Busy week

I know, I know -- you keep stopping by and there's nothing new posted. You wonder, "Where the heck is the Dule of Earle, and why doesn't he post some of his clever stuff?"

Or, maybe you think, "I hope he just stays gone this time!?"

Regardless, I'm still around. I was out of town at an industry HR conference for three days. I thought I might have a really good story (like Badabing's Badaboom often does) of meeting some eclectic people in a hotel bar. But that didn't happen. Perhaps that's because Carol came with me, and the two of us didn't visit the hotel bar. You think?

We did get to a couple of good restaurants. Carol spent one afternoon shopping for some sandals. Have you seen the sandals made by "Keen?" They are fantastic! Comfortable as slippers, and can be worn anywhere. I don't typically like sandals and have rarely worn any. But she was made aware of the Keen line by our younger daughter and bought a pair. She raved about them so much I had to try on some. They felt so good I bought a pair (last summer), wore them out of the store, and walked all over Chicago in them with never the first moment's discomfort. I'm wearing them as I type this!

Anyway, Carol found a store that sold them and bought herself a second pair. She bought a second pair for me too. I don't need them, not now at least. But we've both learned from experience that when you find a product that you REALLY like, chances are it won't be made or available in a few years. So now I'll have comfortable sandals for a LONG time.

When we came back home, an item I'd ordered from Amazon.com was waiting for me and I've been spending my time using it.

What is it?

One of these.

I have dozens of old vinyl LPs. Some are over 40 years old, and have songs on them that I grew up with. With this new purchase of mine, I can digitize each song as a .wav file, then convert that to MP3 format and burn them to CDs to preserve the music. My purchase even comes with editing software to let me edit out the pops and clicks and hiss of some of the old records. Cool, huh? Well, I think it's cool.

So, I've been busy.

But not too busy to play some golf. And for all of you many, many readers who are enthralled by my golf tales, here's something for you. It didn't happen to me, but to Carol!

She hit a booming drive on a short par 4 and had a wedge shot to the green. Unfortunately, she had tried to cut the corner on a dogleg and had some trees to negotiate. One of them, between her and the green, was a palm tree. Well, since a picture is worth at least 1,000 words, here it is:




So she rears back and swats her ball with the wedge. It goes up through the branches of one tree and hits this palm tree. Nobody sees it bounce off. We all approach and help her search for her ball in the rough around the tree. No luck.

On a hunch, Carol backs off a way and looks up at the tree. Right about here:



What do you think she sees? Lets zoom in close and take a look: