No wonder the poor boy failed the guide dog tests… after we left yesterday it seems the owners son took the dog out for a walk and somehow in the 20 minutes they were out he managed to eat rat poison. They rushed him to the vet and the vet made him throw up. By the time we got back (around 7:30pm) he was all fine, and happy to see people, as long as they gave him a rub.
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The photo above is of him having a breakfast bone.
The hotel, or ‘Auberge’ where we are staying seems to be partly family owned and run. One of the residents is a golden lab, who went for the guide dog test but seems he flunked out of school. Honestly, I think he threw the tests as he seems like a smart guy, and probably realised that life as a guide dog would be a lot tougher than a family hotel dog.
Anyway, he was very friendly this morning, and I asked him if he wanted to take my bag and go to work for me. He then stood up, grabbed my bag by the handle and was about to walk away with it. It really was very amusing, and seeing how long the day is probably going to be (yesterday we finished around 7pm), I wish he had!
… are always fun, especially when you have to fly to the city where an internation golf tournament is being held. The result tends to be busy flights and no hotel rooms.
That is what has happened this week. Flights were not actually all that busy, but hotels were. Ended up in a hotel 30 minutes away from the site, and in the middle of a forest. Add to that the fact that the GPS unit ended us up 300 yards short of the hotel, outside someone’s house, makes for interesting trips.
On the flip side I have a room with a fireplace, although it is too warm to use it!
… that I managed to get a round of golf in. Played at Jersey Meadows, which is not a course I had played at before. Fairly nice course. Tough hole layout on a lot of them, at least if you have not played there before. Greens not in bad shape, but not in great shape. Good placement of both bunkers and water… causing chaos on many holes.
The main problem I had even before starting was my back. It is still bothering me and I forgot to take a Celebrex which would have helped relax the muscle. Result was that everytime I swung it would hurt. The backswing is fine, but hte follow through is where the pain just hits me as like I pulled the muscle, and this on nearly every swing. Result is a lot of balls with a slight fade/slice on it.
Result was actually not all that bad, with all that considered. First 7 holes were remarkably consistent, and then it went tits up for most of the rest of the round. Some due to bad swings, some to unlucky positioning after a good drive or good shot. End result was a 100.
| Jersey Meadows – 22nd Sept 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hole | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Out | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | IN | Tot |
| Par | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 36 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 35 | 71 |
| Score | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 49 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 51 | 100 |
| Stableford (22 Handicap) | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 16 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 14 | 30 |
I finally managed to fit a round of golf in this past weekend. It was only the second round that I have managed to play in about 2 months, but the result was not as bad as I expected. I am going to track my scores going forward, so if you don’t follow or play golf, then ignore the table below…
| Wildcat – Lakes Course – 16th Sept 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hole | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Out | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | IN | Tot |
| Par | 4 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 36 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 36 | 72 |
| Score | 5 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 9 | 3 | 5 | 48 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 7 | 47 | 95 |
| Stableford (22 Handicap) | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 17 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 18 | 35 |
| Scoring Key | |
| Eagle or better | |
| Birdie | |
| Par | |
| Bogey | |
| Double Bogey or Worse | |
Day was perfect for golf, and was actaully pleasant temperature wise. After taking a Celebrex for my whacky back, I made sure to focus on three things… 1) don’t over swing (that cause my back to twinge), 2) breathe, 3) relax my grip before swinging… which fits in with the whole focus on breathing thing. The result is that I hit my drives straighter than I have done for a very long time, maybe not as long, but in play. My issue was distance control on my short game (pitching, chipping, putting), but that is to be expected with the limited amount of golf I have played recently.
After I got back from class last night Wazz was complaining that she had been neglected and had not been brushed by her mum (who claimed to have tried, but Wazz was not convinced), so I sat down to give her a brush, which somehow turned into her chomping on my hand… although she was very tender about it!
 Brush, Brush, Purr, Purr… |
 Hmmm… what’s that smell on his hand… mmm smells good! |
 CHOMP!! |
Sure, it has been ohh probably over 4 years (if not more) since the last time I shaved completely. Actually could it be more like 5+? Ack… can’t remember. Anyway, I have had facial hair for a long time, and certainly ever since I moved back to Houston, so Mum Mum had never seen me without. So last weekend while I was trimming my beard I decided to cut it shorter than usual and then I decided to shave… and below are the results. Sure enough, I have not shaved since and my beard is back. YAY for my beard!!!
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Apple really are fairly slick. Sure they screwed a bunch of people on the iPhone price cut fiasco, but I have just had a fairly majoy issue with iTunes that there was infact a nice easy resolution for.
I have all my MP3′s on an external drive, including those I had puchased from iTunes (GASP… yes I actually buy my music these days as opposed to trying for hours to find a decent copy of a single on some file sharing network… and then I would normally go and buy the CD if I liked the tracks!). The other day I try to access my files and sure enough, the partition where all my music was stored had gone POOF! The other partition was still there, but just my music was gone. I was freaking out, but luckily I had a backup of 95% of them, it was mainly the songs that I had downloaded from the iTunes store. So I contacted Apple and they were nice enough to allow me to redownload tracks I had already bought! :p They also pointed me in the direction of a technote that allowed me to copy the files back from my iPod to the Mac. I know, maybe not rocket science, but it is nice that you can do that.
Anyway, I will need to get the rest of my tunes in, and set up the playlists again, but it was time for me to refresh them anyway!