Lest I Lose My Loyal Readers

Too many days between blogs.....sorry!

Enough Golf To Make Me Puke (Almost, Anyway)

So, I haven't written since my little escapade down to Alabama and the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. I travelled down with 4 others the weekend before Veterans' Day, and we proceeded to play 126 holes in 4 days. I learned a valuable lesson on this trip - keep your back elbow down! No, wait, that's one of the 836 golf tips I was having trouble with by the 3rd day. What I learned is that NO ONE should try playing 126 holes in 4 days, particularly when you travel somewhere and play on some of the hardest courses you've ever set foot on.

That being said, the RTJ Golf Trail is a GREAT place for a golf vacation. Practically all of their locations have more than one full course, and each course has a distinct design, so they all legitimately seem different too. I should mention that while playing 126 I never played a single hole twice. Pictures never really do justice to outdoor, 'picturesque' scenes in my opinion, but here are a few of the better ones I snapped between holes.

Before I move on, a short ranking and synopsis of the courses for those couple of readers that are also golfers.

1. Silver Lakes - As you might imagine, the courses feature some lakes (though they aren't actually silver). This place was heavily wooded and the course itself was in immaculate shape. Maybe my new favorite golf course on earth. I'll hafta let that idea simmer for awhile before I make that official ('Pebble Creek' golf course northwest of Cincinnati is the current owner of that title).
2. The Shoals - Silver Lakes is the nicest I've ever played, and The Shoals is the toughest I've ever played. One course was links-style (over 8,000 yards from the back tees!), the other was a 'traditional Alabama course' - i.e. it's in the middle of the woods.
3. Oxmoor Valley - Both courses have been built on top of old mining areas. There were a few holes that actually exposed shale and other signs of mining.
4. Hampton Cove - A distant 4th place. But to be fair, we played this course on the 4th day, and I truly hated golf that day. On the plus side, ZERO bunkers!

Happy Birthday, Oliver!

While I was away playing too much golf, my wonderful dog had his 10th birthday. You only turn 10 once, so I did provide a Nylabone treat upon my return. If I had more time and was cruel (and weird too, probably), I would have stuck a birthday hat on him and snapped a picture. Alas, I've been busy.

My Coaching Debut

One of my friends at work asked if I wanted to help coach an 8th grade basketball team this year (his son is on the team), so I've been dabbling in that for the last few weeks. It's not the official school team; more like rec leagues for little kids. This is a foreign idea to me, but that's what they do around here. We only practice twice a week, and these kids aren't serious about the game at all, so you can imagine we don't have too many complicated plays in our playbook. But we had our 1st game last week, and we won 26-13! This group of kids has historically been pretty bad (read, the doormat of their leagues every year), so they were pretty fired up to start the year with a win. Sadly, we got rocked in our 2nd game, so the jury is still out on whether the season is going to be more like the 1st game or the 2nd.

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Many changes are imminent on the job-front. Things are not looking up there, so I'm probably going to get a little more serious about checking out the job market (even though I'd be stupid to leave the relative safety of federal employment right now). I don't own a gun or anything, so I won't be taking one to work. But it's a good thing I also don't know karate, because I probably would've kicked a couple of people in the face by now....

Dang You, Cold Hard Statistics!

(I may have too much material here, and it's possibly not entertaining. I may just be entertaining myself, and scaring everyone else....)

Yeah, so I ended the Vegas trip down a couple hundred bucks due to $5 blackjack. I'm usually somewhere between up a couple hundred and down a couple hundred when I leave Vegas. Nothin' too devastating, considering the gov't pays me about that much for a week there anyway (on top of my normal pay). It's technically for food and other such necessities, but really I have to feed myself when I'm at home too, so I guess I might as well foolishly entertain myself and make the casinos even richer :-) I'm really close to even for all my small-time gambling endeavors, so I figure that I'm really winning :-) I also figured out the card-counting basics, but at the 'cheap' tables it doesn't really get you very far. Here's the short version. You're supposed to keep track of the number of cards with value '10' left in the deck (10s and all face cards). A higher proportion of these is good for you and bad for the house. But if you play at the cheap tables they only play with a single deck, so you only play 2-3 hands before the count resets back to 0. At slightly higher stakes they play with 6 or even 8 decks at a time, so the proportion has alot more time to get out of whack before they shuffle the cards.

As a sidenote, although Vegas is pretty much a place of overwhelming craziness, it does get one thing right - every business in that town understands customer service. I've never been to a restaurant that was anything short of attentive. I got a free lunch one day because somebody in the kitchen messed up, so my food came out not more than 5 minutes after the rest of the guys. I didn't say a single word about it, because it wasn't a big deal. But they took it off the bill, no questions asked. That seems to be more of the rule than the exception in Vegas.

AND, I also had a previously unfathomable string of horrible music while sitting in 'New York, New York' (a casino, pictured above). They played a song, and I noted to my compatriot Logan that "this song is easily on my top 10 worst songs ever". Then the next song came on and I said "geez, this song would be on that list too", and a 3rd consecutive song came on which made me think that it must not be my night. This is entirely subjective, of course, but for my money you can't get worse than these three songs:

1. Werewolves of London - Warren Zahn OR Kid Rock (it's really the same)
2. Blinded by the Light - Manfred Mann
3. Greased Lightning - Travolta & ONJ

MAYBE I would want to put a Meatloaf song in there, but I really don't know which song I'd take out so I think I should just stick with this trifecta of musical pollution.

ROCK THE VOTE!

So, I'm a registered Republican, and even though no one asked, I'll tell you I'm voting for Obama (and possibly every Democrat on the entire ballot). I'm doing this because John McCain is one of the greatest Americans of his generation, and even he has been incapable of making the Republicans make any sense. He has had to do what the party says, and that's a shame. The party is more interested in puppeteering the Christian right than in compromising to make some improvements to the country. They could have latched onto Obama's incredibly liberal voting record, played up the higher taxes issue, and destroyed him with his flip-flop from publicly funding his campaign and his lack of experience. Instead, they decided to throw Sarah Palin in the 'invigorate the core' (and 'invigorate' me to not vote republican). A few thoughts on this nomination.

1. You can't learn about foreign policy or energy plans by osmosis. I don't care how close Alaska is to Russia, nor does sitting on an oil reserve make one an expert in energy.
2. I understand the desire to put a female in VP slot to capture a few disenfranchised Clinton supporters. The republicans have a perfectly capable, smart female candidate in Condaleeza Rice (who also happens to be black, which couldn't have hurt). But she was too close to the Bush shenanigans for their liking I guess......they might as well have thrown Ann Coulter in there. At least everybody already knew she was bat-shit crazy.
   
3. When someone asks which newspapers you read, don't answer "All of them." That's retarded.
4. I'm certainly not a fired up abortion rights activist, but the incestuous rape case is one in which I expect even the purist of pro-lifers to at least acknowledge the opposing viewpoint of pro-choice. The country was founded by Christians, but was founded FOR religious tolerance. It's called compromise, and if we can't compromise when a girl is raped and impregnated by her father, we're in real trouble. If pro-lifers spent all their money to educate at-risk females rather than buying lobbyists, the end result would be less abortions than ever. It doesn't have to be illegal to lower the number of abortions.
   
5. Obama's plan isn't 'socialism', it's a progressive tax code. And it was started by the republicans. Socialism is a national banking system. Oh.....shit.......guess we messed that up. At least the democrats will tell you what they're about. The republicans aren't for free markets anymore either, but they'll say they are. And these guys (that I voted for) have been re-distributing the wealth upwards for a long time, and that system isn't working anymore. If the rich bastards want to move to India to make a couple extra million because our tax code is a little higher, I'm in favor of giving them the plane ticket.
   

/end political rant

I got an 'A' in my Foundations of Effective Management class that ended last friday. I'm on to Managing Organizational Behavior, which started this past monday. Now that I know what to expect, I don't think this class will be too tough either.

I'm going on my golfing trip this weekend. 7 rounds in 4 days, starting this saturday. I won't be blogging next sunday, but my next post should have some pictures from Ye Ol' Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.

OK, I'm blogged out.