On Tuesday when most people were scrambling to file taxes, Danny and I skipped work to play golf. (WARNING: lots of golf talk in this post. Do not read if your name is Martha Burk.) In celebration of the great Masters tourney at Augusta, we played 36 holes of golf. We started at 7:42am at the Monarch Bay Golf Course in San Leandro and ended at 7:25pm at Tilden Park Golf Course in Berkeley. (We had about a 2 hour break for lunch and travel.)

Monarch Bay: A very scenic course, but being near the water, also a very windy course (we had never played there before).They were fixing up the greens on the back nine, so we had to play holes 1-9 twice. I was struggling with the bunkers here. On the par 3 hole seventh hole, I hit my tee shot into a bunker A, smashed it out of there into bunker B on the other side of the green, took 2 shots to get out of there, but the ball goes back into bunker A, take 2 more shots to get on the green. From there it was an easy three putt for an amazing sextuple-bogey. For the record, I also scored a quintuple bogey on the par 4 second hole, and a quadruple bogey my second time through the par 4 third hole. The rarely seen bogey-slam. (I did get a par on the par 5 fifth hole. Only one at Monarch. Sad.) All that adds up to a lot of strokes. And my day was only halfway over.

Tilden Park: After grabbing lunch and a 10 minute nap, I was ready to dominate Tilden. I crushed my first tee shot. Best tee shot I ever hit to start off a round at Tilden. Danny threw my pitching wedge at the old man who was playing with us. That's about it for the highlights. Although somehow one of my Stratas managed to clone itself. I had only lost one ball at Tilden by the time I got to the 13th. I sliced it into some deep trees back on the 8th. As I approach my ball preparing for my third shot on the short par 5, I see another Strata Professional Distance ball with a 'C' written on it with a blue Sharpie about 5 yards away. Today was the first time I had used these balls and marked them with a blue pen, but the number on the ball even matched the sleeve I was using. My second shot must have hit the tree so hard (I smacked it a long way and it rolled and bounced off a tree trunk) that it caused the ball to split and regenerate itself. The physics of golf never cease to amaze me.

So to sum it up, I played pretty poorly today. I probably wouldn't have won the Masters. I would have finished 11th or 12th or somewhere around there.