You gotta know when to hold 'em...know when to fold 'em...

Our landlords are the social-est people I know. In May they had a Pop Star Party (I went as Avril...remember? I wore sock-chucks?) and we all sang kareoke (they have their own kareoke machine). They frequently invite us to come camping/to the States/to Costco with them. They have three tenants (five if you count Joel and me in the basement, six if you count the foetus [Shari's, not mine]) taking up their personal space. If anyone has ever had the gift of hospitality, it is Dave and Shari.


Every year, around this time, they whip their house up into a casino. People get tricked out in their fancy best to come and gamble their fake money away.

Seriously, they should set this up as a community service so that people can come see what its like to go up against the house. I lost loads of fake money, and in real life there's no Baron von Dave strolling around, saying 'Hey, I'll give you $10 000 but you have to lay it all on one bet. If you win, it's yours, but if you lose, I can't help you.' No actual casino owner walks up to a poker table and says 'For the next hand, the minimum bet is $25 000 but the odds are 5 to 1.' If you go broke in the real world, you can't just deal a table for half an hour and make $50 000 so you can keep playing.

Some people were kind enough to work tables the whole night, and were paid handsomely for their pains.

Melissa and her giant foetus-belly (seems to be contagious) spinning the wheel.



Poker...always a hot game.

Andrea deals a mean blackjack.

The color-wheel is no one's friend, but it's so hard to walk away.

What does one do, in the end, with thousands of fake dollars? Why, one bids with it! What's this? A gift card to the Olive Garden? Going once...going twice...SOLD for three hundred thousand dollars!!!

Joel and I turned out to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) poor gamblers, but with our deep Mennonite roots we are sharp and shrewd bidders. With our mere hundred and fifty thousand dollars, we walked away with the second Austin Powers movie, six chocolate bars, and nunchucks and a beating-stick!

It goes perfectly with the ninja mask and throwing stars Joel won for me last year.