http://californiawithkids.com/tag/puppet/ Golf weather. Second fairway and third green, September, 2011. The pond in the foreground is a stream you can usually step across.

buy modafinil uk united pharmacies There have been showers in the forecast every day this week, and as a consequence my home course has been empty. Hardly any rain has actually fallen, except at night, but an image of raindrops in an icon on a weather website is apparently all it takes to keep most members cowering at home. On a cloudless 100-degree day in August, my friends and I often have to wait on every shot, but if the evening news mentions even a ten percent chance of occasional sprinkles we’ll usually have the place to ourselves. Earlier this week, Tony, Addison, and I played 27 holes in three and a half hours, on foot, and during that whole time we encountered just one other group: a dad and his ten-year-old son, who waved us through. The temperature was perfect—it hovered near the point where you sort of begin to think about maybe putting on a sweater—but we never got truly wet, and although I wore my rain hat for a little while I never had to wipe off my glasses. And no need for sunscreen.

Tony, light rain, empty course, eighteenth fairway, June, 2012.

Later this summer, my wife and I will spend some time on Martha’s Vineyard. There’s a golf course there that I like a lot, called Farm Neck, but it’s so popular that tee times can be hard to come by, especially on short notice. What I usually do is wait for the sky to cloud over and then show up unannounced, confident that the forecast will have created openings in the tee sheet. And if it actually rains, who cares? If you have the right equipment, there are only two kinds of weather you can’t play golf in: lightning and dark. And dark isn’t necessarily an insurmountable problem, as you can tell from the photo below:

Closing hole, Sunday Morning Group, annual end-of-season golf trip to Atlantic City, October, 2007.