What handicap?

 

          I’ve been dodging my golf league, which is strict about score-keeping, for the past two weeks, but today I broke down and played. Being a middling-to-poor player, I’m tired of perpetually being teamed with those in the top division. I’m even guilty of signing up to play because I know there’s a 99% chance of rain that day (as I did last week).

          Why do I stay? I’m hedging my bets for a future when the friends I go out with on other days will no longer be available.

          But today went well. My group of four consisted of one person I play with for fun on Tuesdays, one (Nancy) I’ve been out with before who is good but who doesn’t intimidate me, and a third who I didn’t know but who was a delightfully poor player. Very soothing.

          It was a little worrisome that the third player never quite grasped the fact that you need to wait behind the firing line before marching out in front of someone who’s swinging a club. Maybe she finally got the message when she was yards ahead of us; someone’s shot, instead of going straight, winged off to the left and hit her golf bag next to her.

          We were the very last of the league to tee off, likely because of the second player, Nancy.  I’m pretty sure she’s well into her 80s, is doubled over with age, and always brings along her four-prong cane.  I think the schedulers have deemed her a slow player and so park her at the back so she doesn’t slow down everyone else.  Still, she kept up with us perfectly well. I would just drove her in the golf cart to her ball, she’d hobble over to it, swing, and send it sailing for yards beyond any of ours.

All in all, It was a good day. We had perfect weather, I made par on one hole, and was one over par on another.

          Our octogenarian? She won the round, out-swinging us all.  

         

         

Mahjong, yoga, and turkeys

 

Life lately has been a soothing stream of routine events. So soothing that I haven’t written a blasted word anywhere.

Still, there have been a few breaks.

Yesterday, the group I play Mahjong with trekked out to the lake house of one of the members, where we all ate too much of our various lunch contributions and admired the view. 

In spite of the 65-degree temps and sporadic sprinkles, some opted to even take a slow boat ride. I know too well how much cooler even the slowest trip in a boat can be, so I stayed back with the desserts. Oh, and we did play some Mahjong, too.

 

This morning was my regular Wednesday yoga class, where my body let me know it was uninterested in bending anything. It didn’t help that the instructor held several of the positions longer than usual, IMHO. My wrists were unhappy with the extended time of ‘down dog’ and my knees decided ‘warrior two’ was not going to happen today.

 

Still, I was now loosened up, and I managed to add a couple of coral bells to the garden so I didn’t waste all that limberness, and that earned me some porch time.

 I settled in with my book and all was well for a while until I heard the cluck-cluck-cluck of turkey warnings.

I looked up, and sure enough, there were the four musketeers who travel back and forth in our backyard all day. They had been squatting in the shade enjoying the afternoon breeze, napping and thinking tiny turkey thoughts.

And then drama:

Fortunately, the four dodged to the left while the fox took off to the right and not a feather was lost.

If I only had a brain

 Ah, the comfort of wandering our town library and finding something by a favorite author. And once home, possibly setting it aside in the pile, to read last.

Lawyers, Carpenters, and Doctors - Oh My!

         There’s been so much going on in the past two hours, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m retired after all. What started out as a pretty ordinary day definitely picked up speed in the afternoon.

Slow Saturday

Not a heckofa lot going on here. Nowhere I needed to be, so I meandered through the morning. Enjoyed my tea, finally put on some clothes and did a walk around the complex. I then made a trip to the library, where I noted that the rose bushes there that I volunteered to tend needed me to return with clippers in hand for dead-heading.

Sniffing Blanks

          Lately, the odds are pretty high of finding me at a standstill in front of the open fridge sniffing barbecue sauce or with my nose in the jar of kalamata olives.

A day in the life of a grandmother

          My Saturday began hunched over my phone and computer.