Five days in September.....

7:55 am - Saturday - September 28th - LPG&RVR - 54° F, humidity 39%, wind 3 mph out of the south by southeast....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 90° F.  On this date in 2018 TLE and I were in Providence, RI having lunch at Trinity Brewhouse.....

.....the view this morning.....the leaves are turning quickly now....

I've been absent from the blogosphere world for about 5 days now, and for good reason.  Monday was the third day of green 'punching' here at the Likely Place Golf and RV Resort, and I was facing 5 consecutive days of that same activity.  I needed every minute of every morning to get my knee and back ready for 6-7 hours of some of the hardest work you will ever do, so I decided to suspend writing the blog in favor of being mostly physically fit to make it through each day.  Last year we had a crew of 8, and were able to punch 3 greens a day.  This year we have a crew of 6, three of whom are over 70, including myself.  The first few days we struggled to finish 2 greens per day.  What I have discovered this week is it does not matter how old you are, you will be 'whipped' at the end of each day.....some just more whipped than others....lol.

After the weekend hiatus from green 'punching' I felt pretty good as I drove Club Car Villager #20 out to the 7th green to begin the day.  Mike Picot (mower Mike) and I have worked together for 3 years now scooping up the thousands of plugs into the John Deere Gator, which has a dump bed.  Mike and I estimate that the average size green here generates around 90,000 plugs, which means we will have scooped, when finished with the 18 primary greens, 1,620,000 plugs into that Gator.  We use large snow shovels to scoop up the plugs....

The plugs being pushed into piles so Mike and I can 

scoop them up and put them in the John Deere Gator

Scraping the excess sand off each green after they have been 'sanded'

.....José began 'punching' the first green of the day around 8 am, and in spite of all my physical therapy before work I was ready to be done by 10 am, and we still had 4-5 hours of work to go....lol!  The 6th and 7th greens are two of the largest greens on the course, and we did not finish them until 4:30 pm.  With an 8 man team a 'punching' day was around 5.5 to 6 hours long, and we were always done for the day by 3-3:30 pm each day, and that was doing 3 greens each day!  As I drove home for the day I wondered how on earth I was going to do this for 4 more days this week, and then 3-4 days next week.

Without TLE's help each day massaging my back each morning, and evening I do not know how I would have gotten through one day, let alone 5 consecutive days of 'punching' greens, but I did.  Each day we would meet at 8 am at the next green to be punched, and by 10 am each day I was out of gas, but I just put my head down, and kept moving forward, and somehow by Thursday we were punching 3 greens a day with a smaller crew.  By Friday Mike and I were operating on 'fumes', but we kept at it, and finally around 4:30 pm Friday we had finished scraping the excess sand off the third and final green of the day.....#1.  We now have just the 10th green, and the 2nd green, plus the putting green to finish on Monday.  I'm not sure when we will do the 'sod farm' green, but I'm pretty sure that will be later in the week.

As I sit here writing we have just 7 days of work left in the season,  and it appears we will be departing LPG&RVR on the 14th of October.  This next Thursday I'll officially turn 75...where have the years gone?  I've been saying I'm 75 for 6 months now, so my birthday will kind of be anticlimactic....lol!

Thanks for stopping by!