me gets a dreamy look) the pre-UIGEA 2005 year, but still, it's in the low positive 4-figures for the year. It'll pay for a family vacation. Taxes take a small chunk of it, but tax on fun money hurts less than tax on money I really worked for.