It's Not A Bender, It's A Lifestyle.

We go. It'll be a white Xmas. Somewhere, not in Vegas, silly. If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. The money is out of the bank, The laundry is done, the bag is mostly packed. The flight and room are checked into. The devices are charging. 7 nights in the desert are upon us. 12 hours from now I will (hopefully) be in the air to Heaven or Las Vegas. Don't have much to be concerned about. Would have like to have gotten the Thermo pennies from heaven but as expected looks like that's not happening. It'll be there on the return, and will help massively. No real worries about spending anyway, have more than enough in cash and CC. Weather for the flight was a concern but that seems to have passed and it should be clear tomorrow. The airport will be busy but I do this every Xmas and it always works out, will just duck out of work at a reasonable time tomorrow. Cosmo and Delano await, good practical choices from an expense and rewards standpoint. Still will...

Pussied out on Fontainebleau.  Had 6 nights booked there for a little over a grand for this trip, was just really excited to check out the place and knock it off the list of resorts never stayed at. The place looks beautiful and though I just had a standard, no view room I'm sure it would have been pretty spectacular. Then I started worrying, as I do. I really do have to MGM-max on this trip, to get to the 20K points I need to retain Gold MGM for next year. It would have been hard to do that staying at a non-MGM resort where you're going to spend the first and last parts of your day. I need to wake up, come downstairs, and throw a couple hundy in every morning, and do the same at night on the way back to the room to make sure I get there. That likely wasn't going to happen at FB, and I would have been constantly worrying about spending enough time in MGM sports to cover all the needed spend. So, in comes Delano. It had been over $200 to book even for me the last couple week...

Nearly there. 187 days with no Vegas is about to end. Longest drought between trips since 2013. Looking to end it in glorious fashion. The last load of laundry is done, the bag is half packed, the money is right, my head is right. Two fabulous resorts over 7 nights await and I'm ready to do this. It's been a year of change at work but I feel like it all came out more or less how I planned it. Extricated myself from a bad sitch in the last job and now, all you can ask for at my life/work level is to be pretty much unfireable, and at least for the next half year or so that should be the case. Have gone through some self-imposed tough stretches financially in the middle of the year but it was never unmanageable and I was certainly never eating ramen. I feel like I've earned a good endcap to this year and in 7 days I get that. So not much left to do. 4 more full days of work to wrap up, pull the rest of the money out of the bank, pack some cool weather gear, shave my balls and ...

I'm about to be delayed-paid for living in San Francisco. I worked for a company in '20 and '21 that was supposed to be making payments to an SF health care ordinance fund in my name, to the tune of a little over $3 an hour. Without going into too much detail it was supposed the help underwrite the cost of health care in the City. Turns out, this company was not making the payments, for the nearly 2 years I was there. So I get a notice last week saying hey, we owe you $6700. You'll be getting that. No other details like, are they going to try to direct deposit it, when will the payment be made, yadda yadda. So I reach out to the number in the letter you're supposed to call if you have questions. Which I do. I'm 2 weeks away from a Vegas trip and you're trying give me basically a full trip save (before taxes)? Fuck yes I have questions. I call the number. It's one of those horrid robo-helper things, and this one is several levels more horrid that the usua...

All over but the shouting now. I'm on a plane two weeks from this post. Everything is set. The save is plentiful and assured, my last check before flying goes in the bank tonight and it's enough to beat the predicted save by $500. Taking a little extra to cover the many cab rides that will be happening to-from Delano. Will have no issues with paying off last month's CC, even if I come home empty-pocketed (cash). Didn't really have to deprive myself of anything over the course of the save either, thanks to the (as it turns out, net after taxes) $2400 work bonus. Always good to head out on a trip knowing all the normal life basics are covered. This is a MGM Rewards trip. At least until Gold is covered, I'm an MGM resort gamblehog. With the Freeplay I have logged and the tier multiplier in effect, hopefully I can get the 20K points covered by Monday then I can be free to drop some coin at FB and see if I can make a dent in their program. Once MGM Gold is got I will be ...

The final pre-Vegas MGM Rewards points from the CC dropped in today. After a good earning month I'm sitting at a little over 52K pre-trip. So assuming I'll earn something like 3K points in December (conservative, being I'll be earning 3X points in town), that gets me to 55K w/o gambling a penny the rest of the year, so I'll just need to earn 20K points in town to keep Gold. Better than I thought it would be, and very doable. With the tier accelerator in play on the trip, if I earn 10K in a calendar day that will bump up to 15K. I may need only two decent earning days of the week to get there. I may just try to take like the Saturday and really start to pump at 12:01am, keep it going through the day and I might be nearly there. I can keep track on the app during the trip so I'll know in real time where I am. It'd be a relief to get it done early, like by Monday latest, so I can just be free to roam and gamble at will at other resort groups later in the trip. Woul...

Whelp, though I can scarcely believe it, we are T-minus one month from Vegalagalus. Time to do the obligatory plan post, that gets almost always uniformly ignored once I'm in town, but I'm a creature of tradition, so here goes. Night one, Thursday: Leave work around 1p, drop the car in the work garage, Uber to SFO and off we go. Fly in time if all goes well with United is around 6:30p. In a cab, over to Cosmo, check in, dump the bag, freshen up and hopefully out to the strip by 7:30-8p. May come down and hit Vesper first for a couple "get started" cocktails, then it's off for a light dinner somewhere at Aria or Bellagio, to start racking up the MGM tier credits. Maybe the food hall thing at Aria, dunno will play it by ear.  Then it's off to drink on strip, nowhere in particular. Probably somewhere mid-strip as I may be wearing down a bit after having been up since 7:30a. Some gambling at Aria or Bellagio maybe on the way back to the room, I will hold off on FB...