8:17 am - Tuesday - October 1st - LPG&RVR - 48° F, humidity 29%, wind 2 mph out of the southeast.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 89° F. On this date in 2011 I was at soccer fields in Moreno Valley, CA....I was the center on two matches, and an assistant referee on two others....it was hot....
Well, it has been a couple of days since I posted, so let's get started. Sunday was the second of my two days off from 'punching' greens, and I spent most of it doing relaxing. I actually felt pretty good Sunday, which surprised me just as much as it did Saturday morning. Nevertheless, resting was the order of the day. I anticipated that we would have one last day of 'punching' greens, but there were four left (#2, 10, putting green & the sod farm), and we've never done four in one day. I guess I was optimistic, or was it that my body could only only do it one more day? Could we finish in just 8 days? We'll see.
At any rate, other than working on a small project in the trailer for about an hour in the morning I spent the day ensconced in my recliner watching the final match play round of the President's Cup, and wasn't it exciting? Yes it was! Twelve individual match play rounds were scheduled for Sunday, and we only needed to win 5, and tie a 6th to win. The International squad had to win 9 of the 12 matches to win, so they were at a definite disadvantage. In the end it was too big of a disadvantage. The USA team won 8 matches, and tied a 9th to win handily.
For dinner TLE had me fire up the Sea-B-Que one more time to grill two lovely filet mignons, to which she added a baked potato. The steaks were oh so tender, and cooked my moi to a beautiful medium rare in just 9 minutes at 500° F.
Fast forward to Monday morning. TLE still had two more days off work before returning to her job on Wednesday, but I had to get up, and gird myself for what I hoped would be my last day this season 'punching' greens. I reported to Clubhouse for work around 7:45 am to find that José had already 'punched' the putting green, and had already raked all the plugs into 7, or 8 neat piles. Apparently he did that Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I could see he was serious about finishing Monday. By the time we all drove out to the 10th green he had already punched half of it, so Mike and I began loading the plugs into the John Deer Gator dump bed to haul them away. We managed to clear the 10th green of the plugs by 8:30 am.....
....next up was green #2, but José sent us back to the putting green to clear those plugs before joining him at the 2nd green. We finished with the putting green by 9 am.....wow! At this point I was becoming more convinced that we would finish all four greens Monday.
By the time we got back to #2 he, again, already had half the green 'punched', so we got to work clearing those plugs, and finished around 10:15 am. While we were clearing the plugs from #2 DeWayne and John had been spreading sand on #10 to fill all of the holes, and were ready for us to scrape off the excess sand shortly after we finished clearing the plugs from #2. We had #10 scraped by 11:45 am, so we took a lunch break. That is the first time in 8 days we actually had one green scraped before 12 pm.
José bought us all lunch, which was a clear sign we would finish Monday, because he always buys us lunch on the final day....YAY! We went back to work around 1 pm reporting for work at the #2 green, which was ready to have the excess sand removed. From there we proceeded to the putting green, which was also now ready to be scraped, and had it done by 3 pm. By this time I was out of gas, but we only had the 'sod farm' to punch now, so we all headed there to do just that. Within 60 minutes we had punched the 10' by 200' sod farm green, and were done! José and DeWayne remained behind to sand the sod farm green, while the rest of us headed for home.....it was 4 pm, and we were all ready for long, hot showers. As you know, we have never done four greens in one day this season, but we did it Monday when it counted!
The nice thing about finishing the annual punching of the greens Monday is that I still have Tuesday off before returning to my regularly scheduled job.....staging carts, washing carts, and 'marshaling'.....on Wednesday. We now have just 7 work days left with 4 days off work separating the 4th and 5th workdays. We'll be packing up in earnest those four days, and will officially roll our wheels southward on October 14th.
Thanks for stopping by!
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