The Last Two Weeks (Part Two)...

Yeah, I've slowed down on my posting. Shame on me especially since I know some readers are expecting an update about my round with my Father-in-Law.

So, continuing on from last post that saw my world crumbling under my feet. With a second day of super-high fever we decided to head to the hospital. While I was in the waiting room my fever broke and by the time I was seen my fever had dropped to 103. I was released after a chest xray and some blood work. That was Tuesday night.

I started to feel better Wednesday, but the "better" was interspersed with generally feeling like crap. I was not well enough to pick up the inlaws that evening, so we had a friend take my wife up to Houston International.

Husbands know what their wives go through when you have someone staying with you for several days. It was her folks, but she still wanted everything to be in order. It was no fun for her (or me) to have to do all the cleaning on her own. Being sick, I was of little help. I did try though... I did my best to clean up after the kids, do the dishes, and generally try to keep from losing ground (which is easy to do with kids aged 4 and 5). My efforts to help out (coupled with my mentally willing myself back to health) earned me the idiot of the day award when I tried to move our bedroom TV into the guest room... During one of my feeling better waves I decided to move the TV. We have it on top a highboy dresser. I grabbed it while standing on a stool, stepped off the stool, and tried to put it on the floor... That's when my back brutally objected and I found myself on the floor unable to move for about fifteen minutes.

Now, even if I didn't have acute bronchitis, and even if I hadn't wrenched my back, there still wouldn't be any golfing on Thursday at Tour18 as scheduled because the two solid days of rain had the courses closed.

Over the next few days, I began to recover and by Saturday night I thought I was well enough to play golf. We booked a 9:24 tee time at Southwyck. Southwyck is a Palmergolf managed links style course (Tour18 is also a Plamergolf managed course). The rating and slope are 70.6 and 118 based on the card.

I thought I shot pretty good considering the circumstances posting a 104. My Father-in-Law shot a 101. I had initially posted a 107, but made an error adding up the score (I thought I had 55 on the front, but when I entered the score into my spreadsheet I realized the three-stroke error). Hey, even rocket scientists have math problems from time to time!

The top row is par, the bottom row is my score:

4 5 4 4 3 4 3 5 4 4 3 5 4 5 4 4 3 4
4 7 8 7 4 5 4 7 6 6 4 9 5 5 5 6 5 7

The course was not as impressive as I expected it to be. For the money, I'll take The Battleground any day. The layout was very nice, the fairways were outstanding, and the greens were average. The main problem was finding a yardage marker. This has to be one of the worst marked courses I have played. I had to estimate my yardage often and you can guess how that helped my game.

I managed to lose several balls (at least 6, maybe 8) which was my main problem. Dad lost several too. I had a tough time hitting the fairways and Dad hit most of them. I didn't keep good stats for the round, but through 15 I had hit only 3 fairways where Dad hit 6 of the first 10.

All in all, I had a good time. It was great to play with my Father-in-Law and I'm looking forward to playing a round (or two) when we head up to Wisconsin in August.

Posts have been slow due to my not playing golf much due to skating injuries and the bronchitis episode. Also, work has been very busy as I had my final certification qualification simulation to work in direct support for the Space Shuttle in Mission Control. That was the Monday after the inlaws went home.

Next time I'll post a review of my first year playing the game.

-Greg