Taking Care of Business

The week has flown by and now Friday is nearly done. Most of the day today has been taken up with various tasks all of which go under the heading of “taking care of business.”

Among those tasks was a visit with our tax preparer. Used to do all that on our own, but as life became more complicated we’ve begun having someone offer some assistance, and it’s been a great time-saver. Also this time around I managed to spend a lot more effort during the year keeping careful track of income and expenses, documenting and categorizing everything so as to make today a lot easier.

I did, however, take some time last night going back over the year and kind of reliving some what I’d experienced, including those trips to Uruguay, Las Vegas, Macau, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Not the nonstop globetrotting that some of my colleagues engage in during the year, but a lot of running around, for sure.

Sometimes I talk to people about what I do, and how a lot of my work happens at home, and we talk about how being able to work from home is most certainly a good thing, if you can manage it. However (I point out), when I do leave for work, the commute is often pretty long. As in thousands of miles!

Anyway, all of this going back over the year and tallying the totals makes me think a little about how I’d do something similar with online poker, always looking back over the year and scrutinizing the graph and thinking about what it represented.

But I’m realizing today that 2012 was the year where that sort of work stopped for me. I still goof around a little online, pushing pennies back and forth with others over on Carbon now and then. But the fact is I’m not depositing, I’m not withdrawing, and I’m not really paying attention anymore to how that ledger looks.

This development occurred sometime during the latter half of last year. I’m seeing a post as recent as April 2012 where I was stubbornly attaching some sort of significance to the little black book in which I’d enter results of sessions over the years. But that’s stopped now. I keep track of lots of other stuff now, but not that.

Sometimes when having those conversations with people about what I do I’ll get asked if I play poker myself. I’ve caught myself using the past tense sometimes, particularly with regard to how “I used to play online.” I’m hopeful some of these developments in Nevada, New Jersey, and elsewhere might one day eventually evolve into some situation where I’m able to play again, but I’m obviously not holding my breath.

In a way I’m thankful now I never rose above the level of a dedicated recreational player -- i.e., someone who took poker seriously, learned a lot about the game, but never reached a point where it was anything close to becoming more than an important hobby.

Would’ve been hard, I think, if somehow playing had become more of a “business,” to have to admit all of that had been taken care of.