Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Ah, Summer!

Written on 7-5-15.

    We are on vacation.  Phew!  June is over.  We made it to July.  With The First Tee, the Bisti Writing Project, and the Santa Fe train the trainers training, June was a hectic month.  And, I’m supposed to be retired?  Mostly it was The First Tee that made it so busy, but that was definitely a work of joy and love.  It all was.  To celebrate, Belinda and I spent the night at a brand new Hampton Inn in Cortez yesterday.  It had literally been open for exactly one week, according to a lady who looked like she was in charge. 
    We chose Cortez in order to stop at the cabin on our way home to spend the night here tonight.  The Edgertons had the cabin for the 4th of July, so we waited until today after they had left to spend our one night.  Danielle left the Edgertons and the cabin to come hang with us yesterday, though, and we chose to go to Mesa Verde.  We stopped...

at the new visitors’ center  positioned just off Hwy. 160 to check it out first.  Then we took the 20 minute drive to Spruce Tree House where we hiked the path down and quickly back up again; it took us about an hour.  We all broke such a sweat coming back up that we stood over the air conditioners at the museum at the top until we recovered.
    This morning, I went to St. Margaret’s in Cortez for mass while Belinda hung out in the hotel room.  It’s been an amazingly lazy day since then.  After driving here, we’ve been completely relaxed bums.  We read books together.  We ate.  We drank.  We lay down for some precious naptime.  We watched some TV.  The most productive thing we did was take a hike around the lake just before dusk.  It took us close to an hour, and I captured some gorgeous images of the sunset on my new camera.  Ah, summer.
    Now I’m writing as I sit on one of our old glider rockers (the dark green one) and Belinda is reading on the Daney’s former leather couch.  I myself read from two different golf books today.  One is brand new.  It’s Mark Broadie’s Every Shot Counts.  It’s all about the newest way of looking at golf data, specifically the “strokes gained statistic.”  Very interesting.  I think Bruce would be fascinated to read it as he is the most mathematical of us all.  I used my $25 GC from Hasting’s, a retirement gift, but it cost $35, so I had to spend around $12 of my own after all was said and done.  I was also considering Dr. Bob Rotella’s new book, The 15th Club, and a book of golf drills by Jim McClean, but this one won out because I was intrigued by the concepts inside.  That and I’m a bit burned out by Dr. Bob, although he is fantastic; I was just curious about this new way of looking at golf data.  Could it help my game?  Could it help my coaching? 
    I also recently purchased, through some more retirement GCs at amazon.com, a tribute DVD about Payne Stewart.  My fascination with Payne and his life will not go away.  I’ve already watched it, and I intend on watching it again.  I was reminded of many things about his life while I watched since I had read so many books about him years ago. 
    The other book I continued reading today was Are You Kidding Me? by Rocco Mediate and John Feinstein.  Since Eric and I played at Torrey Pines in California years ago, and since Tiger has been struggling to return to his former glory recently, this has been an interesting read.  It’s just starting to get good, too.  I’ve finally read to the point where the tournament has begun.  It should go by really quickly now.

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