"...and he was never heard from again."

That was the joke one of my exes, Jacqueline, used to make in a mock-ominous voice referring to individuals who had started playing World of Warcraft. The year was 2006 and she'd encountered an inordinate number of regular bloggers whose last blog posts began with, "so I signed up for World of Warcraft today" and correspondingly got sucked into the game so much that they were never heard from again (at least in the blogosphere).

Just as I have never tried crack or meth, I never touched WoW. But for the last month, I do feel like I've disappeared off the face of the earth. Sure, I've gone many long stretches without blogging, but this last month is the first time in my life I've been so immersed in work that I've had almost no interaction with the outside world. Many times over the last few weeks I've wanted to blog about how the working world has been treating me but the only thing I have time to do once I get home is work out (sometimes), cram a prepackaged dinner down my throat, and fall asleep. The only reason that tonight I have time to blog is that at this moment I'm on call, waiting for a co-worker who is on the road (it's 9:30pm) and could need my assistance online at any time.

Sadly, I haven't really been doing much in the way of MMA training. I make it to jiujitsu once or twice a week. I've hired a boxing trainer to give me private lessons twice a week. I've been trying to keep up general fitness and done a decent job of that. That's about it. Every time someone asks "when's your next fight?" I feel a little bit of life-tilt because there's no way I am in fight shape.

To be brutally honest, if I had known beforehand that this is what my life would be like, I might not have accepted the job. But despite the workload, I'm still glad I did. It's actually been fun in its own way. We have had a tremendously harried week here at Ultimate Poker, but the whole team has come together to support one another and get shit done. It's been nice to be a part of that. My stress level at times has been just through the roof and I have had my share of "omfg this is a disaster" freakouts, but there's definite life-ev in being part of a team.

I also like that I get to dabble in a little of everything in my work. I have had my hands in the technology, marketing, customer support, HR, and finance aspect of things. I definitely don't think I would have survived in a job where I was just doing one thing, and I hope the breadth of my work here at Ultimate Poker continues to increase.

But it is a crazy pace and hopefully things do settle down a bit soon, because I definitely don't think I will last long at the current pace. My hope is to set up and establish systems that largely run without me, so that I can get off the daily grind of burning the candle at both ends and instead work towards making a lasting long-term contribution to the organization. Not to mention getting back to fighting and playing poker.

A lot of people have been asking when we're going to start taking bets here at Ultimate Poker. While I'd love to go into detail, all I can say is that things are definitely getting exciting around here. We are continuing that push towards hand #1 of legal online poker and we really think we have what it takes to be the market winner in Nevada and beyond!