Back home

Well, I'm back from Am Worlds. It was a blast! 6 days of tournament golf, shooting better than I have in a long time, seeing Arizona for the first time and some of the sights it contains, making great memories with some cool people... couldn't ask for a better time.

Overall I threw well, carding no worse than 1 stroke better than my rating for all of my rounds (ratings are similar to handicaps in ball golf, but it uses a different system. Each ten points of your rating is roughly worth 1 stroke, with higher numbers being better: I'm a 920 rated golfer and I threw anywhere between 930 and 970 rated rounds all week). Flagstaff was in monsoon season and showed. Weather was unpredictable, with rain nearly every day and two of our rounds being suspended due to lightning storms. One round was postponed for an hour after lightning hit the mountain we were on: another round was called at one point, then we were sent out an hour later, and then called back off another half hour after than and then had the rest of the round cancelled until the following morning. Fun times. One of my buddies was on the chair lift to the top of the mountain while the rest of us had to play a round, and he had gorgeous weather going up... by the time he got to the time, he was rushed back on the lift to get to the bottom ASAP as a storm blew in, and the lift was hit THREE TIMES by lightning on his way back down. They kept having to replace fuses to keep the thing running. If I were him I would have likely crapped my pants.

The picture at the top of the post is of the 4 leaders of the Advanced Division (my division) before the final round (edit: clarification, I'm not one of those four guys)... the 2nd guy from the left is a dude I met this week, he borrowed one of my mini's that round since he forgot his in the hotel room, and kept it for the week since he was having such great luck with it. He ended up taking 3rd place for the week and attributed part of the success to the mini... nothing like a little healthy superstition in sports. :) Hey, he even used part of his winnings to buy me a disc of my choice to thank me for the thing. Myself, I took 26th out of the 160 player field, which was far better than I expected going into the week and I still felt like I left a lot out there. But I had a great time which was the whole purpose of the trip anyway, so I can't complain.

I'll write more about the trip and things later, for now this is all you get. But at least I posted more to the blog again, heh.