The Black

(For some pictures, check here)

The executive summary: The most difficult straight-forward course I've ever played. Tobacco Road is hard, but mainly because you can't see half of the pins or fairways. The Black is just big and hilly and has the most penalizing bunkers imagineable. However, the greens are relatively dull, and so if you have a good ball striking day you can make a decent score. Check that -- a great ball striking day.

Here are my notes/thoughts from the day:

Pregame: Get there really, really early: 8:00 for a 9:51 tee time. Maybe the earliest Wiseman has ever been to a golf event. The clubhouse is gorgeous, and looks a lot like a real country club. That said, the range is ghetto, and amazingly small for a facility that hosts 5 golf courses. The security associated with teetimes at the Black is impressive: golfers get wristbands once they pay, and the wristbands are cut off by the starter on the first tee. The weather looks dicey as we tee off.

#1: The first tee is right there where everyone is watching, and with the signs for the Open looming above it is pretty nerve racking. The first hole is 40 feet below the tee box and a sharp dogleg to the right. I hit a solid drive just into the rough at the elbow of the dogleg, but still can't see the pin. 8-iron from 138 gets pin high on left. Easy chip to 5 feet below hole, knock in putt for par. Best drive may have been Mike's, which was 75 yards left of the fairway into the fairway on the Green Course.

#2: Probably shouldn't have hit driver, because I would have rather been on flat spots. Drive into right rough, can't hit any sort of fade/cut/slide off the side hill lie, so I pull a 7 iron into the rough 50 yards short of green. Hit a 60 degree wedge to 15 feet, two-putt for bogey.

#3: Playing about 152 from the whites. I knock it 5 yards right and 5 yards past pin, two putt for par. Wiseman hits 6 iron on the front part of green and rolls in a nice 25 footer for birdie.

#4: Yarg. Something makes me hit 3 wood to try and stay short of trouble that I couldn't have reached anyways. I leak my tee shot into right rough, try and get a 4-hybrid onto the 2nd plateau, but instead hit into giant bunker. Good lie, hit a 7 iron pin high about 40 yards right of green (great angle). Hit a good chip, but three-jack for double. Just a fantastic risk/reward hole for the pros, since they have to kill a long iron uphill to reach in two, but there is a false-back to the green.

(You'll notice a theme here: missing to the right. I have no idea what the left side of the course looks like. I hit a couple of drives down the left half of the fairway, but that's it. It could be really easy over there, but I'd never know.)

#5: Bust a high fade down the middle, which is perfect for the diagonal fairway. You could hit the left side of fairway and have 250+ yards. I have 180 back uphill and hit a 4-hyrbid pin high, 15 yards right of green (magically, not in bunker). Hit another good chip and knock in the putt for par.

#6: +3 through 5 holes, and the wheels come off. Kind of a tough tee-shot, since you can't really see anything except a little sliver of fairway (hole turns left and goes steeply downhill about 225 yards off the tee). I hit a weak two-iron that leaks into the fescue, chip out into the rough on the other side of the fairway, and chunk something just short of green. Try a miraculous flop (to an absurd pin position), blade it over the green into the fescue collar of the back bunker. Try to play it from the bunker (ball was level with my chest)... miss twice, come out of the bunker and hit it lefty... back into the bunker. Hit out, two-putt for X (counts as 8 for handicap purposes).

#7: Hit a decent drive into the fairway, but am pretty far left (another diagonal fairway). Hit a terrible weak layup into right rough, but am able to muscle an 8-iron from 132 onto the back of the green. It starts pouring. POURING. I try and make my 5 footer for par with the rain pouring down, but alas I miss. Bogey.

#8: We kind of play this on the run since the group in front of us was scared by the rain. I hit another weak fade 5-iron, nearly get stymied by a tree but hit a decent chip, two-ish putts and we're off to #9.

#9: Fantastic drive down the right side, although since it's a dogleg left I'm not in the best position. (Incredible fairway... not a flat lie anywhere.) Hit another weak fade 3-hybrid about 20 yards right and 10 yards short of green. Try and punch a wedge back onto the green but come up short. Plug into the lip of the bunker (remember that rain?). And I mean "plug" and "lip". Manage to get it onto the fringe, cover myself in wet sand, chip, and hit two putts for a triple.

So I was 3 over through the first 5 holes and 9 over over the next 4 holes. Suh. Weet. At least the weather was sucky.

#10: Great tee shot down the left side. 5-iron from 180 ish comes up short into the bunker. Rain is pouring again, we wait it out under the shelter. When it starts slacking off I chunk my bunker shot (yeah wet sand), finally get out and two putt for double.

#11: Dumb stuff all around. I'm too lazy to put my glove on and hit my worst drive of the day. Amazingly I find it in the fescue and the lie is a little bare. I try and hit a 4-hybrid back out to the fairway, but the club gets twisted and I barely make it back to the "short" rough. I hit the same club and chunk it down the fairway into the left fringe. Next comes a 60 degree wedge from 70 yards. The fringe is so nice and the grass is so dense that my wedge slides right underneath the ball, so I hit a really high shot that comes up about 5 yards short of the green. You shouldn't be surprised to find that there is a bunker short of the green. And that I had a buried lie. Again. I leave first bunker shot in the bunker, finally get out (hitting the pin) and two putt for my 2nd quad of the day. That's +15 over 6 holes.

#12: Turnaround. Decent drive down the right side leaves 235 to hole (my fade really doesn't do much good on a dogleg left). I don't trust my 3-wood so I try and rip my two hybrid. I remember doing the same back when I shot 77 and adjusted my posture so that it was a little more upright. Boom! I don't quite hit it 235 (more like 220, and then it plugged). Hit a 9-iron bump and run that rolled right past the cup and onto the back fringe. Cozy a putt down the hill to an inch for a bogey.

#13: Big par 5. Leak a drive a little right, but am able to hit a 4-hybrid out of the light fescue. Have 81 yards for my 3rd shot. I hit a 3/4 54 degree wedge exactly 81 yards. Unfortunately I hit it with a ton of spin (or, at least some spin -- that should be a pitch for Vokey, since I can't spin anything) and pull it back down onto the front shelf. Run the birdie putt by 5 feet and miss the downhill slider on the comeback.

#14: Leak a 6 iron from 167 to the right. Finally figure out how to hit out of the sand and hit a great bunker shot to 10 feet. Miss the putt, but hit my 3rd bogey in a row. That's pretty good here.

#15: The hardest hole on the course, and arguably the hardest par 4 anywhere on earth. I bust my drive down the middle and am left with 175 to the hole. I play it 2-3 clubs uphill (3-hyrbid), but catch it thin and land in the rough short of the green. (I did hit a 2nd 3-hyrbid and knocked it on... it was the club.) Make a good chip, miss a 20 footer for par, end up with bogey. Feel like a champ.

#16: Hit my 2nd consecutive fairway but am rewarded with 216 into the wind. Two-hyrbid comes up into the right bunker, hit a great bunker shot to 15 feet, two putt for another bogey.

#17: Hit a nice 3-hyrbid from 195. Ball fades a bit much and am left on the lower shelf. Have to putt through the fringe, which throws me off, and end up 3-putting for bogey.

#18: Close out with yet another fairway hit. Have 153 back up the hill to a dead-front pin position. Hit a nice 7 iron that comes up just short of the green, but make an easy chip 4 feet by and make the putt. Book-end the start and finish with pars.

Holes 1-5: +3
Holes 6-11: +15
Holes 12-18: +6
Total: +24, par 71 = 95

Some notes:

I didn't lose a ball. I hit the fairway on 7 of 11 par 4s and was rewarded by getting to hit 4/3/5/2/3/2/7 iron in to the greens (hitting none of them). I only hit my pitching wedge on the driving range, and only hit one 9 iron (a bump and run).

Yarg. What a rough middle of the round... In general it's tough to see how I would score a lot better here. I can obviously replace the quads with bogeys, but I don't see a ton more pars out there: I can't expect to reach the green on many of these par 4s in regulation (I'm not that accurate with a 3-iron), so at best I can make decent chips and try for bogey-option-par. I could realistically birdie #7 and #13 (par 5s), maybe #3, maybe #1, but that's about it.

The blog is dead, long live the blog

For a variety of reasons, I'm done with the old blog about random stuff going on in my life. But I have decided to blog about golf, because I love golf and writing about golf. Sorry if that isn't your cup of tee. (HA! Tee! or Tea!)

Duke

Long story short: blog has been silent for the past two weeks because I didn't have the InterWebs at home. Now I do. Regular blogging to resume shortly. In the meantime, I managed to score a ticket to the 1st round NCAA games yesterday. Saw Duke barely beat Belmont. Here's the thing: the crowd was so anti-Duke they booed the cheerleaders.

Read that again: they BOOED THE CHEERLEADERS. Who does that? Sure, Belmont is a great story. Boo our basketball players. But our cheerleaders? Jeez...

Day 4 Photos

A little out of order, but here's what happened between Columbia, MO and Charleston, WV.

Ozarkland. We didn't go in, but it was the most interesting thing to take a photo of while filling up with gas. That and I didn't think that the Ozarks actually came that far north.

The Arch. I was surprised that the park is actually called "Jefferson National Expansion Museum." The brand "arch" and "gateway" aren't anywhere in the name. Go figure. Anyways, this thing is really cool, especially as you read about the history of the design (1947) and construction (not until 1960). Saarinen didn't know how to build it, and by the time they figured it out he had passed away.



Not much going on in southern Indiana, so we made a 7 mile side trip to Santa Claus, IN. They've got this and a huge wooden roller coaster. And farmland.

The profile of the Kentucky State Capitol from a hill way up above the heart of Frankfort. The Capitol building is nice, but the governor's mansion is off the hook.

4,238

Fairfax Station, VA

And... we're done. Or, a week ago today, we were done. There was something refreshing about waking up to a "short" drive of only 350 miles or so, but it was also sad to be heading into familiar territory. Once I crossed into Virginia there wasn't a stretch of road in front of me that I hadn't driven at least once before. That was true for the first time since I drove south of Salem, OR.


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We tried to end the trip the way we started: looking for a giant hole in the ground. Turns out there is something called the Grand Canyon of the South in Virginia, but sadly it was way further south than we were going. After reading a terrible review of basically all of the BBQ places in Charlottesville we decided to make a break from smoky pork products and go after more traditional country food. Lunch was at the Southern Kitchen (surprisingly, no website) which probably has the best imitation of my Grandmother's food ever. The tea was similar, the green beans were very similar, the potato salad was very similar... the fried chicken was a little different, but not by much.

After lunch we drove to Middletown, VA, home of Route 11 potato chips. It's a surprisingly small little building where they make small batch potato chips. They are unafraid to use the word "chip" as a verb, and are very proud about their deals with Cracker Barrel and someone else (can't remember). The best part about the "tour" was getting a hot chip, which is a surprisingly pleasant treat.

With that we hopped on I-66 and made the familiar 50 mile trek home. The trip was over. We could stand up and walk around and not get back in a car. Fantastic.

To close, pictures from Day 4:

The WVa state capitol:

Home Sweet Home!

Charleston, WV

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Details to come tomorrow. Highlights:

• Stopped to see the Gateway Arch in a frigid St. Louis. Pretty cool stuff, especially from an engineering perspective.
• Didn't find a Starbucks to start the morning, which was a big disappointment.
• Took a side trip to Santa Claus, IN.
  
• Saw another State Capitol (Frankfort, KY)
• Ended up in our last State Capitol (Charleston, WV)

Day 3 route

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Day 3 Photos

Trying again with Day 3 pictures:

East of Amarillo is, supposedly, the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. I don't have any way to validate the claim, but it does look pretty big compared to the power poles nearby.

The Oklahoma State Capitol building. That's definitely an oil rig in the foreground. The building is quite impressive.

The inside of the Capitol Dome. The dome wasn't built until 1999, and the names of the donors are inscribed on the marble inside. Like SBC and Halliburton.

An Oklahoma rest area.

Some Kansas grassland. I can't begin to capture the emptiness... Kansas wasn't nearly as flat as advertised, but it was as grassy and empty as advertised.

The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. We didn't get to go in. There isn't a lot going on in Topeka.

Columbia, MO

We ended up in Columbia, MO today. Original plan was to stop in Kansas City, but we decided to grab our BBQ and then drive another 120 miles down the road before pulling in for the night. It was our first 4 state day, our first day over 700 miles, and our first day without a giant hole in the ground. The highlights, this time in bullet form:

• BBQ stop 1: Lunch at Earl's Rib Palace. The food was good: my ribs were really good, and the sides were great. Dad's pulled pork was also good, but he hated the slaw. Their "sweet tea" also lacked... sugar. The food would have left us with a B/B+ rating, but the history of Earl puts it to an A++. Turns out that Earl was Elvis' personal chef and confidant, and was quite proud that Elvis put on 50 pounds while under his tutelage.
• BBQ stop 2: The original Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City. Frankly, pretty mediocre. Was a little sketchy to walk into, and the ambience was such that it should have been a grade A joint. Turns out the ribs were only okay. The sauces, however, left me very confused. The "hot and spicy" sauce was pretty good, while the mild sauce tasted like Old Bay seasoning in a vinegar and tomato solution. Not very good.
  
• The Oklahoma State Capitol is almost worth a trip to Oklahoma City. It's really a gorgeous building, and the actual House Chamber is really stunning (we didn't hit the Senate side, but I assume it was the same). Plus, you can pretty much walk in and go anywhere you want in the building.
  
• Kansas is not as flat as advertised, but impressively empty, even when compared to wildly empty places like Northern Arizona and New Mexico. Its state capitol is way less impressive than Oklahoma's.
  

Photos coming later when my internet connection doesn't suck.

Amarillo

Day 2 found us driving between Flagstaff and Amarillo (660 miles, with side trips); with the exception of Albuquerque there is stunningly little in between. The high desert of Arizona slowly melds into the slightly less high mountains of western New Mexico, which themselves slowly meld into the high, flat plains of Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. To be frank, it's stunningly boring. Here are some pictures and stories:

Just outside of Flagstaff* is Meteor Crater. It's an enormous hole in the ground, which as you probably surmised was created by a meteor tens of thousands of years ago. The picture below doesn't really give you a great sense of scale, but you see some stuff at the bottom of the crater? That's a 6 foot tall fence, which is about the same height as my dad. Meteor Crater turned out to be the second and last stop on the "Giant Hole in the Ground" part of the tour.


This is a picture looking back towards Flagstaff taken from the rim of the crater. Yeah, that's 35 miles away. Flagstaff sits about 7000 feet above sea level, and I think the higher of the two peaks here is 11,000. We crested the road between them around 8046 feet on Monday night. In general I think this is my best picture in terms of capturing the enormity of the West.


This is "70s man", just standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. If that doesn't ring a bell, think about the Eagles song "Take it Easy". One and the same. Just to the left is historic Route 66, which is arguably the most disappointing part of the trip so far. There's nothing else to note about Winslow.

We ended up eating lunch at Mr. Powdrell's in Albuquerque. My dad got the pork ribs while I got the beef ribs, figuring we were in a beefy part of the country. Not to foreshadow, but I think this trip will permanently settle the beef vs. pork ribs debate across the entire country. My meal wasn't bad: I liked the sauce, but the meat wasn't fantastic. The ribs were also fatty and stringy. On the other hand, my dad's ribs were really good: very smoky meat, nice balance of meat and fat... very good. The downside is that they were coated in a sauce that would have been better on the side. Overall a B grade for Mr. Powdrell's (ambiance was nice, except we were the only ones in the place at 1:30 pm).

Sticking with the food story line, my last tale from Day 2 deals with The Big Texan. Calling it a restaurant kind of undersells everything it has to offer: restaurant, shooting gallery, motel, stable, trading post... it really earns the name "Steak Ranch." The food was actually pretty bad, but the ambience was A+++. There were cowboys walking around singing. Tons of taxidermy. And, it has a stage where you can sit and try to eat a 72oz steak in 60 minutes. Succeed and you eat free. Fail, and you pay $72 for the steak. Our waitress says that roughly one person tries each day, and only 1 in 10 succeed. Sadly no on tried while we were there.

Day 3 takes us from Amarillo to Columbia, MO via Oklahoma City, Wichita, Topeka, and Kansas City.


* The distance that is associated with "just" can vary, but in the Southwest I think the minimum unit of "just" is 50 miles.

Flagstaff

We made it to Flagstaff today. Picked up my dad a little before 10:00 and immediately hit the road. 105 to the 605 to the 10 to the 15 to the 40 to Williams, AZ. In Williams we took a left turn and went to see the Grand Canyon. All I can say about the Grand Canyon is WOW. I'm not sure how many things in life live up to their hype, but this is one of them. Other than that, not a lot of news to report. It still amazes me how little there is in the West... it was easy to drive 60 miles today without seeing an exit from the highway, and often those exits lead to roads that didn't seem to go anywhere worth going to.

Two photos from today:


This was taken at speed somewhere on I-40 between Ludlow, CA and the California/Arizona borderd. But really it could have been taken anywhere on I-40, which has looked like this for the past 400 miles.



This, obviously, is the Grand Canyon. We got there just a few minutes before sunset, so the colors were very impressive. It was (un) surprisingly cold (you can see some of the snow on the ground). I'm not that talented a writer, so I won't try to put the GC into words. If you haven't been, it's on my highly recommended list.

Road Trip: Seattle - LA - DC

I've made the last couple of posts from my hotel in Redding, CA. I did about 620 miles today, including some "sightseeing" in Salem, OR (a pretty lame state Capitol building). The trip went really smoothly until I hit Weed, CA, when I-5 goes back up into the mountains. It snowed on me for the last 70 miles, and snow/dark/unfamiliar roads is pretty much the trifect of super-stressful driving. But I'm here. Sadly I can't post any of pictures because of my lame hotel internet access.

That said, here's what I can tell about Redding:

• There's a really cool bridge*
• The "city center" has nothing open after 8:00
• Well, it has some things open: a couple of cheap and seedy motels, and a couple of bars that looked way to tough for me.
  
• The "Hill Top" area has every chain business imaginable. It's like they just said "Screw downtown, we're just going to build an entirely new city center about two miles on the other side of the interstate.
• If it weren't night and raining I bet it would be very pretty.
  

On to LA (West Hollywood, to be specific) in the morning.


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My last days in Seattle

Here's the quick synopsis of my last week in Seattle:

Saturday: Golf at Washington National
Sunday: Basketball and sushi
Monday: Work
Tuesday: Golf at Chambers Bay
Wednesday: Lunch at Salumi, errands
Thursday: Golf at Trilogy (missed an 8 foot birdie putt for 79)
Friday: Moving, which was pedestrian, and partying (dinner and drinks with my friends in Seattle.) And in between? This:



What am I thinking leaving this?

Beer

It would be great if I could blog about the recent excellence of Duke Basketball. Coming off of a dominating win over Carolina my Duke friends and I were actually imbued with a confidence that hasn't been present since 2004 when we lost to UConn in the National Semifinal. We killed Maryland and seemed to have a legit shot at running the table in the ACC which we haven't done since the Battier years.

And then the Wake and Miami debacles happened, so I'm not going to talk about basketball.

Anyways, I watched the Wake game at a place in Seattle called Taphouse Grill. They are very proud about their selection of draft beer: over 160 regular taps plus 10 rotating seasonal taps. I decided to order a sampler of porters and stouts (winter time!). I had ordered the four beers that come in the sampler when the waiter informed me they might be out of one or two of my selections, so I should probably name some backups. I named two, and all was well.

Except that he came back and informed me that they could only find three out of the six, and could I pick yet another beer. Surprisingly, they actually had beer #7.

I ran into this same issue when I would go to the Brickskellar in DC: their menu has hundreds, if not thousands, of beers, but their refrigerators usually only have about half what their menu promises. I understand that it is hard to keep some things in stock, but why run your business in such a way that continually disappoints your customers? Why not have a more conservative menu (in the Brickskellar's case, maybe only 400 beers) and always have them. And if there are some rarities sitting around why have your wait staff offer them up as specials? Am I missing something here?

Sometimes you can't even give it away

Craiglist provides a fantastic service: it's free, relatively easy to use, and reaches a much wider audience than many free classified ad services. The problem is that it attracts an absolutely bizarre clientele.

I've been wanting to get a new mattress, and the move provided me with a good excuse to make the switch: rather than shipping my old one back across the country I could get rid of it here and buy new once I'm back East. An 8 year old mattress isn't worth a whole lot, so I posted it on Craigslist as being free for whoever wanted to pick it up. I got a response pretty quickly, and we agreed she would come last weekend.

Nothing.

So I re-posted the ad on Monday figuring that I had just found one of the flakey people who cruise CL. On Tuesday I got an email from the girl apologizing for not checking her messages and telling me she still wanted the mattress. I responded that she needed to come on Wednesday night, and she agreed.

Until Wednesday, when I got a text message (really, her only method of communication) saying she wasn't sure if she could come by. Specifically, she said this:

Hey! I haven't checked messages yet, wast sure if u called! im at a police station now or wld call u bk! how late can I get it?

Now, I'm not an expert, but I think that being at a police station indicates something is "up". Especially when this is the followup message:

I dont know how long i am going to have to be here since i am helping a friend report something. is there any possible way that time tomorrow i cld get it?

Dicey. So I decided to donate the mattress rather than dealing with the CL flakes (probably the most connected flakey population on earth). I called the Salvation Army, and they promised to stop by on Thursday morning. Which they did, only to tell me that my mattress doesn't meet their standards. If you have ever felt ashamed by a piece of furniture try having the Salvation Army tell you that your mattress can't even be given away.

At the end of the day I had to call 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which is a pricey but good service. Unfortunately they do not have employees who understand geometry, and so coaching them on how to get my box spring into the elevator was, to say the least, a chore. At one point they decided to try and break the box spring in half rather than backing out and putting it in the way that it would fit.

After all that I got a text message from police girl asking if it was cool to get the mattress next week. Idiots.

Chambers Bay in detail

In short: sublime. I honestly may not have a better golfing experience.

The crowd sounds are going to be really cool during the Open. The entire course sits in a little bowl (it is, after all, a former gravel pit), with the highest points sitting 100-150 feet above the lowest points. The dunes provide some separation between holes, but there really isn't anything to keep sound from traveling and echoing against the pit walls. When Tiger is pouring in 30 footers on Sunday it's going to be pretty intense.

The course record is 70; I've probably never been within 16 shots of a course record, ever. I can see how the course would get to be unplayable in a hurry. The USGA could set the course up to play anywhere between -4 and +20, especially if the wind blows. I had a four putt (coming off a birdie, too), but I didn't putt into a bunker (Michael did), nor did I miss a putt by 55 yards (Stewart did). I can see pros making the exact same mistake.

I seemed to be one of the few guys with a caddy, even though it was incredibly useful. Most 2nd shots were aimed 20 yards away from where I would have aimed if left to my own devices. I really had to suspend disbelief on a couple of the shots, thinking there was no way I really wanted to hit it where he had me aimed, but sure enough, things always worked out. While I needed the caddy's advice on 18 holes, I really only had about 14 holes of conversation saved up and only 15 holes of patience for some of his advice and telling me why his advice was good. That said, I did enjoy that he thought I should be a 7-8 handicapper with my swing. He wasn't wrong (13/14 fairways, 11/18 greens), except that he hadn't seen me putt yet.

My only regret is that I played the white tees (6000 yards) rather than the Sand tees (6400). Honestly, my score probably would have been the same. I had one six-iron into the green, but I was hitting driver/wedge most of the day, and there were four holes where I didn't even need driver. In general, I drove the ball like a fiend... made some really aggressive carry shots, and I was in the greenside traps on two of the par 5s (took 3 to get out of the first), and birdied the other. I really should have birdied 15... had 8 feet and one of the Scottsman drilled his putt on the exact line.

Everyone should have a chance to be paired with two Scottish guys from Canada. Hilarious, full of good stories. Thought I would split my pants laughing when one of them said "That's crap!" like Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer. They also had the best name I've heard for a 9: "Fraulein's Rejection" (or Nein, as it were). Also fun to see how they comfortable are putting from anywhere, including 50 yards off the green in swales 50 feet below the green. They had no fear of keeping the ball on the ground the entire way.

Chambers Bay

I'll post my thoughts on Chambers Bay this evening, but here's the short story: There are probably fewer than 5 golf courses in the world that I can expect to play that will be more impressive than Chambers. I shot 86, including a birdie and a four-putt, and I played with two Scottish guys from Vancouver, which should be mandatory at a course like this, just like using a caddy.

I managed to take a bunch of pictures, which can be found here.

How to double the miles on your car in 8 days

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I'll probably trip 5000 miles before I leave town on Saturday. When I roll into DC a week later I should be comfortably over 9000 miles.

Fore!

I get to play this tomorrow.

Part of me is excited like a kid on Christmas Eve. And part of me wonders if I own enough golf balls. And part of me hopes I don't four-jack a green with a caddy looking on.

Not so live blog: Caucus day

Well, the one thing about the iPhone is that it is very conspicuous, so my plans to sit and casually blog about the goings on of my precinct caucus while in my precinct caucus didn't work out so well. I did manage to make a couple of notes:

• There was a huge line to get in. Since no one ever goes to caucuses no one know what district they are in. And since districts are literally the size of one city block pretty much everyone who showed up needed to be directed to the right place. I count myself as one of those people.
• When I finally found the right building there was a long line there too.
• As I was standing in line I wondered: Is it a valid reason to support the candidate who's volunteers are cuter?
• I don't understand the whole "suspended" thing. There were signs everywhere telling people that Edwards' campaign was suspended rather than over. Is there really a difference? I don't know anyone who voted for Edwards, but I know that "Uncommitted" won at least one delegate. Wouldn't it suck to lose to Uncommitted?
• It turned out that we didn't really have a precinct chair. Which, in a caucus, is a ridiculously important job. Primaries are simple: you show up, you vote, you leave. There's a whole process to caucuses that no one understands. Our precinct's solution: find the last person who walked into the room and make them be the chair. The chair's first job: find someone to be the secretary, and then find at least 12 people willing to be our precinct's actual delegates for the county and state nominating conventions.
• My precinct was mostly women, and it kind of struck me that the caucus was turning out to be a fantastic place to find a date: politically like-minded people, cute girls, passionate arguments, etc.
• Sadly, it later turned out that most of these women had brought along boyfriends.
• Our precinct chair also claimed to be some sort of radio host, and interviewed me briefly. I think my insightful, witty comment was something like "No one has any idea what is supposed to happen here today."
• My precinct's initial vote was 50 to 13 to 4 (Obama, Clinton, Uncommitted). Something happened to two of the uncommitteds, and we never saw them again. People then had to move around and stand with their fellow supporters. Each side was given 5 minutes to make their case for their candidate. It was astonishingly like listening to meet Meet the Press: Obama didn't vote for the war, Hillary has more experience, Obama brings in new voters to the fold, yada yada yada. The idea of "caucusing" is a good one, but at the end of the day no one was particularly persuaded by the arguments of the other side.
• The two uncommitteds who we could find both ended up going to the Obama side.
• Perhaps the most bizarre portion of the event was after the voting was done. In what seemed to be a ploy to get people riled up and start donating money willy-nilly the Chair told us that we were supposed to go around the room and discuss what we didn't like about the current administration. This is like asking people to strike matches in a room full of gasoline. Our precinct voted to save time and skip this, since we all generally agreed there weren't any secret Bush supporters who had infiltrated our caucus.

So that's pretty much it. Frankly, I still prefer easy democracy to hard democracy, and the total events of the day took nearly three hours to complete. And I didn't even get a date out of it.

Live blog: caucus day

Whoever invented the robo dialer should be thrown in jail. My phone has been ringing off the hook since before 9:00 this morning. I've only picked up the phone once, and it was a Huckabee call.

In other news the moving company that stood me up yesterday seems to be standing me up again. Needless to say their quote will need to be approximately free if they want to earn my business.

A caucusing we will go

I like democracy. I'm not so sure that we need to start wars to promote democracy in other places, but it seems to work pretty well here. One of the nice things about democracy is that it's relatively easy: I go somewhere, I vote, someone counts it, done. Sometimes I can mail my ballot in, meaning I don't even have to go somewhere.

But not now.

I got a ballot for the Washington state primary in the mail last week. After the relatively even Super Tuesday results I became excited that my vote would actually count. I filled out my ballot and mailed it in.

And then I found that it would count for exactly nothing.

Turns out that Washington state has both a caucus and a primary. And the primary doesn't count, at least not for the Democrats. And it only kind of counts for the Republicans. So rather than being able to choose my parties candidate from the comfort of my own home I now have to spend some time (one hour? three? ten?) on a Saturday to go stand around and caucus.

I haven't yet decided on a caucus strategy. I'm probably just going to stand around and hope that no one bothers me. But I may also decide to pledge my vote to someone stupid, like Mike Gravel, and start yelling at people who think that Hillary or Obama are the better candidate. Gravel: any man who throws a rock into a pond on YouTube can be my president. Or, I may choose to just walk around and scream "Ca-CAW!" like Gob on Arrested Development. You know, caucus. Ca-CAW! That's comedic genius.

Oh yeah

Some of you may have heard through the grapevine, but it's finally official:

I'm leaving Seattle. Got a cool job at a startup company in DC. Will be moving back East in a couple of weeks. Details to follow.

The iPhone

It's here. I hesitated after it first came out, thinking that there might be bugs or glitches or new features that would be added. But the yearning and desire? It never went away. I need the iPhone. And so today?

I bought it.

It's gorgeous. It must be so easy to use that Apple doesn't even bother putting instructions in the box. Just the phone, a dock, a charger, and some headphones. Lovely.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use the phone yet, despite having owned it for nearly 10 hours now. It would seem the activation process doesn't quite work. I first ran into problems when I tried to transfer my number. It would seem that I can't transfer my 703 number to a Seattle billing address. So I had to set up my billing address as my parents. First hurdle cleared.

I continued through the process and got to the final screen. No dice. It would seem that there was an issue on my credit report. This isn't a surprise: I put a bunch of fraud blocks on my credit reports after I got robbed. This makes it impossible for anyone to pull my credit without my explicit permission. Well, the iPhone activation process doesn't take this into account, so I had to drive back down to the AT&T store to get approved in person. Sweet. Way to improve the AT&T experience.

After getting the necessary codes I took a six hour break to watch the Super Bowl and have some fried turkey. Got home expecting to finish up the activation and start playing with my phone.

No dice.

Despite have the right credit activation code, and all the other information, I got forced into a manual queue. And so now I wait. I've got nothing. The iPhone just stares at me, wanting to do something cool. It mocks. It laughs at me. The hours pass by. The hole in my heart gets bigger.

Come to me iPhone. Please.

My favorite Christmas present

It's tough to rank Christmas presents, because they are all wonderful in their own way. But I would say the best thing I got this year is my laser rangefinder. Ostensibly it is for the golf course (it's actually called "The Pinseeker"), but since it's been too cold to play golf this year I've had to find alternative uses. Which means "stand out on my balcony and measure the distance to things." Here's what I've discovered:



The boat's mast is 576 yards away. Even down hill it's a 3-shot par five. The edge of the water on the left side of the photo is 408 yards.

The red brick apartment in the dead center of the photo is 266 yards. The yellow apartment to the left of center is 607 yards. The apartment building in the foreground is 62 yards. The Space Needle? I thought that would be just a touch out of range... but it's just at the edge. 1332 yards. Just over 3/4 miles away.

More blogs on the way

Here at West Roy headquarters we had a pretty significant technology upgrade in the past couple of days. I managed to install some new RAM and a new hard drive in my laptop. Amazingly nothing broke, although I did need to take the machine apart an extra time because only about 1/3 of my keyboard worked after the first reassembly.

Anyways, with that out of the way I should be able to get back on the blog train. There will certainly be some interesting things to write about in the coming days.

Why Salt Lick sauce is so good

I just wrote about my new favorite BBQ sauce, the original recipe from The Salt Lick, outside of Austin, TX. Now I know why. As I was perusing the label to look at the ingredients (oil, vinegar, prepared mustard, Worcestershire, spices, etc) I noticed the nutrition info.

Egad.

Take a look at whatever sauce you keep handy near your computer. (Don't tell me you don't have sauce at your desk at work.) You'll see that per 2 Tbsp serving it has something like 25 calories and no grams of fat. Well, the folks at the Salt Lick seem to have adopted the "Fat, it's where the flavor is" theory of cooking: their original recipe sauce has 160 calories and 16 grams of fat per two Tbsp serving. Which basically means it is BBQ sauce flavored salad dressing.

Now, God didn't design BBQ to be healthy, but do we really need to put a fat-based sauce all over our fat-based meat? That said, if there is that much oil in the sauce, I wonder if I can deep fry a turkey in it. Hmm.

3 bullets on food

Some random stuff before I head off to New York:

• I think I've found the best barbeque sauce in the world. My mom's family comes from the part of South Carolina that uses mustard as the base for their BBQ sauce, and I'm partial to Mathews (which I think is from Saluda). I never thought that it would be replaced in my sauce hierarchy by a sauce from Texas, but it has. I'll be the first to say that Texans get a lot wrong about BBQ, including the feature animal (cow) and sauce base (tomato), but the folks at The Salt Lick in Austin are on to something great: a mustard based sauce with good tang, a touch of sweetness, and just the right amount of vinegar. I've been told their BBQ is also good, and if it's half as good as the sauce it's worth your trouble to acquire some.
• Many moons ago I complained about the lack of decent yogurt around here. Well, my favorite market started selling Stonyfield, which is great. What's weird is that I've been eating a lot of the caramel yogurt. It seems pretty strange to have "caramel" on the bottom as opposed to "peaches" on the bottom.
  
• Cheeks are hot. Huan experimented with halibut cheeks several times, and they were fantastic. Then on New Year's Eve I had a pasta dish with pork jowl. Now the New York Times just ran a story about to towns in Italy that have competing versions of a dish based on, you guessed it pork jowl. And it turns out that one of the few places you can get cured, unsmoked pork jowl in America is in Seattle. I'll let you know how it goes.
  

Sports!

Despite being inhabited by relatively fit and athletic people, hosting three professional franchises and being home to a pretty big university, Seattle would not strike anyone as a "sports" town. Like most major cities people are rabid about football. Locals care about the Mariners until they fall out of contention in July (about three months after my Orioles have fallen out of contention back East), and after that the crowds are mostly Japanese tourists excited to see Ichiro. The Sonics get so little love that they are going to get moved to Oklahoma City.

Anyways, I'm a big sports fan. Back in DC I would usually go to a couple of Redskins games (thanks to my friend Todd's parents), maybe a baseball game or two, and a Wizards/Caps/Georgetown game if I could luck into Capital One's box seats. If you look at my sports attendance in 2007 you'd notice a difference:

• Three Seahawks games;
• One UW football game;
• One UW basketball game;
• 10 Sonics games (3 pre-Durant, 7 post-Durant);
• Five Mariners games

That's 20 sporting events in 12 months. I feel like that's a lot. I was talking with the girl who cuts my hair on Friday about how hard it is to make same-sex friends in a new city. She is young and hip and "Myspaced" someone, which I think means that she met someone randomly on Myspace who ended up as her best friend. Anyways, we were talking about the awkwardness of the "friend date", and got to talking about how men have sporting events, which are nearly perfectly designed for man-dates (firm stopping times, requires paying attention to something else making silence okay, excuse to drink obnoxious quantities of beer, etc). We couldn't decide if there was a female equivalent, although she thought shopping could qualify.

I was hoping to have a lot more to say other than "I went to a lot of sporting events" last year, but it turns out that I've got nothing. But I do have Sonics/Jazz tickets in two weeks if anyone is interested.

Redskins photos

As promised, photos from my trip to the Skins-Hawks game this past Sunday.

http://www.flickr.com/gp/72188899@N00/29g855

34 hours in coach? One way? Sure!

I've been toying with the idea of a trip to visit my friends in Asia this spring. It isn't hard for me to find a reasonable flight from Seattle to Singapore (under $900, stopping in Tokyo each way). Shanghai, it would seem, is nearly impossible to get to from Singapore for under $1000. I don't mind search engines returning expensive flights, since sometimes that is all that is available.

Kayak has managed to break all the records for "least reasonable flight suggested, ever." How unreasonable? Try this:

Leave – Wed 27 Feb 2008
This flight leaves and arrives on different dates.
	American Airlines Flight 5832 Operated by Japan Airlines	Departs: 11:30p Changi (SIN)		Arrives: 7:10a Narita (NRT)
	Coach | Aircraft: 744 | 6h 40m
	[ Layover in Tokyo, Japan (NRT) for 4h 50m ]
	American Airlines Flight 5822 Operated by Japan Airlines	Departs: 12:00p Narita (NRT)		Arrives: 8:20a O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)
	Coach | Aircraft: 744 | 11h 20m
	[ Layover in Chicago, IL (ORD) for 2h 35m ]
	American Airlines Flight 289	Departs: 10:55a O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)		Arrives: 3:25p Pu Dong (PVG)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 14h 30m

Return – Sun 2 Mar 2008
This flight leaves and arrives on different dates.
	American Airlines Flight 288	Departs: 6:00p Pu Dong (PVG)		Arrives: 5:20p O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 13h 20m
	[ Layover in Chicago, IL (ORD) for 17h 45m ]
	American Airlines Flight 153	Departs: 11:05a O'Hare Inter­national (ORD)		Arrives: 3:15p Narita (NRT)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 13h 10m
	[ Layover in Tokyo, Japan (NRT) for 2h 35m ]
	American Airlines Flight 5836 Operated by Japan Airlines	Departs: 5:50p Narita (NRT)		Arrives: 12:30a Changi (SIN)
	Coach | Aircraft: 777 | 7h 40m

Yeah. That's right. Singapore -> Tokyo -> Chicago -> Shanghai. The Great Circle right my a**. Go find a globe. Trace that out. You'll find that a straight shot is 2300 miles, or about 5 hours on a modern jet airliner. American Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, would suggest you take a trip that is 34 hours (going) and 54 hours (returning), where you cross the International dateline TWICE on each leg, and cover approximately 33,308 miles. For those of you keeping track at home the circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles. It's almost a bargain at $7,238.

You'll notice that the itinerary doesn't tell you what date you land. I'm not sure I could even do the math and figure it out.

It's a small world, but this is ridiculous

Took my seat for the Seahawks/Redskins game today. Qwest Field is about 2700 miles away from DC. It holds about 69,000 people. The guy sitting in front of me? Went to high school with me. As in my same class.

Pictures to follow tomorrow.

Placed on the 15 day DL

I sustained maybe the lamest injury of my 30.9 years this past Sunday. To celebrate the Redskins making the playoffs (and, as luck would have it, coming to Seattle) I decided to replace the flush and fill valves on my toilet, which has been slowly running for the past 11 months. Turns out that replacing the flush valve involves taking the bowl off the base of the toilet, which requires a lot of lying on the bathroom floor loosening old bolts*, which requires contorting myself into some weird shapes.

I woke up Monday with what is best described as a Grade 2 strain of my left hamstring. I literally hobbled around work on Monday, and couldn't actually do anything at the gym. I managed to walk 9 holes today, but it required lots of stretching. I don't know how I'm going to make it through life if I regularly injure myself by lying on the floor.

* Don't worry, I had mopped the floor prior to starting this exercise.