What a week.

Scandinavian homes, for unsurprising reasons, don't typically install airconditioning. The unsurprising reason is that we don't normally get temperatures that warrant having indoors cooling. This is why, when it's the end of July and we get those few days where the temperature reaches 33 celsius (90+ for the Americans - I think), I don't function very well.

On top of that, my computer has not been functioning very well, either, although I doubt that has to do with the temperature. Rather, it was starting to act up and took more and more time to boot up. I decided to format the hard drive and re-install XP, which was easier said than done since the license key for WinXP I had apparently did not match the CD that I had. And when I re-installed with the correct CD, I had apparently screwed up the RAID configuration for my hard drives which gave me a weird looking STOP 0x07 error, which I didn't actually understand was a configuration error, so I was this close to just saying "fuck it," buy a new computer - this time a nice, quiet laptop - and throw this big heavy hunk of metal away, but inspiration hit me, I decided to try one last thing (after trying about 20 different things for a grand total of 15 hours of work) and it worked.

So I still have my old boring computer, but at least I saved a thousand bucks or so on not having to buy a new one. And it works, bless its little heart.

Between the temperature and the computer driving me mad, I've also encountered my first substantial downswing at no-limit. It's been four months in the making, and boy, was it worth the wait. Through a combination of temperature tilt, new-site-with-an-unfamiliar-interface tilt and how-the-hell-can-I-run-so-bad tilt, I've managed to lose 17 buy-ins, which is quite a feat. These 17 buy-ins include the usual bad beats, of course, although in an unusually large dose, but I take solace in the fact that I know I haven't been playing my best, either.This used to be something that made me feel worse, not better, about a downswing, but that's changed. I'm not sure when or where, but at some point I realized that if I can show that some of the money I've lost in a downswing was my own fault, then I feel more in control of what happens to me, which is way way way better than thinking that 17 buy-in downswings are something that can happen anytime.

There's always a way to win more, lose less and play better. This is true for everyone, and it's doubly true for me.

So while I'm licking my wounds (and moving down to $100NL), I'm still happy that I get a chance to improve. Poker is a very humbling game, and after my four months of virtually non-stop upwards pointing graphs, I needed the bitch slap.

Thanks, poker.