Monday, August 8th, 2011

Looking west over the 8th green

Last week was another picture perfect week in the weather category. Still not seeing the 90's and managing to stay in the low 80's. It can stay like this until October as far as I'm concerned.

Once again we were productive and managed to get quite a few things accomplished. Our scheduled events such as tee fertilization and green topdressing went without a hitch. We got a start on mowing some of the tall grass down along sixteen and will begin in earnest following the Championship next week. We also began relocating the sand in the bunkers. Many of them appeared to be shallow but only needed to have the sand pushed back around to uniform levels. We will continue with the bunkers throughout this week. The new portable toilets were delivered Monday and so far I am very happy with the first round of service. They are doing a very thorough job cleaning them out. We installed a new door on the ladies restroom which had broken last year due to high wind. A heavy duty closer was used to insure that it stays shut this time.

The evenings have been amazing out at the course. I enjoy coming out early in the evening to pick up Adam from work and spend some time to take photos and play around with the new camera. I have been playing around with HDR photographs lately. HDR stands for high dynamic range imaging. To make it as simple as possible it involves taking multiple shots of the same subject with different exposures. Mainly an under, a mid, and an over exposed picture. I use Photoshop to combine the three photos which results in a picture that more accurately represents the range of intensity found in real scenes. Above is a picture I took of the cart barn that is a combination of these three shots below:

I have far from perfected it and could probably done it with the first and third shots only but it is fun to play around and see what turns out. If I ever get anything halfway decent I'll be sure to share it.

Speaking of great evenings, this year Stone Creek organized a couples par 3 tournament following our Friday afternoon event and from what I could tell everyone had a great time. Jason and I laid out the course and I set the cups and mowed out the temp greens in the fairways Friday morning. I think we ended up with more players than we expected so an extra two holes had to be added. Given how fun it was and the response from the participants I am sure we will have more by the summers end.  Here are some more shots I took of everyone having a great time.

Great work Paul showing everyone where to go!

Megan was in high demand for the event!

Finally I am sorry to report that Carl had another accident on his motor bike last week. He had been planing on this two week excursion to the Sturgis motorcycle rally for a year and just as he arrived his front tire blew out at 60 mph. He suffered a broken leg and another broken wrist. I actually think he got away lucky. I am grateful he didn't hurt his head or anything else more serious. "I think this is it for the motorbike thing", says Sandy. Please keep Carl in your thoughts the next few days as they try to get him back home.