Do you feel lucky?

On Saturday, a bunch of my friends and I hired a bus to take all of us (nearly 30) to a casino "RedWinds" in Olympia for their "fabulous Saturday Nigth All You Can EAt Seafood Buffet". It was supposed to be a much bigger group, but an entire bus load of firefighters had to cancel on us after they had picked this date - some awards banquet / fundraiser they had to go to. Oh well, we'll see them in the Spring when we go back...so let me know if you're interested in hitting the "Seafood Express".

Speaking of the all you can eat buffet.....Wow! Some of our group can really pack away the king crab legs, lobster, prawns and prime rib!!!! Since I'm very allergic to shrimp I had to be relatively careful. So I had oysters on the half shell - which were not bad; the bacon-wrapped giant scallops - rather fishy but everyone else raved about them - but then again they WERE bacon wrapped scallops; I also had some fabulous lightly sauteed garlic asparagras (I went back for seconds); some good swordfish and a very nice piece of prime rib. The raspberry dark chocolate cake was also very good and the favorite of the group.

After we stuffed our faces to our heart's content and tummy's near discontent, we decided to walk around and see the sights. We meandered around for quite a while and watched other members of our group and cheered them on. I'm not much of a gambler. I work too hard for my money to just throw it away. (In fact, I haven't been in a casino in probably 15 years.) So I brought up about $30 to spend / lose. I was very happy to see that they had penny, nickel, quarter slots in addition to the dollar slots and the other traditional games of chance. I tried my hand at the nickel slots, but didn't know what I was doing (too conservative) and quickly lost $2 of my initial $3. Then I bought a $20 card and played around on the penny slots waiting until the bus was supposed to come at 10pm. I was doing pretty well, until someone convinced me to try one of their "favorite" penny machine that they had just won $90 and $80 on - different machines same game.... Within 20 minutes I lost $6 and told them I was done there.

So I went back to the game/ machine I had been playing. The lady to the left of me, won $606 dollars which was pretty exciting. The lady to the right of me won $40, so when she left I moved over to her game to kill the hour of so until the bus came at 10pm. What I like about it was that it took a lot longer for the winnings to show up (each little penny had to plunk into place) - thus prolonging my losing until the bus showed. (While playing this, I found out that the bus now was leaving at 11pm. I had a headache and wasn't too happy. All I could think was that while I'm in here -and the casino's jamming devices are not letting my cell phone work, something bad was going to happen to my kids and the headlines would read - "Children barely escape burning house while Mom gambles at casino".) Yes, I'm a little gun shy from C's carving knife as a can opener escapade the last time I went out for the evening.

Well, to make a long boring gambling story short and interesting.... I wasn't betting very much - remember I'm pretty conservative when it comes to this kind of stuff. However, I discovered that the best rate of return was to do 20 cent bets. But the gambling gods were not smiling on me.... I lost most of my money (only had 13cents)
until my luck turned. The clock hit the "magic hour" and the gods smiled upon me.

Yes, after 10pm I won $127.37 on this same little patriotic penny machine. Hurray!!!!
Now I'm glad we waited. I know that it's a total fluke and won't happen again, but it was a nice ending to story and I was glad, since it paid for my bus ticket, dinner and tips. And... I had money to buy pizza for the end of the season football party for C.