RichL85

These are indeed wise words. I read the forums frequently, but I am the type of person that doesn't post a lot. I'm not sure if there is something wrong with that, but it's just my personality. I post when the response is something important enough for me to post. I don't post every random thought that comes into my head. Even on another forum (not golf related), I had a relatively low number of posts, and unfortunately over there, low number of posts indicated a person that did not have any knowledge of the subject. That sort of mentality drives people like me away because I'm not going to waste my energy trying to prove a point to someone that sees a post number and makes a snap decision on whether that person has anything of value to contribute. Luckily, I have not experienced that on this forum, and I hope I never do.

Made cream stew tonight with chicken and jasmine rice. Super simple and lazy but I made way too much. Looks like I've got plenty for the next few days. Cooked the chicken separately for this one just due to the amount involved. Also made a batch of soufflé pancakes in the afternoon because I needed the extra calories. These ones worked out pretty well with a little reduction in the cooking time to about 7 minutes total.

Asian sticky ribs with rice and steamed broccoli for quick dinner tonight. Took advantage of the instant pot to cook ribs in 30 minutes after I got home from work. Still have a few hours of work to finish up later to get a report sent out.

Interesting situation you had to deal with @artful_golfer. I can understand a lot of what @GaryF is saying from just a personal standpoint. I was in a lot of different competitive activities throughout school and in college, and I can honestly say if I were grouped with you, I would probably come off as "standoff-ish" but that's just me. I am fully aware that I'm a very introverted person to begin with, especially with people that I don't know well, and even with people I do know, I only have a limited amount of social capacity before I'm just mentally and physically done. It's 100% not intentional or meant to disturb the people around me, but it's just me. So Gary might come off relatively quiet due to internal focus, I might come off the exact same, but for a much different reason. I'm glad your experience improved on the back 9 and you were able to enjoy it. Having said that, I appreciate the competition, male or female. In fact, during college, I spent most of my tennis practice sessions playing with a woman that was ranked in the state. I enjoyed that more than playing with a lot of the guys around me because it forced me to play a different type of game. I usually found ways to frustrate male players and force them into mistakes, but she was very solid and forced me to play outside of my normal game to have a chance. I think over the 3 years I only won a handful of times, but we had a lot of close matches.

@edingc I may have stepped on this one a little.

CEO decided to give us the day off so I finished up a couple loose ends and hit the course for a longer practice session. Forced myself to actually spend time on the putting green and short game areas today. Probably hit more putts today than I have for the year combined from different distances working more on speed than reading. I do have a tendency to over read breaks, but leaving putts short has always been the killer for me, so that is what I'm dedicating more of my practice to. At least get the ball a foot or two past the hole. After about an hour in those areas I went to take some full swings to work on a few little things. Not really intentionally, but I found a weird tendency of mine. Apparently my swing makes slight adjustments based on where I'm looking. Long story short, I tend to look at the leading side of the ball with any club other than driver. When I pick a spot around 9 o'clock, I tend to hit a little fade, but when I look at 10 o'clock, my swing adjusts just slightly to hit a nice little push draw. It was not a ball flight I'm used to seeing, but it was interesting to make a note of it and switch it up between the two.

I still have my I-701s and they are still some of the best feeling irons I've ever hit. Srixon makes great irons for sure. The only reason I switched was just that I wanted new clubs after 15 years. And to @chisag's point, those 701s are fairly big from a visual standpoint, but on pure feel, they are incredible.

An old one, but it popped up while I was in the gym earlier so now it's burrowed into my brain.

Not much to say other than nice drive! I legitimately haven't gotten out to course as much as I've wanted due to work. It has been crazy busy for me. Having said that, for comparison, during my fitting back in September, my 7 iron swing speed was averaging around 82mph. Recently went out and hit through the bag to check gapping, and 7 iron is sitting right around 89-90mph with what feels like a much easier swing. I just haven't been able to get on the course to have ShotScope track the results for me, but I see it at the range where my 9 iron is carrying past the stake that used to be my 8 iron target.

Makes sense. I'm nervous to reduce the sugar in the eggs whites because that is part of what stabilizes the meringue. My wife is a pastry chef so in general, I don't mess with baking recipes because I've learned many of them are very finicky. I did have the same issue the first time I tried making a larger batch. They are more of a prep only as much as you can cook at one time kind of thing. Also, I 100% agree that they are not worth the prep on a daily basis. I have been eating basically the exact same breakfast everyday for the past almost 2 years, so once in awhile I just feel like mixing it up. That's when things like this or omurice come into the breakfast options just for a change of pace.

Well... Since my wife keeps sticking me with cooking duties and I had to get rid of the left over ground beef, stuck with the recent Japanese theme and made Nikomi Hambagu to go with Miso Roasted Sweet Potatoes. This is what happens when my wife complains that I only cook certain things on repeat. She's not wrong, but I'm an engineer, I stick to what I know.

Miso Ramen with hambugu inspired meatballs. We clearly need larger bowls.

Mixing it up this morning while putting together training presentations for a client.

They are actually super easy in terms of ingredients, but take a little practice in the execution. Ingredients: 2 eggs (separated, yolks in one bowl, whites in another bowl) 2 TBSP milk 3 TBSP flour (24g if going by weight) 1/4 tsp baking powder (1g by weight) 1/2 tsp vanilla 1/2 tsp lemon juice 2 TBSP sugar (26g by weight) Mix together the egg yolks, milk, and vanilla. Sift flour and baking powder into this and mix again. Egg whites and lemon juice go into a stand mixer and start whipping it. Add sugar in 3 stages to the egg whites, took about 12 minutes of whipping in our stand mixer to get stiff peaks for the meringue part. Tricky part here is now you have to mix the meringue into the egg yolk mixture without breaking the meringue, so mix gently. Preheat a pan (with a lid) over low heat. Once it's hot, very lightly coat the pan with oil and then you add the batter. If you have something like an ice cream or cookie scoop you can use that. My wife has hundreds of piping bags, so I put the batter into a piping bag and use that to get the batter onto the pan. Do not crowd the pan, you probably won't be able to cook more than one or two at a time in a single pan. When I made them for the family, I had 3 pans going. Once the batter is in the pan, place the lid on and let it cook for about 4-5 minutes. If the goal is to make them as tall as possible, you can put some batter down, let it cook for 2-3 minutes and then add more batter on top of that. After about 5 minutes, the goal is to flip the pancakes gently. It works better to almost roll them rather than flip them. Once they are flipped, cover with the lid and cook another 4-5 minutes. Sometimes they will take a little longer to fully cook. Seems the best way is to touch the sides and see if the batter is still wet, if it is, let it cook longer. Some people will recommend a couple drops of water in the pan before placing the lid to steam them a bit. It doesn't seem to make that much difference but some people will swear by it. I'm not huge on sweets, so these come out pretty sweet on their own in my opinion. It's not something to make when you are in a rush, but if you have a lazy weekend morning, it's fun how much of a different experience these are compared to the traditional pancakes.

It's a work from home day with a sick kid, so background music it is.

Had to try the pancakes again. Coffee cup shown for height reference. Improved results on the second time. Also made Oyakodon the other night but no one gave me a chance to take a picture before eating.

Thanks so much! It breathes some color into the bag. I will be more than happy to pass the trophy to next season's winner!

Or the one that beats you in the race to spending the money in said accounts...

Solid hour and a half practice session today in the quickly warming up heat of central California. Should be hitting triple digits soon, but today was lower 90s. Popped in my earbuds and pretty much ignored the existence of everyone around. Got warmed up and then hit through the bag. Wanted to see if the off season speed work showed throughout the bag. Overall pretty solid results with irons showing 4-5 mph more speed and 8-10 mph gain with the woods. Gapping was still where I wanted it to be, just going to adjust for a little more distance throughout. After that I spent a bit of time with driver specifically because it is one of my more inconsistent clubs. Overall good results with a few wild flyers that I need to try to get rid of. Moved onto some work with the wedges hitting different distances with all of my wedges and also worked on learning to hit a bit more of a lower flighted wedge shot. That was fun and actually had some success hitting that flighted shot all the way up through about the 7 iron. May not need that shot too often, but it's nice to have. Finished up with about 20 minutes on the putting green. I still absolutely hate putting practice but I'm convinced that I need to do it. I miss having golf friends to have little competitions with on the practice green. I'm competitive enough to get into putting practice in that situation, but bored outta my skull by myself.

+2 for the cut Spieth at -3 after 2nd round

First attempt at Japanese soufflé pancakes. Kind of deflated after they came off the heat. Kids are too noisy for fun food I guess.

Range session after work today. Not the best day overall, but was able to make some minor adjustments and get things on track. Was pushing things a bit right to start but got it straightened out and finished off with a handful of shots with my 5 iron and 3 wood. They tend to give me to most problems so I figured they would show any glaring problems with what I felt like fixed the issue. Must have done something right because I don't think I've hit my 3 wood that consistently well since I put it in the bag. Overall, happy with where things are at, now I just need free time to play more often.

Sweet Potato Beef Curry. Wife has been on my case about making some different foods recently so I've been experimenting a little bit. Last week was gyudon, tonight was the curry. Been on a little bit of a Japanese streak. Might attempt the soufflé pancake next weekend.

I don't see anything wrong with how you handled it @Middler. If there is some level of competition involved, I would expect everyone to uphold the same standards, whatever those standards may be. If the rules were clearly stated as you said they were, there is nothing wrong with expecting everyone involved to follow those rules. It's always an awkward situation regardless, at least if you have any sense of integrity. The people that don't have integrity are usually only bothered when they get called on it, and they blow up pretty quickly. Playing tennis back in school meant everyone called their own lines. Would anyone be surprised to hear that competitive high school kids might not be the most honest when making close calls with balls going 80+ mph? It gets real awkward to make that accusation and try to get people to act as line judges over things like that. I was also accused of sandbagging a number of times in my younger days, typically around the time of the youth state tournament for bowling. I remember placing and/or winning multiple divisions almost every year, and there would always be someone accusing me of sandbagging my league average in order to give myself a higher handicap. I really wasn't doing anything like that, my house was just tougher than the average house, but there wasn't any kind of slope system in bowling to account for that difference. A 170 average on a tough pattern can easily crack a 200 average on a typical house pattern. State tournament always used a different pattern each year and since I had been spending my time practicing on tougher patterns, I was better at adapting. It was always interesting to see a few of the kids strut in with high averages get decimated by a tournament pattern and throw temper tantrums about their equipment being wrong. My senior year I came into the tournament with around a 185 average, and then proceeded to average around 225 for the tournament. It was a weird year because I had made a sudden jump in improvement near the end of the year anyway and there wasn't enough time for my season average to account for it, and like I said, I practiced in tougher conditions than the tournament. It just happened but there was definitely a lot of accusations thrown my way. Sadly all of that was over a little bit of scholarship money because it was youth sports and actual prize money wasn't allowed.

Yes... I get weird looks...