A few observations on a variety of subjects that tell you Spring has sprung:

This is why one of the cardinal rules of the Goodboys Invitational is that there are no gimmes, you must putt everything out. In golf, anything can happen, and usually does.

It’s Masters week with all its cool traditions, and while, like most, I’m picking Tiger Woods to win, my non-Tiger pick is Adam Scott. I think his game is perfectly suited for Augusta National. If I had my way, however, I’d love to see Bubba Watson in the thick of things come Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, as long as he is, I don’t think Bubba’s game and Augusta are necessarily a good match.

The baseball season starts, and I’m not quite ready to make my predictions. Give me another day, OK? Just a sneak preview: I think the Sox finish fourth behind the Yankees, Rays, and Blue Jays in the A.L. East, and manager Bobby Valentine is gone at the end of the season. I just have a bad feeling about how this season’s gonna go.

It’s Holy Week, and once again Christians all over the world ponder anew the mysteries of the suffering, death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ amidst widespread persecution of the Church in Africa and Asia, while having to ensure the daily threats and attacks by western secularism on our most fundamental beliefs and practices. Rebecca Ryskind Teti of Catholic News Service has a great column about this, writing in part:

Hope isn’t just a piece of information for our files; it’s the seed of heaven in a baptized soul, imparting a great interior liberty to act for the good in the face of any exterior pressure. It is the joy of the saints and the strength of the martyrs. Hope gave the first Christians and all subsequent saints the power to make sacrifices for the good of others and to sacrifice their comfort to stand up for the truth – because “God’s love was worth the gift of themselves.”

What is the source of this certainty that we are loved? Good Friday. That God so loved us that he gave his only begotten son. And what is the source of our hope? Easter Sunday.

Read the whole thing.

Finally, the pool hit 70 for the first time on Saturday after two days of 90+ temperatures. If we had a couple more days of temperatures like that it would have been swimmable for the first this year, but a cold front came through, knocking the temps back and the past two nights have been cool, so the pool season will have to wait a couple more weeks. But it’s close.