What I learned about golf...

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I had the opportunity to go to Colonial Country Club yesterday and be a part of a charity fund-raiser for The Gladney Center for Adoption. No, I didn't golf. I was just there to keep score for the foursome I was assigned. Evidently, somebody had to do it. I mean, any time I have ever been golfing that little task was done by those who were doing the golfing but not on this day. On this day things were different. I've not been much of a golfer since "The Incident" (more of that in an upcoming Storytime) and so I have been out of the loop about some important facts about golf, some of which I will share now. The first thing I learned was that I can't afford free drinks. On nearly every hole there were huge wooden containers filled with ice and all kinds of things to drink. There were cokes, water, Gatorade, and beer all free for the taking. I helped myself of the Coke and water as did the four caddies. The golfers each had maybe one beer during the course of the day but mainly water as well for them. I got to thinking about that. While I'm not much of a golfer I know that very few people just give away much of anything so I quietly asked one of the caddies about how much he thought these guys paid for the priviledge of playing at the Colonial for the Gladney Cup. I'm thinking it is probably something outrageous, like four or five hundred dollars. He said he wondered the same thing and had looked it up online the day before and it cost $10,000 for the foursome! Oh, ok, "free drinks", right. The next thing I learned was that gear don't make the golfer. Three of the foursome were pretty good golfers, each hitting about 4 or 5 over par. The fourth guy, whom you could barely see behind all of his equipment, shot 27 over. That's still better than I'll ever shoot but what got me was the amount of stuff, high-dollar stuff, he had. His poor caddie had to lug that oversize leather bag filled with every kind of club known to man with every pocket filled with gadgets and helps. I wanted to tell him that his laser, range-finding, GPS-enabled, hole-seeker thingee he was constantly using and slowing everybody up with was not going to help when you shank it into the woods every shot. And your golf ball retriever needs a snorkel on it there, big boy. Good thing he had that Personalized Full Grain Leather Bag Tag. It matched his Personalized Gold Plated Divot Tool and Cigar Holder. And I hate to think about how much that driver cost. No, not that one. The other one. (Yea, he had two.) Evidently, if you attach a mule's head to a custom club shaft it helps you hit the nearest tree every time. But the main thing I learned about golf yesterday was very important. In fact, according to the consistentcy of usage, the aftershot encouragement cannot be underestimated. You see, after each and every shot all members of the foursome are to encourage the ball and / or the golfer with two syllables. The ball is usually the first to get the encouragement. Common encouragements (remember, always two syllables) are "get up", "lay down", "get legs" or a simple "baby!". Next, the golfer will get his encouragement. It is always positive no matter what zip code the ball now has. Appropriate terms include "sweet strike", "nice out", "big dog", "boom town" or "Arnold" (Palmer or Schwarzenegger, I assume). I hope this lesson has been helpful. Please tune in later for Storytime when I continue my insistence that a good story needs to be told even if it makes me look bad

Put the WEE! back in Halloween.

The older I get, the more I realize the less I understand. When I was a kid our church had a haunted house (in the church) at Halloween. We loved it. I know now that we can't do that any more. Too many people get offended by all that and so, in order to provide an option on Halloween, our church will have bounce houses, food and games at our "Fallfest". On October 31. With candy. People will dress up. Some will say, "Trick or Treat!". We don't celebrate Halloween any more though? In case you are one of the few we have successfully fooled with this let me explain. Ok, wait. This is the part I don't really understand. I asked somebody the other day why they believed we shouldn't celebrate Halloween. I told them I know all about its origins as All Hallows Eve and that this was the big day for Satan-worshippers and all that stuff. But if this is Satan's biggest day, I'm not impressed. I never hear anything about Satanists ever doing anything on Halloween. Can't we go back to calling what we do "Halloween"? Their response to my question was that we don't celebrate Halloween because it's not Biblical. Well, duh! Neither is Christmas nor Easter. Those were pagan traditions as well but when anybody tries to call their Christmas tree or Christmas party a Holiday Tree or Winter Celebration we are ready to clobber somebody in the name of the Lord. All I'm saying is that we're not really fooling anybody with this. Even the kids. It's supposed to be about the kids so do they have to keep wearing their Halloween costumes they bought at the Halloween store to get Halloween candy at the "Trunkfest"? Somebody help me understand.

Let's play, "Which one Doesn't Belong" again!

Which one of these people doesn't belong at the meeting of United Nations yesterday? Hmm...could it be the guy at the top left who you wouldn't see at all if he wasn't smiling? Or could it be Ronald Reagan top row third from right? Maybe it's Pablo and Achmed on the lower left who thought this was "business casual" day? Obama, who is doing his best Glamour Shots, tilt-the-head look, seems to think the guy on his right shouldn't be there but I'm pretty sure everybody else in the world seems to think our president is the only one who doesn't belong.

Sunrise in Paradise

For my 666th post I thought about posting something about all the evil in the world but who needs that? How about a beautiful sunrise over the thriving metropolis of Paradise, Texas? A beautiful sunrise or sunset always reminds me of Romans 1:20. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

"Fall" is in the air.

Yea, yea, the cooler weather is great but that's not the kind of fall I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of fall that hurts your pride and body; the kind of fall you don't see coming and to be honest, don't know if it is really going to happen until you are on the ground.

I went to clean the windows of a house yesterday and got there the same time some tile installers got there too. We were all getting our stuff out of our vehicles and chatting and trying to be cool yet professional. Don't act like you don't do it too. I have my bucket in one hand and my broom in the other. The broom is for sweeping the window sill and clearing out cobwebs.

I set my bucket down on the sidewalk and moved the broom to my left hand at the same time my left foot rested against a small stump in the grass. I'm too busy telling some witty story to the other guys to realize that my momentum was still easing leftward. Not very quickly, but still easing that way. I'm just to the really clever point in the story when I realize I'm slowly starting to lean.

No problem, the broom is there to hold me up and I'm comfortable with that. Ok, maybe too comfortable because now I'm leaning on it pretty heavily and my grip starts to tighten around the wooden handle. Am I falling? Not really sure. Still talking like nothing is happening but now the bristles on the broom start to fold under and I lean that much further over.

Wait, wait, uh oh, yep. I'm pretty sure I'm falling but it seems to be taking a really long time. My hand starts to slide down the broom handle and I see my right leg completely off the ground and rising. Now it's hard to look cool at this point and I don't remember what I was saying which makes me look even stupider as I continue to ease downward and to the left.

A few more minutes of this and I realize that I am for sure falling but the good news is that I only have about a foot to go before my left pocket hits dirt. It's too late to reverse course but I still have plenty of time to make needed adjustments and so I let go of the broom and put my left hand out to help me bounce right back up but there is a freshly clipped bush there and I cut my finger on it.

The reaction is to bring that hand up which now lets me fall even further over to the left and so I tried to squirm to the right but now where did all these bushes come from? I'm a turtle on its back for a couple of seconds thrashing around in a man-eating bush with a bloody finger and a story untold. I don't know what's worse. And the whole process seems to have taken about an hour and a half.

I'm not sure how I got out of there. I may have blacked out from a total lack of coolness, I don't know, but by the time I managed to get out of there most of the guys had politely averted their eyes and had gone to work. Heck, you can't watch a guy fall all day. Anyway, for their sakes I hope to catch up to them again to finish my story. But I may wait til spring.