First round of golf since December, and so much has changed. I’ve got the new TaylorMade M2s in the bag, Superstition Springs Golf Club has allowed most of the ponds to go dry and – especially on the 9th hole which used to have water all down the left side – replaced them with what I think are ultimately going to be waste areas filled with native grasses and flowers, and I’m anxious to see what kind of game I have.

Yanked my drive off the tee into a sand bunker, but had no trouble getting out with my 8-graphite, leaving me with a chip just off the green and a putt from 5 feet for a par. I’m thinking, here we go, baby!

Err, not so fast. Not the greatest drive on #2, but good enough to leave me 180 yards to the pin. The play here is not to get snookered into going for the green, because anything left is close to OB or short-siding you with a slippery downhill chip or putt. I choose my 5-iron, planning to leave it 30 yards to the right with a short, uphill approach with plenty of green to work with. I catch it good. But I’m not 30 yards short right, I’m 5 yards past pin-high to the right. 185 yards with a 5-iron. I’m stunned. Of course, haven’t spent much time on my short game, so I proceed to butcher the hole and end up with a six. But that’s OK, I’ll take that six and head to the next tee.

Ah, the next tee is the Springs’ first par 3. Normally 170 to the center, today it was tucked as far back and right as it could be, 180 yards with water right and behind, a large bunker protecting the approach. Back in the Callaway Steelhead days, this was a 5-iron all the way: don’t pull the hybrid because it’s just too unpredictable; instead, play it safe with a 5-iron and leave it just short off the green to the front. I pulled the 5-iron, but it’s way longer than I ever expected to hit a five; instead of nestling into the sand bunker, it’s over the bunker and in the water right. I pull a six-graphite to play my penalty, and it lands 170 yards just left of the green. This is uncharted territory for me – with my Steelheads I would figure my six to play at the most 155. So now I’m facing the prospect of having to gear down at a minimum one, perhaps even two less clubs with my M2 graphites.

And that’s how the rest of the round went: just feeling my way around, hitting clubs for distances I’d never dreamed of. A 7-iron that carried 150 yards. A sand wedge I grabbed for 105 yards and hit it pretty damned close to that distance. On #7, I pulled a six-graphite with 158 to the pin and hit it 172. On #9 I had 180 to the pin. Normally, that’s a 4-hybrid, but I pulled the 5-graphite instead, felt myself push it a little with a bit of a thin hit; it still went 170.

I wasn’t keeping score, but I figure I ended up around a 52 or something, but that wasn’t the point of the outing: I knew my short game was rusty and that I would need to get to work on that before my first bona fide 18-hole, keeping score outing. I threw away at least a dozen strokes just butchering chips and finesse shots from 40 yards or less out. But these new M2s are real, baby. Or rather, unreal in the distance improvement I’m seeing. I remember feeling that the 7-irons I was hitting back at the Golf & Ski looked like they were traveling lot longer than my usual 7-iron, but until you put the clubs under real playing conditions you just don’t know.

Now I know. And they do.

Next step is to get to work on my chipping and prepare for my first honest-to-goodness, every shot counts outing. Now that I have a general idea of what to expect from these new graphites, you can bet I’ll approach my yardages with a different club in mind than what I’ve been used to, like, forever. It’s the absolute coolest thing.

…so it’s like the gods are conspiring against us at “The Client Who Shall Remain Nameless”. There was real hope that our work there would be complete by now, but something happened over the last weekend and everything has once again slowed to a crawl. So it’s yet another weekend of work that should have been done two weeks ago. Painful.

Gonna be hot this weekend, hot enough to scare golfers from teeing off at Superstition Springs any time after 10 AM. Perfect for me, as I want to play nine holes with two balls – one white, one orange – just to see how the new M2 irons (actually, graphites) perform. I haven’t done much chipping or putting lately, so this will be a good opportunity to lube up, drop four water bottles in the cart, and go out and work on my game.

Looks like “The Big Ugly” has started: it’s well past time people started to be held accountable for lying to federal authorities and leaking classified information to the media. The media and the “Deep State” have been at war with President Trump almost from the moment he announced his candidacy, and it’s well past time the Justice Department sends a message that lying and leaking and mishandling classified information (Hillary can’t be sleeping to well tonight) is no longer to be tolerated. The next month ought to be very interesting.

I’m hoping this is the last of the really hard weekends trying to get “The Client Who Shall Remain Nameless” back to where they need to be. The light truly is at the end of the tunnel: the team has had two really good weeks since the false alarm two Thursdays ago that put me temporarily on suicide watch; while we’re not going to get as much done this weekend to close things out, there’s a good chance that by this time next weekend we will have. I can already feel the stress just pouring out of me; whenever I take a moment to relax I find myself drifting off to sleep. My body is achy from head to toe as the muscles all start to relax and decompress. This has been the absolute worst six months of my life, but it really feels as if the whole fiasco is coming to an end.

I’ve taken my new TaylorMade M2 graphites out to the Superstition Springs range three times now, and all I can say is they are by far the best clubs I’ve ever owned. They hit like a dream, and I’ve gained one club length simply by them being what they are. With things starting to finally settle down at “TCWSRN”, I’m thinking one more range session next weekend before I start taking Fridays off to play all the way to Goodboys weekend in July.

Hillary Clinton has so far blamed everyone and everything for her 2016 election loss, but the one person she hasn’t had the guts to blame was the one person who gave all the liberals out there Donald Trump: their savior, Barack Obama:

All you did was troll Donald Trump into running for president in the first place, stand by while Ferguson and Baltimore rioted and burned, give Iran billions in exchange for empty promises, allow Russia to establish a beachhead in the Middle East for the first time in half a century, browbeat Israel at every opportunity, ram through Obamacare after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, preside over the mass migration of children across the southern border in 2014, expand the DACA amnesty despite saying 22 times you lacked authority to do so, use the permanent structure of government to devastate the Appalachian economy, convince half of America that liberals were ready to take their guns (this wasn’t hard to do), have your Education Department issue orders that led to the campus-assault craze and the deterioration of classroom discipline and that, months before a presidential election, mandated trans-bathrooms in schools, have your Justice Department preside over a sloppy (I’m being charitable) investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that included, at one point, your attorney general secretly meeting with the husband of the subject of the investigation on an airport tarmac, muscle out Joe Biden, who might have won, from the race, and hand the party back to the less-likable half of America’s most polarizing and corrupt political couple. Not to mention the eight years of lecturing. Oh, the lecturing. . . .

Not to mention siccing the IRS after conservative Tea Party organizations, running guns to Mexican drug smugglers that resulted in the death of a border agent, and hide the fact that you left your own ambassador to Libya and American servicemen and intelligence officers to die in Benghazi, and trash the very country you were President of every time you went overseas. After a while, your agenda became clear – but only clear enough that an outsider running as a plain-speaking, red-white-and-blue loving modern day Harry Truman could beat the likes of Hillary Clinton.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Barack Obama could have been one of the greatest presidents this country ever had. He could have single-handedly healed the racial divisions this country had, but he didn’t want to. It was too much work for someone who was fundamentally lazy, and the whole idea of bringing truly diverse groups of people together was just something he never really embraced. Oh, he and the activists he surrounded himself with believed in diversity, but only the kind of diversity progressives and liberals believe in. They despise this country, they despise America, they despise freedom, and most especially, they despise anyone who doesn’t think like they do. They hate, demean, and despise “fly-over country” because they don’t understand anything outside of their little liberal conclaves along the coasts. Hillary Clinton’s campaign revealed just how much they despised folks who weren’t like them, and now they have paid dearly for it.