Golf at Penmar

We hadn't played at Penmar in more than a month. I picked it today since it was easiest to get a tee time for and I thought for a little while there I was going to go to Arizona at Greg's invite to watch Dodgers Spring baseball AND play golf. That meant I would have been out until today. I really gotta work more on simply getting out of the house and doing more stuff like that. I mean, Lisa and Johnnie spent the weekend in Santa Clarita after all, although we did all manage to have a nice and brief family morning yesterday. Anyway I posted a pic I found of Greg hitting his tee shot at Hole 5 in Altadena 3 years ago almost to the day. Who knew a year from then we'd all be locked down by a pandemic. Heck I myself was barely a year removed from Maplewood and the divorce wasn't even final yet. Those days, Johnnie was still at Blue Oak and that was my focus I think. I was in the process of rebuilding my life.  Enough of that brief time travel though. These days it's just Scott and I. I do miss playing with Greg. Chris, not so much. This morning I treated myself to a different juice. Who knew there was a Robek's right across the street from Whole Foods? I grabbed myself a smoothie that was green but tasted of banana and mango. That would be sufficient for breakfast. This being Penmar, I expected to have a pretty good game. Especially since they were sodding the regular tee boxes and so the ones we teed off from were much more forward and much more closer to the hole. On my first drive alone, it was errant but it was already 50 yards from the hole to the righ in the trees. I still had a clear shot. But I shanked it left and past the hole and that cost me a par. I was ok with a birdie but still. After 4 holes, I was bogey-double-bogey-bogey-par. Yes I was at bogey golf. And I did get my requisite par on Hole 4. Again though, we were so close to the hole already I felt like I could have teed off all the way to the green. What happened after Hole 4 though? I had a bad Hole 5 all the way to a 6, a decent first 2 shots on Hole 6, but kept whiffing from the fairway. Same with Hole 7. I don't know what happened. I think I simply lost focus and stopped thinking about the hole. I was just up there swinging. And more often than not, I swung and missed. Lesson of the day: keep up the focus. Keep up with the game. Oh well. I went to Crimson right after and today I did something different. I can't eat rice obviously. I just had the salmon, the salad that came with it and the lentil soup. That was all perfectly good! And then I went home to try to duplicate the excellent meditation session I had yesterday. There is, of course a big difference between trying to do something and just simply doing it. I had a decent session but not like yesterday. I had it in my mind that I was going to finish tomorrow's work stuff today. But then I stopped and wondered why I wanted to do that? To get ahead? To tank tomorrow instead? I compromised with myself. I finished everyone's time cards. And as far as the big to-do, which was the HRSA survey? I simply decided to wait until tomorrow. After all the weather forecast says rain. Looks like I'll be inside mostly. What I did do was finish an identity check request that came from the IRS. I wonder why I got one of those? Maybe it's because my refund was large. $3K in all actually. That's a nice chunk. And so I went thorugh the whole identity rigamarole thing and got it all done. For the rest of the evening I watched the Walking Dead and I watched the last part of the Oscars. I'm glad CODA won Best Picture.  I was perplexed at how emotional Will Smith got when he accepted Best Actor. And then I found out he had done something very strange just a half hour previously. Chris Rock did a joke on Jada his wife and he walked up to Chris and slapped him. Right there. In front of everyone. Why is THAT acceptable? Chris Rock's joke was in poor taste no doubt. But they both were in the wrong then. It is people lashing out like that in reaction though that we could do less of. Lesson to learn for me perhaps? Watch MY reactions? At the end of the evening, it was still almost midnight when I got to bed. Weekend over after a week that saw me work more than usual. We'll focus on next week being easier.