The Heat is On!

Yep, Spring has Sprung and Summer isn't far behind. We actually had a very comfortable weekend with highs in the mid-eighties and nice cool nights, BUT all of that will change toward the end of the work week when the high is expected to creep up over 100 degrees. In fact, 100 is supposed to hit on Thursday, which is the night of my golf league. I very well could go from the course home to my pool. The pool was up to 76 degrees this weekend and Darla was on the pool in an air mattress yesterday getting some sun.

Mother's day was a nice relaxing day. I coaxed David into hosting his Mom to a Mother's day lunch at Chevys. I n fact i called him Saturday night and told hime that he was taking his Mom to breakfast the next day. He did me one better and bought her lunch. We met at church and the two of them headed off to lunch in Rocklin at the new Chevys there. I headed home chopped up some potatoes, some onion, some turkey bacon and had it all nicely frying on the stove, when I realized that we were out of eggs. I enjoyed a breakfast of potatoes and turkey bacon with toast and no eggs. A little weird, but it works. I set out to the back yard to cut back some of the ground cover around the pool. It is so healthy that it keeps growing up the fence line and onto the raised flowerbeds above the pool. I took my hedge trimmer and cut it back along the border of the patio and the pool edging and went about cleaning up all of the trimmings. Darla and David made it back home and soon Darla and I were relaxing by the pool with a cold drink and our books, while I slowly nodded off to sleep. Darla woke me up with a start and I looked up to see an 8" rat sitting on the raised flowerbed. His tail was about 7 inches long and he scampered into the bushes before I could react. We let the cats out to see if they could raise him, but no luck. When I went out to barbecue dinner, he had fallen into the pool and was lying dead on the steps. Hopefully he doesn't have a whole family back there. I was going to call Clark to come out and set up some traps, but he committed rodent suicide before I had the chance. David took pictures of him in the pool, but I even I have standards high enough not to publish that picture in my blog. Well, not yet anyhow.

We had a fun weekend with a dinner and poker on Saturday night at one of my friend's' houses. He lives about four blocks from us and is the cousin of my two man best ball partner. We will go to Poppy Hills together with the wives in August. His cousin, John, is a master barbecue chef and his wife, Camille, is the sauce master. They prepared tri tip and chicken breasts. The sauce recipe that Camille prepares from scratch was "stolen" by her brother and he markets it commercially and is in both Costco stores and Wal Mart. I was really looking forward to going off my diet and enjoying some tri tip. I did, but the sauce on the chicken is so good that I could have passed on the tri tip. The chicken was moist and tender and delicious. John puts the marinated chicken breast on the barbecue and turns the meat every three minutes to keep it moist and on the third turn dunks it again in marinade and then turns it once more. The meat is cooked on high over charcoal for twelve minutes and is to die for. We all brought bottles of wine and the wine connoisseurs sniffed and tasted and rolled the wine on their tongues. i enjoyed the Armida Cabernet Sauvignon and the Stewards Private reserve Merlot. We also had a Greg Norman Cabernet that was very nice.

The guys played poker and I introduced Darren to the group and to poker. As is the norm in our group, Darren could not catch a card and proceeded to lose $110 in about 3 1/2 hours. He finally quit and retired to the couch. The girls were going to go to a movie, but were enjoying their vodka lemonades a little too much and ended up sitting in the kitchen talking and laughing. Darla hauled out her jewelry (by request) and soaked our friends for about $500 in sales. I won about $45 in poker so it was a good night.

Saturday was the final round of our 54 hole individual championship. I was pretty stressed out after a week of meetings and training and needed to relax and play golf by Saturday. I shot 39+41=80 for another net 70 and a three round total of -4. The winner was at -8 and I finished fifth out of 24 golfers in my flight, so was I pleased with my play throughout the tournament. I made a lot of one putts on Saturday and parred the top four holes at Diamond Oaks. I never did manage a birdie on the day, but played solid golf the entire tournament.

I am in the middle of preparing for two golf tournaments on back-to-back Mondays in June. The first tournament is the Sacramento insurance agents' annual tournament on Monday June 2nd. I am on the golf committee and in charge of the signs. We have about 30 sponsors each of which has to have an individual sign (hole sponsor, beverage, closest-to-the-pin, long drive, etc) and then I have to do a 3'x3' sign thanking all of our sponsors. On top of that, I am knee deep in preparing for the annual junior golf tournament that we sponsor at the Roseville Golf Club. The tournament is in memory of one of the junior golfers from Roseville that died in 1967 in a boating accident. He was 17 years old and already a plus golfer (meaning his handicap was lower than a zero) and his father was on the board of the Roseville Men's Club (We changed our name after being sued by an ACLU lawyer in 1991). The tournament has been going now for 41 years helped annually by a donation from the young man's family. So far I have 74 golfers signed up and expect over 100 young people to come out and play golf in our tournament. I am the tournament director and have handled all of the entries, phone calls, marketing, donations, etc. for the tournament. It is the sole biggest job of the President of The Roseville Golf Club and once this is complete, I will be done with about 90% of my responsibilities as the head of our club. The one thing that I am proudest of as President of this club, is establishing a slow play policy and enforcing it. We have purchased clocks for the first tee and the last tee and require each player to record the time they teed off and the time they finished. our slow play policy requires every player to finish in 4 hours and forty minutes or within fifteen minutes of the group in front of them. You never wanted to be in the last group of our tournament because your tee time would be pushed back thirty minutes and it would take a minimum of five hours to finish the round. Since we instituted the slow play rules, not one group has taken 4:40 to play and not one group has finished farther than fifteen minutes behind the group in front of them. I teed off Saturday in the third to last group (out of 20 foursomes) and we started within eight minutes of our tee time and finished the round in 4:15. The rules are working and the players are aware of the two stroke penalty for slow play and don't want to be the first to get whacked.

John and Samantha treated Jennifer to a spa day yesterday and then went out to dinner at some Italian festival in Las Vegas. I didn't talk to her, but Darla did and she was having a great day on her first Mother's day. We also didn't get a chance to call Shirley last night as we were busy with movies. We watched "PS: I Love you. ", a total chick flick, but an entertaining one. We had "27 Dresses" as well, but David refused to watch that.

Well, the gang is arriving and our Home Office trainers will be here shortly, so I have to get prepared for the day. I hope all is well with you, that Mother's Day was a celebration of your Mom, or you, and that God continues to direct your life and be in the center of it. Ciao.