Saturday Lynnzo and I went up to Blackhawk for the low-stakes gambling, a thing we do four or five times a year.

Up until this trip, I'd largely confined myself to the nickel machines, believing, as I do, that it's not the gambling that's fun, it's the game-playing.

(For those who don't play the slots, for a quarter in the quarter machines, you get to pull the lever. And that's pretty much it. Over and over.

On the nickel machines, you have bonus rounds and extra "games" that you can trip into. You get to play the Match Game or go 'round the board on Jeopardy or get a screen full of symbols that pay more bonus money if you select correctly and all kinds of things. You can play for two minutes on one nickel.)

Anyhow, up until this trip, I'd avoided the penny machines as being boring but this time around they had a new selection in and I found several that entertained me. I managed to have a blast at a penny a go for three or four hours.

As always, it was the drive up and back that I enjoyed the most, though. We take the bus and I love sitting up high, above the traffic, looking at the mountains, scanning for wildlife (we usually see bighorn sheep), and just generally enjoying the beauty of the Rockies. It was a gorgeous sunny spring day, too.

Sunday was less of an adventure, what with the cold and the gray skies and the rain that moved in.

I did some writing on the Sentinel story, I'm happy to report. Not a huge amount, about ten pages, but it's progress, right?

I remain astonished by how much easier almost anything is to write than OaT, you know? I mean, I have no idea if the Sentinel thing is anything worth reading (my earlier Sentinel efforts were dismissed, by one reader, as, "not really your best stuff" but whatever, because I'm not really self-aware enough to understand why not) but it's certainly much easier on the author.

And then it was Monday. Being as we're getting toward spring, naturally I drove to work this morning and hopped out of my car without remembering to turn my headlights off. Sigh.

But! Thanks to the Joy of Gifts this past holiday season, I have a handy-dandy jump-start system in my trunk these days.

I discovered my dead battery after work, and I whipped that gadget out, figured out which bits went where, shook it a few times when it didn't seem inclined to work, determined which one was the "on" button, and voila! The car went vrooooom and I toddled on home. I hope it starts again tomorrow morning.

And that's pretty much it for excitement in my life since Friday. Additional activities included soup-making, bathroom-cleaning, cornbread-baking, and reading.

Peaceful, but enjoyable.