Friday mornings hit the working man hard. Stumbling out of bed in the predawn gloaming, the weekend never looks further away. The shower is an onslaught of white hot needles into the dermis -- it bleeds us and leaves us disinfected, ready for the office. Breakfast is the same as it ever was -- a nondescript tureen of dismal processed grain flakes and droplets of dusty dried fruit. It overwhelms. It topples. And then comes...the scream. Originating somewhere in the nether regions of the bowels, it builds momentum as it ascends the large intestine, up through the stomach, the esophagus, and finally, gloriously, reaches open air in a cathartic whalesong of disgust. It's a terrible and awesome thing to behold.
| Fortunately, this passes, and we can go golfing! I put in a slightly abbreviated day at the office so as to make my 4:53 tee time at the Lincoln Park Municipal Golf Course in San Francisco, California. As munis go, Lincoln Park is pretty much a winner. It's situated at the entrance of the Golden Gate, with views of the beaches to the south and of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate bridge to the East. It even has one of the more famous holes in golf, the 242 yard, par three seventeenth, which clings perilously to a cliff high above the breakers and barking seals. It's a beautiful, challenging golf hole, but it's also a tough one to get to during daylight hours if your tee-time is at 4:53 P.M. |  |
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Lucky for me, my foursome included the speedy and talented Bohners -- the crafty Kristanne (cracking another winner at left), the wily Calvin (whose poetic swing you see above), and the powerful Rosalie (whose speedy swing defies modern photographic techniques). Rosalie was wielding her "Brobdingnagian Bertha" driver with particular aplomb today, regularly splitting the fairways with laser beam drives that occasionally felled small trees. The Brobdingnagian Bertha features a head the size of a Halloween pumpkin and a clubface of space-age polymers that crackle and spark on impact. You can even get little bursts of CNN on particularly good swings. |
Now, in case I haven't mentioned it before, the elder Bohners make their home during the school year in Okinawa. There, Rosalie's golf drives are the stuff of legend -- the natives in the hills sing songs of them -- and Calvin is known only as "Le Sandbagger," a fearsome opponent who can poormouth his golf game from now until next Tuesday, and then come out and shoot 6 pars in a row, exclaiming that, "I can't believe it...this is absolutely the best I've ever played...this has never happened before," and then take your money off to the parking lot. A scary twosome on the links, I assure you.
However, this was a friendly game, unmarred by the unseemly antics that cost Kristanne her LPGA tour card during Q-school back in '95. The only problem was the time -- as we closed in on the famous 17th, darkness was fast approaching. Putting out on 16, the sprinklers came on en masse, turning my gimme par putt into an unforeseen challenge. Naturally, I missed. With that, Rosalie and Kristanne tried to head back to the clubhouse, but Calvin and I were having none of it -- c'mon, it was the seventeenth! We have to play it! We persevered, they acquiesced, and we played the hole. Though we couldn't see our balls ten feet in front of us, it was still worth it. Unable to see, I naturally parred the hole, and we headed off into the darkness, a foursome sated.
And that's, "Extreme Telecommuting -- The Golf Episode." I tell ya, Tiger Woods is changing everything. See you next time in San Francisco, one more time!
Total Miles for 6/27 = 91 one more time!