Ok, picture in your mind a typical 3 bdrm 2 ba single level house on a modest family street, nice visual going yet? Ok, good, now, you know the one housethat always seemed to have trouble brewing around there? The cops, the loud music , the dogs, the parties on a Wednesday night or every night, the revving of sandrail engines, Harley motors, the smell of spraypaint going on a bumper, we all have at least one in every suburban neighborhood across the US....well that's where I fell in love with the game of poker. Long nights for a 16 year old girl, who just loved hanging out with the guys... but that's where my now husband of 20 years lived. I was in LUV (thats how 16 year old girls spelled it back then)... nothing could have or did stop me from hanging with him in those days, my Mom wasn't around much, my Dad left 15 years earlier, I never knew him, so I got myself a boyfriend... 10 years older and oh so much wiser (budweiser that is).. he knew it all... him and his buddies were so much weiser they built an entire walk-in castle thing-a-ma-bobber out of beer cans. "But honey if we ever have kids, they already got something to play in... ahahaha" Well back to the poker part of this story.... every Friday & Saturday night we would all sit down and pretend how to play poker, we always had arguments over hand - ranks, for the love of me I don't remember why, but it probably had something to do with every other card being 'wild', now that was fun... lol .... 7 card baseball with 2's, 6's and one-eyed jacks wild was one of the favorites of the nights..."no Copper on the Table" was our motto, and if one person ran out of money we all threw him some change, just to keep him around longer... and this party lasted for almost 4 years every weekend, until the 'man' took 2 bros away for awhile so they could lift some weights, and make 12 cents an hour. All of us that played poker together just kind of scattered after that, some went east some went west, but all our lives changed after that night. But it sure was fun while it lasted ;) I then went about 3 years without playing a single hand... I just couldn't find anywhere or anyone that really was interested, the good old days were over, reality sunk in, or reality was 'smoked' out on purpose, kids were conceived, a couple even ended up with a mortgage payment, and the white picket fence- aww Isn't that sweet? "GAG!" These people swore to Live free and ride hard for the rest of their lives, whatever, they turned into yuppie scum. Not that there is anything wrong with living the good life, but to just abandon your friends/family that were there for you in good and bad times, for money and "things" just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But life moves on.... and then along came this thing they call a computer... ohhhhhhhhh ahhhhhh , You mean I can play games online? against real people? Right On! I found a new friend in the internet... I started with blackjack, then blackjack tourneys, then found a game they called Texas Holdem, took about 3 hours to download on my slow very slow dial up connection, and of course there was no $$ involved, but I didn't care, I was playing poker again. Limit poker was all they offered back then from the Hoyle Co., I then started playing the poker tourneys they offered thru the same software. They were fun, usually around 85-100 players. Then the admin who sponsored the tourneys aked me if I would like to become a tourney director for the BJ and poker tourneys. I did that for about a year and just got burnt out on the results lists that I had to handwrite and then post to a website. It was tedious and most times I was the only one to show up. Our 'leader' didn't lead by example thats for sure. So after that site disolved into a pay to play for fun site, I just lost hope for poker in my future. Until one day a kid named Mike said , psssst, hey Gin, they got this real poker site going on at pokerpages... well heck, I never thought about going and searching for poker anywhere else, I didn't know hardly anything about a computer at all, I read all kinds of things to teach me how to use and not kill a computer. None of it made any sense to me until I sat with the mouse, and now I can't put it down, I don't know how I ever functioned without it. That might be an experiment to try... "Lady, put down the mouse"....lol

............................ cont. in Part II................ sometime soon....