Winning stuff is cool!!

Friday night we decided to go out for dinner and I called Mark's dad to invite him out with us. He didn't feel up to going out that night but he told me that he'd like to go out the next day and felt like doing some gambling. I guess this was going to be like a "big night out" in lieu of going out for zany New Years fun.

Mark worked today and when we finished, we went out to do a couple of errands. We finished the errands a lot earlier than I thought we would so I called Joe to see if he would like to go for dinner earlier than we had planned. Joe wasn't hungry yet so I suggested that we head to the casino first then, and have dinner afterwards. He agree and we picked him up and headed to Gan. We aren't big gamblers but once in a while, we like to go to the Thousand Islands Charity Casino. It's a pretty podunk little place but it's less than 30 minutes from our house and we usually have fun when we go.

Every time we go to the casino Gan I can't help but think about how hard the Kingston city council must kick themselves in the ass. Kingston could have had a charity casino but council wouldn't approve it. Gan snapped it up and they have been rolling in moola over it ever since. The parking lot is almost always full, I was talking to a fellow from Gan a while back and apparently a big new spiffy hotel is going up right near the casino. I'm pretty sure that they'll expand the casino too (it's really small) when they can. It's just a little goldmine for Gananoque and Kingston council just could not see that. It's too bad too, I think that casinos get a bad rap most of the time. The old argument that folks with gambling addiction will get into trouble if they have easy access to a casino is just bullshit. If you are a gambling addict, you can find stuff to bet on anywhere, anytime, casino or no casino!

One of the errands we had done earlier in the day was to drop off some Christmas presents and a tin full of cookies to our friends Tam & Paul. As we were going out of the door, Paul handed me a penny he had found (thus making it a lucky penny) and told me that if I won, he'd like a 5% cut. I laughed and realized that I was sans-lucky penny in the coat I had on (I usually keep a lucky penny in my pocket but had switched coats that morning).

The three of us split up pretty much when we got to the casino. We each usually just play with $20 and see what happens. Mark likes to play the video poker machines, Joe is a nickel slot guy and I'm into the quarter, three line slot machines. I put my $20 into the machine so I started off with 80 credits on the machine. After about 5 minutes, I was down to 65 credits and was feeling pretty bad about the whole thing (even though I transferred Paul's lucky penny from my coat pocket to my pants' pocket before I checked my jacket). I gave the machine one more shot at redemption and won, my credits went up to 115 (from 65 -- so that's like $10!!).

An ever cautious gambler, the kind that the casino hates, I know, I cashed out and went to see how my boys were doing. I found Joe in front of a nickel machine, not doing too well...Mark was at a poker machine and was up to about 581 credits. He cashed out and went looking for another machine and while he was doing that, I tried my luck again. I put $1.25 into a machine and won again...So now I'm up to around $33 (from $20 -- not bad huh?) and I decide to just quit. Again, I'm cautious. I know it's boring but hey, it's who I am! So I find Joe again, and he's just not having a good night. He moves over to a poker machine to try that. I walk around the corner and see Mark sitting at the machine directly in front of his dad, he's up again on this new poker machine so I leave him to it and go see Joe again. By this time, it's getting close to "dinnertime" so the crowd is thinning out at the machines. Joe was getting pretty frustrated and he's like, "here, take all my coins and dump them into the first machine you find." I move to the next poker machine, which is set on some kind of fruit and animals version of poker(?) I dump his 7 coins into it, press the button and blammo, I win back Joe's $20 plus a little extra. When we all cashed out, I had won $15, Joe was up $7.25 and Mark had won like $180. It's so nice to walk out of there with more cash than when you went in, even if it was just $15!! I felt kind of goofy smiling so much on the way home but winning is just SOOOOO much more fun than breaking even!!