MaxEntropy

I. CHOKED. Now that I've given away the result.... It was a very good night in league last night - everything was working pretty well and I even had a little luck on my side. I did hit a couple irons a little thin that resulted in being long, but thankfully they were straight and not in any trouble. You ever hit a drive that was so bad it ended up being "good"? That happened too. Two birdies (nearly chipped in for eagle on one of them), three bogies, three pars as I stepped to the 9th tee (that's +1 for those not counting). The 9th hole on our league course isn't particularly hard. It's a par 3 that can play anywhere from 140 to 180 depending on tee and pin. Last night they had the tees back, middle pin, and it was dead into the wind. Arccos said it was playing around 185 (up to 190 with gusts). That is an awkward distance for me that I have needed to address for a couple years so doubt started to creep in. I have had some success at that distance gripping down a couple inches on my 4H and making a smooth swing, so that was my choice. As I was standing over the ball, a terrible thought crept in: "DON'T DO ANYTHING STUPID". So what happens? I tried to guide the ball rather than hitting it. Here is a satellite view of the hole: Normally, I don't even give the ponds any thought as they are short enough and left enough to not be a concern to me (especially with my typical left-to-right ball flight), but a less-than-committed swing with contact high on the face and out towards the toe brought them into play. The trees obscured our view, but to me it looked like it was on line with the cart path intersection near the upper left of the pond on the right (or maybe the rocks surrounding that pond?). We saw no splash, but we also never found the ball. We assumed it ended up in a pond, but I suppose hitting the rocks could have resulted in a god-only-knows-where-it-went bounce. I walked off with a double. In hindsight, I should have gone with a 6i requiring a full, aggressive swing and accepted being either a little short or perhaps creeping on to the front, taking anything worse than bogey almost entirely out of the equation, but I'm apparently not smart enough to do something like that. I was texting with @DiscipleofPenick after and explained what happened. His response? "Were you thinking about it?" Hell yes I was thinking about it and I choked.... I am still very happy with a +3, 38 (net -3). I was also leading my match at the time, although not by a lot. The guy I was playing is quite a bit older than me and hits the ball dead straight, just short. I was giving him 5 strokes. My little blow-up (and his up and down for par) meant we tied on strokes and tied on holes.

I was decent left handed but never tried in a game, mostly just having fun in practice. Since doing superspeed and getting more comfortable with it, I'd love to play with a lefty and try one of their clubs just to see what would happen.

Re: the non-dominant swings. I know there has been debate on this all over the innerwebs, but, as I recall superspeed made the point you always want to balance your workout (e.g. you'd never just do curls for your right arm) as part of the reason for doing them. This argument makes a lot of sense to me. Personally, I liked the non-dom swings and I got the point that it was very nearly as fast as my dominant side even though it feels awkward as all get out.

Driver has been a struggle for me most of this season - there has been a lot of high flares to the right or dead-pulls left without a lot in between. I thought I had it figured out last night in league. First hole was a bit of a pull but no real trouble (par). Second hole was a high flare OB, resulting in a triple (3-putt to add insult to injury) . I knew exactly what I did and the next two driving hole were great (resulting in par, birdie). Then the pulls started and I was in scramble mode the rest of the night. Fortunately, the scrambling was pretty good - 3 bogies and a par the rest of the way in. Ended up with a +5 41 which is one under my handicap. Overall, pretty happy with the round - approach saved me, for a change. Shot of the night was 2nd shot on the 16th hole. After pulling drive into penalty area, the place I dropped had trees blocking me with about 130 to the middle and I had to aim to the right side of the green to catch the fairway, otherwise relying on good bounces in the rough. Punched a 6 iron with almost perfect pace - first bounce was in the rough then caught the fairway and rolled nicely onto the green, at least giving me a chance to save par. Didn't happen, but I gave myself a chance. The only real problem was the pace of play. The league in front of us (one group in particular) is slow and completely oblivious. On our 15th hole, we were standing in the fairway for easily 10-15 minutes waiting for the green to clear. They finish up and one of the guys drops his ball in the rough near the green to practice the chip he just messed up. About as loud as I could, I yelled "Hey, what are you doing?" They all glanced back at us and finally moved on. They ended up over a hole behind the group in front and our round was nearly 2.5 hours. I HATE WAITING ON EVERY SHOT!

Congrats all!

We are looking at a kitchen remodel and a bunch of landscaping/hardscaping, both of which are due.

It's been a very busy week for me, so just getting around to posting this.... Our youngest daughter graduated with her Master's degree last weekend. The insane thing to me was she was able to get her Bachelor's in 3 years and only took an additional year for her Master's, which she accomplished while working part time and playing club volleyball. She's a hard worker and a bright girl. Her degree is an MPA and her focus was urban development/planning, if I recall correctly. No real job prospects right now, but she waits tables at a decent restaurant and makes a livable amount of money, especially if she starts picking up more shifts. The perfect job will come. With that, our tuition payments are done. We were able to get both daughters through debt-free, which was our goal. Now I feel like I need to join a fancy country club with our newly-available disposable income. Would be nice, but we have a couple remodeling projects in mind that will take priority over my golf.

I used to be a big, big F1 fan in the early-to-mid 2000's. After talking to @GolfSpy_APH a bit last fall about how he got into F1, I watched Drive to Survive. It was good for me since so many of the drivers/teams/principals have changed since I was into it. For example Williams was a very good team back then with Ralf Schumacher (Michael's brother/Mick's uncle) and Juan Pablo Montoya. The two top teams were Ferrari and McLaren/Mercedes. One thing I really miss is the sound of that era - V10's turning nearly 20000 rpms was ridiculous. I remember being on the front straight at Indy for the start and thinking my ears were going to bleed as the 20 cars launched. If you've never seen it, there was a fun show on the old Speed channel were Jeff Gordon and Juan Montoya traded cars on the Indy road course. There was also one where Lewis Hamilton and Tony Stewart did the same thing at Watkins Glen. Lewis seemed to really enjoy driving a car that wasn't planted by aerodynamics.

Here is a before and after picture

Happy Mt St Helens day! I grew up in SW Washington, in the shadow of Mt St Helens. Google Earth says our house was 38 miles (as the crow flies) from the mountain. I was in 6th grade at the time. A friend had stayed over the night before and we were outside playing catch with a football. On one throw, the ball appeared to shake in the air and I let it drop on the ground being very confused by what I saw. Obviously the ball did not shake, it was the ground I was standing on that shook. Very shortly after, a neighbor stuck her head outside and told us to go inside, the mountain had erupted. As I recall, the first activity really started on March 27 (I remember because it was my mom's birthday) and activity on the mountain continued past May 18. In fact, even though the typical winds blew all the ash away from us, occasionally the wind would shift and we would get some. My last day of the 6th grade was cancelled due to having 6" of ash on the ground. That was a weird time - people were discouraged from driving because a) standard air filters would not capture the fine ash particles (state patrol had these huge external air filters mounted on their cruisers), and b) when the ash get wet (hey it rains in SW Washington in the spring), it was slick as snot - not quite as bad as ice, but close to it (at least according to my dad). We would put masks on and make the couple mile walk to the grocery store to get necessities. The ash was also really heavy when it got wet. People had roofs cave in and gutters ripped off their houses, so my dad and I had to deal with it. I was on a ladder with a garden trowel scooping it out of the gutters and he was on the roof with a shovel. Anyway, that was my experience. Anyone else in the area have any recollections of the time? Especially anyone who may have been east of the mountain and got the brunt of the ash? Edited to add a gif of the north side of the mountain collapsing, triggering the eruption

Pretty good night in last yesterday, although the way things started, it could have gotten ugly very fast if short game didn't save my a$$. Instead of potentially starting bogey, bogey, double, I started par, bogey, bogey. Everything was right the first three holes, and not by just a little bit. Finally, at the 4th hole, piped one down the middle (good for long drive). The rest of the night, everything was a pull (!?!?!?). Normally par 5's are a strength, but I bogied both of them (a penalty on one and a 3-putt on the other). I ended up +5 40 and, for the first time in a long time, nothing worse than bogey on the card.

It worked great. The nice thing was I discovered the alignment was off on a couple while playing a few days after I put them on. No problem - just burst some air and rotate a bit.

Congrats, all! Looking forward to seeing the results!

This is pure speculation on my part - lower handicap players likely are better ball strikers, so when the bumps in the road come, people like you are probably a little better equipped to deal with it than someone like me (I was around a 13 when I started IIRC). Will there still be issues? I'm sure there will, but maybe not as bad as they were for someone with less skill? With that said, depending on how seriously you take tournament season, I would be tempted to start in the later in the season and do the bulk of the work during winter and try to time it so you can be at a maintenance phase when golf gets serious. I would be curious to see what the other guys say.

I had a psycho scorecard yesterday. It was flashes of brilliance (or flashes of OK-ness, depending on your perspective) among some hot garbage. Started par, par, par, bogey (3-putt ), and finished birdie, par. I was +16 on the remaining 12 holes with a few really, really ugly holes (back-to-back triples anyone?). I never really felt comfortable with the driver and it showed. Irons were pretty solid and putting pretty much saved my day. The course was new to me. I enjoyed the layout - lots of elevation change. The greens have quite a bit of slope to them or are turtle-back greens that repel anything near the edge, a few were a combination of the two. A couple of the pin placements were borderline unfair - impossible if the course had been drier and greens a little faster.

Agreed. It was not clear to me if this was a relatively normal thing, but I wish someone would have told me. Just like the SuperSpeed folks did tell us there would be periodic problems with ball-striking. That was really good to know when there were days I could barely find the club face, much less the center of it.

When I went through this, there were times of frustration and losing speed - hitting a wall of sorts. That seemed to happen for me a week or so before a jump. It was a bit disheartening when it happened.

It did not, but everything else was pretty close to my Chicago adventure.

About 10-ish years ago, I was visiting a friend in Chicago around spring break. Weather was beautiful for our Friday round, but a front rolled through that night. Saturday was brutal. I told my friend "I didn't drive 6 hours to sit on your couch. I'm game if you are." Since neither of us have ever been accused of being terribly smart, to the golf course we went. Temps were in the mid-30's and the wind was blowing hard (ponds had white caps - somewhere I have a video). Snow started falling at one point - we had to hang our heads out the sides of the cart to see where we were going from all the snow stuck to the windshield. Fortunately it didn't last long. One of the par 4's was completely into the wind. Dr, 3W, 4i (all of them were decent) and I was still short of the green. I always swore I would never do that again, but did it again with @DiscipleofPenick a year and a half ago in similar conditions.

Memorial Day weekend is likely not good for me - my wife's family will be in town. Unsure of 20/21 just yet.

6 of us total, 5 active MGS'ers. Me, @MattF@Mr_Theoo@DiscipleofPenick@gmmiddle

I didn't see a lot of pics being taken. Hopefully someone took a couple.

Myself, @MattF, @Mr_Theoo@DiscipleofPenick, @gmmiddle, and my friend Mike had a mini MGS outing at Turkeyfoot in South Akron today. It is easily the best draining course around here and has some of the best greens. Course was in great shape and a good time was apparently had by all. I started off pretty poorly with two doubles and a triple in the first 6 holes. Finally figured out on 7 that I was getting too steep and tried to flatten things out a bit. Finished the front with three pars, shooting a +9, 46. Good play carried over onto the back and I had 6 pars, a bogey, and a birdie when we got to 18. This hole is a beast on a calm day. Today it was dead into the wind. Arccos says it was playing 650 yards. I hit a decent drive, good 3w second, and sat about 180 from the green. I grabbed a 3h since it's my stock 200 club and clipped it nicely, but pulled it (OB right, with my fade have to protect against it). I saw most of what happened next, the rest was relayed to me by the ranger. My ball hit the cart path, bounced onto the roof of the party barn (octagonal building in upper left of pic below) then jumped over to the roof of the clubhouse and slowly rolled into the gutter. Ranger said he heard it rattle down the downspout. Ended up taking a double on that hole, but am thrilled with a +2, 37 for the 9. All-in-all, a good day, but a strange way to hit below my handicap.

Fun day and the course was in great shape. I only took one picture - one of my favorite tee shots in the area. Hard to see from the pic, but it's way down hill from the tee to the fairway. As far as play, it was a tale of two nines for me. +9 46 on the front, +2 37 on the back. I was even par on the back when we stepped to the 18th tee. See the How'd You Play thread for the description of the brutal double to finish.

0% change of rain between 12 & 4. A bit cooler than expected, so be prepared.