Playing hooky

It's been said "Golf is a good walk spoiled." I say even a bad day on the course is better than any day (well most) in the office.

My friend Karen and I have been trying for a month to go golfing. We figure we're pretty evenly matched (or lacking equally in talent) since we both have clubs that have seen a golf course less than half a dozen times in the past 3 years!

At first we were thinking of going after work some night, but we've both been busy running to our sons' T-ball and baseball games and fulfilling other motherly obligations. It didn't look like it was going to happen anytime soon.

But then Jim had a brilliant idea. As a birthday present to me, he told Karen to take me out Friday afternoon and he'd pay for us both. You mean play hooky? Wow, we hadn't thought of that!

We did ask our bosses and they didn't mind so we were set. The weather was perfect yesterday. And I mean perfect -- so nice we couldn't claim heat exhaustion for pathetic putting and couldn't blame the wind for carrying our balls into the woods. It was all on us.

First hole my ball goes left and hers goes right. We figured we were in for a long afternoon, but we straightened things out ... a little bit.

We agreed ahead of time that we would use as many mulligans as we needed to in order to keep this fun and stress-free. We expected we'd use about one per hole but we came in way under that -- even after losing 2 balls each in the stinkin' water on the par 3. Still, we might call ourselves M&M (Mulligan & Mulligan) when we go out on tour!

In the end, we decided we did "not bad" for our first time out in a year. No, I won't tell you our scores but I can tell you the "not bad" would be "good" if we could turn our 8's into 6's and subtract bonus points for good behavior. Yes, good behavior. I only dropped 2 F-bombs (ask Jim, that's a huge accomplishment) and we didn't talk about work (that's even harder not to do).

I forgot how much fun it is to play hooky ... Not that I've ever done that before -- especially the day after my birthday. (I gotta grow up... Naahh!)