The Driving Range

Every trip home, I manage to have that extra little bit of space to bring something back. Like last summer, I brought out the remainder of my CD collection and this Christmas, after emptying out all the gifts I brought home from me and my brother I had enough room for a rug. Yes, I said a rug. My Navaho rug (which, incidentally looks fabulous in my flat....) Despite having brought back a rug, I only had one suitcase (hey - I backpacked for years, I know how to pack light) but I was allowed two - so I brought back my golf clubs.

Since then, my golf clubs have been languishing in a corner of my living room - well, they got moved to the closet ever so briefly when I had a guest - but generally they've been languishing in a corner of the room until yesterday, so I hauled them out.

Oh - a tangent! - when getting my clubs out back home, I was looking for the cover and remembered having put it in one of the pockets of the bag itself but it took me forever to find because I had to shift through everything that was in there, which included:
- golf tees (normal)
- golf balls (normal)
- pink golf ball (not normal)
- golf glove (normal)
- wood covers (normal)
- epiPen (explainable - allergic to bees)
- gum (questionable)

- hairbrush (?)
- concealer (?)
- lipstick (?)
- plus many other strange miscellaneous items...

You would have thought I was heading off to a ball with some of that crap. No wonder the bag was so heavy.


But back to my main story - yesterday I hauled out the clubs and went to the driving range. (No easy feat here because they're really not that many around, strangely enough.) Just wanted to test out my swing - see, if I still had it.

So after numerous wrong turns (have I ever mentioned that anytime I go anywhere here in Sydney, I get lost? In fact, it's happened so often that here at work they laugh when they give directions because they know I'm going to make a wrong turn somewhere. But I digress....) I finally found the driving range. I paid for my bucket of balls and the young kid at the counter explained to me how to use it. "Put the bucket on the hooks, type in a code number and the machine will fill up your bucket." Easy.

Except I didn't notice that there were two sets of hooks that matched up to the two keypads and that the hooks for the matching keypad were to the left, not the right.

Ooops.

Which meant that while my basket was sitting on one set of hooks over an opening to the right, the golf balls were pouring out of the other opening on my left. Pouring out all over the pavement....

Oh yeah - and you know what? Yelling 'shit' on a quiet driving range does not draw attention to yourself. Right. But one nice man started to explain to me what I should do (yeah, I figured it out by then, but at least he tried to help me) and after I had picked up all the errant balls and put the basket on the correct hook and the machine finished filling, I tried to quietly walk to one of the practice tees - which was tough, because I was laughing at myself - without being noticed, but there was this man with his dad walking towards me. I could tell they were looking at me, but I was trying to be nonchalant. But I just couldn't help myself, I looked up as they were going past and the man caught my eye, smiled at me and said, "Don't worry, it's happened to us all at least once."