An afternoon of golf

After another leisurely morning, I had an early lunch and drove back to the Cathedral Canyon Golf Club. I booked another cheap round on GolfNow and once again had the course to myself. The weather was perfect. The course is actually in pretty good shape. And although lately (so far) my driver is hitting mostly straight shots, I still feel better hitting the ball hard when there aren’t houses in play on either side of the fairway. This course has lots of big trees, and there is water in play on quite a few holes. Because of the distance from some of the greens to the next tee, you pretty much have to take a cart — fairways are spread out in the community and often the cart path takes you along the side of the street to get from hole to hole. 

I started the day determined not to swing too hard — my ribs are still sore from a week and a half ago. The problem with that strategy was that when you don’t swing as hard as you can, the ball goes farther! And it feels great to hit the ball farther. So at the next tee you forget all about that, and you swing extra hard because you think, my goodness, I can sure hit the ball a long way! And the ball doesn’t go nearly as far (or as straight) and you end up an even sorer back. Golf is a great game for ‘slow learners’ like me.

I played two balls and kept score for each ball. I had a lot of fun. And I ended up with decent scores, more balls than I started with (that’s the upside of hitting balls into the water — when you start fishing for balls you end up with more than just the one you plunked into the pond), a sore back, and feeling tired but happy. It’s what I came here for. And I got some photos — even a couple of me when one of the maintenance guys obliged me and didn’t “cut off my feet” in the photo.

I stopped at Albertsons on the way home and picked up some fried chicken and potato wedges to go with my fried asparagus and mushrooms. Tomorrow’s a big day here — American Thanksgiving. The checkout lady wishes me a “Happy Turkey Day”. 

I FaceTimed with Max and Alex after dinner. Then I drove over to the movie theatre to see another movie. Tonight I saw a Swedish film (with subtitles) which got great reviews and has already won lots of international awards. The movie was called Gräns, which translates to ‘Border’. In fact, the best part of seeing the movie was listening to the dialogue in Swedish, and reading the English subtitles. It seemed to me that Swedish has much in common with German. (Gräns, when you say it, sounds like “Grenze”, which is the German word for border.) Anyway, the movie was quite bizarre — it turns out the main characters are actually TROLLS! Entertaining, if not exactly life-altering. I enjoyed trying to figure out the translations while I munched on a little bag of almonds I’d snuck into the theatre. 

Got home and watched a bit of TV. The holiday tomorrow means that lots of people don’t have to go to work (no different than any other day for us retired folks) and all the stores are open (no different than any other day here as well), and there will be football on TV and turkey on the dinner table (I’ll see what I can do). The TV is airing a constant barrage of ‘Black Friday’ ads — almost makes me nostalgic for those horrible midterm election ads that polluted and poisoned American television for the past 2 months! Okay, let’s see what Jimmy Kimmel has on his mind tonight…