Quite a day. I'm oncall this weekend, and it's been a bit busy (been called out three times, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I had a tee time at 1:39 PM at Avery Ranch and it was in the 80's in December, so really wanted to play. But I got paged out at 12:15 PM while we were still in church. It was someone from a different team who needed help (althought it was never really an issue for my team; the guy from the other team wasn't too bright). I'd brought my laptop with me, and ran out to the car, fired up the laptop and tried to connect with the Sprint broadband card. Every time I use this, it seems to need to update the firmware of the card. It did again, and took about 15 minutes to do it. Meanwhile, my crappy battery in my laptop lasts only about 45 minutes anyway, so I'd barely started, and the battery was already low. I finally got connected and talked with the customer directly. He was getting errors in DB2 (so not sure why they tried to send it to my team anyway). I talked to the customer (internal customer) briefly on sametime, and then drove to Avery Ranch while logged in.
Took me about 20 minutes to get to Avery Ranch while I was still connected via my laptop (which was about to run out of battery power). I ran into the restaurant and plugged in my laptop, ordered lunch and continued to work with the customer. I had at that point about an hour before I had to tee off. Eventually, the customer resolved it themselves (and it was certainly a DB2 issue, so not sure why it was ever sent to my team). I finished eating, paid and even got to hit a few balls at the range.
So it's nearly a miracle that I'm playing golf at all. But the whole time I'm playing doom is hanging over me. If that damn oncall phone goes off, it's all over. But it never goes off. And I shoot an 82. At a tough course. And I only have 27 putts. And I hit the ball as well as I have in a long, long time. One par 4 on the back side I hit a provisional tee shot that traveled beyond the flag on the fly (it was a par 4, albeit a short one). The yardage for this hole seemed all wrong on the card (said 371 for the tees we were playing from, but there's no way that was right). The closer tees said 297, and we think that was probably closer. But it's also possible that it was 320 or 330. The ball actually landed in the sand, else I probably would have rolled another 20 or 30 yards. It felt like the biggest drive I've ever hit (abstracting away weather, steep downhill grades and or crazy bounces etc), and I've other ones that have gone easily 330.
I had a birdie on the first hole which usually doesn't bode well for my round.
When I got home, I helped M. cook, and we had a really nice dinner. And she let me watch the Longhorns play number-one ranked (in the Coaches poll) UCLA at Pauley Pavilion and the Longhorns pulled off a miracle win with Damion James dunking for the final score when DJ just threw up a prayer. We're much better this year that we were last year, even though we lost Kevin Durant. Quite a day. My handicap had started to balloon this year, and I was at 20.60. I'm hoping this will get me back under 20. Although when I checked out the handicap spreadsheet, I noticed I'm losing a decent round off the end, so probably won't get much benefit.
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