Wednesday, October 19, 2005

i apologize

due to the ridiculous number of spam comments recently, i've grudgingly turned on the spam-blocking comment thing. i apologize for the annoyance.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Take it One Page at a Time

Well, I was sick on Thursday and Friday so I wasn’t at work, which is where I normally write these posts. I suppose I could have written something from home, but I didn’t feel like it. Fortunately Ohio State survived the lack of a Fearless Prediction this week. I’ll get Carolina’s out of the way now before I forget:

Fearless Prediction of the Week: Carolina 25, Detroit 17

Tammy (“Threads of Malice” coming soon!) sent me an article from some guy who recommends writing one page a day. Every day. It sounds like an easy, doable plan, so I committed myself to trying it.

Tally: five days, 0 pages.

I could blame my illness, but I managed to play a couple of hours of BF2 while I was sick, so that really isn’t an excuse. I just didn’t feel like writing. It’s hard to pick it back up again when you haven’t done it in so long, unless some great idea just comes out of the blue and zings you. Needless to say, I haven’t been zinged (zung?) in a while.

Part of the problem stems from my style of editing-as-I-go, as mentioned in a recent post. The article suggested that a page should take an hour or so; I’ve spent an hour on a single sentence before. I can’t simply write a page for the sake of having a page done and then go back and edit it later, as the article suggests doing.

But that’s not the whole story. I didn’t even make an attempt to write. I have no real excuse. I hereby recommit myself to at least one page a day.

I’ll start right after I finish this next round of BF2.

Friday, October 07, 2005

There's Nothing More Boring Than...

It’s been said that nothing is more boring than listening to someone else’s golf stories. I’m going to challenge that theory by writing about mine; you be the judge as to whether reading someone else’s golf stories is less interesting than hearing them.

A couple of months ago I went golfing with my brother. Since golf is really expensive, neither of us play very often, and we’re at about the same level. That level is “Extreme Suckiness” and is the reason handicaps have a maximum. My handicap would be 50; we usually shoot around 120.

Anyway, we went golfing and did pretty well for us. I could not hit the ball off of the tee to save my life; I topped nearly every drive and got a lot of 30 yard rollers. It didn’t occur to me until the next day that I just needed to take a half-step forward to correct the problem. Fortunately, the strength (relatively speaking, of course) of my golf game is hitting irons off the ground. My 2-iron saved me from shooting 180 or worse by consistently giving me 180-200 yard second shots. This eventually led to a lot of chipping, which is the absolute worst part of my game. On the longer holes, I was generally able to get reasonably close to the green in three shots or so; it usually took another two to get on the green itself, where I invariably 3-putted. Every now and then I would get a good shot or a good putt and, that day, my chipping was better than usual. When we got rained out on the 16th hole, I was on track to shoot 116, which is a good score for me.

Fast forward to last Tuesday, when I cashed in my soon-to-expire rain check and golfed nine holes with my son 11. 11 didn’t actually golf, but he went along for the ride and I showed him the basics of the game. My driving this time was better, which isn’t saying much. I kept slicing the drives – one ball ended up two fairways away – so eventually I gave up on using my driver and just hit irons off a low tee. One of my chips jumped left and landed in a pond, which was, surprisingly, my first ever water hazard, and my putting still sucked. I had a 53 going into the last (ninth) hole.

The ninth hole was in the process of being renovated, so only a small portion of it was playable, which means it was a short par-3. I teed off with my 6 iron. I was worried that it might be too much club, but, since I’m a bad golfer, it turned out to be perfect.

I topped the ball and watched in dismay as it failed to achieve flight. But the accidental shot was the best thing that could have happened; I had failed to get the ball in the air, but I had made good enough contact that it kept going and going, all the way to the green, which it rolled onto before stopping. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I’d been having trouble reading the speed of the greens all day. It had rained recently, and they looked like they should be slow, but every time I put extra punch into a putt, the ball cruised by the hole at Mach 2. I knew I was somehow going to blow the only chance I had had for par the entire day.

My first putt, from about 20 feet, missed the cup by a couple inches and rolled another five feet away. I actually took the time to line up the come-backer and let out a yell that startled 11 when it actually went in. Woo-hoo! I made a par!

I ended the nine with a 56, which extrapolates to a 112 in 18; a very good day by my standards.

There. Hope that didn’t bore you too much. Of course, if it did, you probably quit reading long before this sentence. Unless you just skipped down to see my Fearless Predictions of the Week:

Ohio State 19

Penn State 13

Carolina 42

Arizona 12