I’m a Little Teapot

Just a quick recap before I get on with it. When last I wrote, I was still drying out from a very wet golf outing at Ballyliffin in Ireland. Good news - I found my other rain glove so I had my matched set after all. Bad news - I needed it. I played 3 more rounds, making 5 total for the 9 days in Ireland. Round #3 was at Old Head down in the sunny Southeast, about 45 minutes from Cork. It was, beyond a doubt in my book, the most beautiful golf course I’ve ever played. Better than Pebble Beach. Better than the courses at Bandon Dunes. Not the hardest, but the most spectacular views non-stop. I played with a father and son. The son (MP) was 30ish and VERY afraid of heights. We had to switch up which tee boxes we were playing from on certain holes if the ones we were supposed to play were to close to the edge. On #17, I hit a shot the landed about 5 feet from the cliff. MP hit one about a foot from the edge. He took one look at it from the fairway above, shook his head no, and made his caddie get the ball and throw it up to him back in the fairway. Round #4 was at Portmarnock in Dublin. It was a nice course but I was by myself in the middle of the afternoon. I had two choices, play as a single with 4somes in front and behind me, or wait 30 minutes and join a 3some. I decided to wait. Might not have been the best decision. The 3 guys I played with were actually half of a group with the other 3 right behind us. They were all early 30s and drinking and throwing f-bombs liberally. It’s easy for me to be righteous now, but I imagine that wasn’t too far off what I was like 30 years ago. The caddies were unimpressed. My final round was in the rain at the K Club, host of the 2014 Ryder Cup. It was a totally American style course with trees and ponds and lush green grass. The first of any of that stuff I’d seen all week. The rain was pure Ireland though. Not hard, just a steady drip. I put away my umbrella after about the 6th hole because it was useless. I did close out my (first) Irish golf adventure with a tap-in birdie on the last hole.

But I digress. I just got finished watching an episode of Only Murders in the Building and it made me think about writing this. My mother-in-law is 82 and has a bad foot. She can walk around and go up and down stairs, but she does it slowly and often requires assistance. In terms of plots and conspiracies to get rid of your mother-in-law, if anyone had “put her in a hotel room on the 5th floor (walk-up), then start a fire by melting an electric teapot” on their bingo card, you should go buy a lottery ticket right now. In my defense, she opted for the 5th floor because it had two beds and she didn’t want to share a bed with our daughter. Also in my defense, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an electric teapot. We have a hot water tap. Also, I’m thinking of the old kettles that start whistling when the water is boiling. There was a small lounge on the ground floor of our hotel. Kelly and Erin had just come back from a run and everyone was getting ready for the day. We were going to meet in the lounge and then head to breakfast. I had some time to kill (as well as a hotel full of guests), so I thought I’d make some tea - a very UK thing to do. I grabbed the teapot, turned on the burner on the stove, and set the teapot on it. A couple minutes later I went to check on the water and I saw a weird white smoke drifting up from under the teapot. I went to move the teapot off the burner and only then did I grasp that the white smoke was actually the melting plastic on the bottom of the pot. I shut off the burner but before I could get the windows open, the fire alarm went off. All’s well that ends well, though. I was helped by a young nursing student who called the front desk of the hotel (in a different building) to send someone over and turn off the alarm. Meanwhile, I let everyone know that the emergency was over and no need to evacuate and then spent the next 20 minutes scraping melted plastic off the stovetop. At breakfast, I had to confess to my misdeed to the hotel staff and pay £45 to replace their teapot.

The aerial view of Old Head (copied from their scorecard).

MP is second from the left. That’s as close as he got to the water all day and he had to be coerced into that shot.

A rather intimidating tee shot. I missed - twice.

In Dublin at the Guinness Brewery. From left, cousin Douglas, daughters Colleen and Erin, surviving mother-in-law Mary Ellen, me and Erin’s boyfriend David.

For Woody, I stopped in the rain at the K Club to take a picture of this guy sitting on the bridge on the 10th hole. On the 18th, he flew across the pond on the other side of the bridge and swooped low over my ball on the green. I thought he was going to take it.