Golf Today: An Exercise In Patience

So today we're back to Daylight Savings Time Fall Back mode, which means we get an extra hour of sleep. Golf is at Roosevelt this morning and considering that I was really late the last time we played there I was not going to let that happen again today, even if the LA Marathon was going on. I plotted a course through the 5 North exiting on Los Feliz. And to my surprise I got there in 22 minutes. W-h-a-t? This was faster than taking Vermont on a normal Sunday! Maybe I should have been doing this all along. I got there at 8:10 a full 50 minutes before tee time. And so I spent the next half hour practicing putting. And waiting for Scott to show. He did show up of course, but Daniel already let us know last night he wasn't going to make it. I'm used to just the 2 of us by now so that was ok. At first it seemed like your run-of-the-mill Sunday morning and we waited for our turn to tee off. And then we waited. And waited. It would seem that the fivesome 2 spots before us were really slow. Not even the fivesome we were waiting on mind you, the one THEY were waiting on. Now it's perfectly ok to be slow because you aren't very good. It is quite another to play as if there was no one else is on the course with you and you're taking your sweet time and talking and not hitting the ball. That is just downright annoying. This particular fivesome was so slow that the fivesome in front of us simply cut through them and bypassed Hole 3 and right on to Hole 4. So now we were waiting on them hole after painful hole. By Hole 7 I had had enough. There were now 2 groups bunching up on our hole by the time we got done. As Scott said we had 3 options: we could talk to them. Politely of course. We could bypass them too. Or we could just wait. I took the first option when we got to the tee box on Hole 7. They hadn't all hit the ball yet after just sitting there for almost 10 minutes. I told them about the groups behind us. The thing was that I guess I don't have that polite tone in me. And I'm sure I sounded confrontational. And when the first 2 responses I got where "hey what can we do, oh well" and "we're just trying have a good Sunday, don't make it worse" as if it were my fault I was about ready to go to a war of words and then from there I'm sure I would have been just fine to go a step further. A fight maybe? I can't lie and I will say I was emboldened only because I was pretty sure I would be able to take any one of those guys in a fight. Thank GOD one of their cooler heads intervened and said "It's over! WE're going to hit already". It was all I wanted. For them to pay attention and to hit instead of gaggling around without any regard for anyone else playing. I hate that more than anything. THat IS one of my buttons. When people don't think of others. Fortunately, it was OVER after that. They kept on playing, so did we and that was that. It ended up being one of the slowest rounds I had ever played. It was nearly noon when we got done. Those assholes cost me almost an hour. There was so much downtime that my activity markers were all out of whack. Usually I record 100+ minutes on a golf morning. I had 122 last week. The lowest I had had was 60 minutes. Today I logged 11 minutes. It was like I didn't even walk around at all! CLEARLY there were some lessons to be gleaned from this morning. If just to remember that everything is me pushed out. So I will have to decompress and debrief myself on it. For today, I went home, had El Pollo Loco for lunch, finished the tie-dye shirts for Lisa and Johnnie and delivered them as promised. In the meantime there was a golf game that was played. Summary was that I hammered most of my tee shots long and fairly straight... until the one on Hole 8 and all in all I only had a couple of whiffs really. So I did end up having a decent game. I will fast forward from here to this evening. Kept watching the Blacklist until I was about to fall asleep. Weekend over. What an unusual Sunday...