Originally posted on jeffshelman.com on Dec. 27, 2010

When I arrived home on Saturday night, I was hoping for some sort of Christmas miracle. During a week in Arizona, Minneapolis got hit with a pair of 5-6 inch snow falls.

Could I have been lucky enough to have had one of my neighbors take care of the snow on my driveway? Unfortunately not.

But even though I got to spend about 90 minutes of quality of time with my snowblower, it was worth it. The reason: December golf.

While my week in Phoenix was a nice break from work and it was good to see my parents, it was really nice to get back on the golf course. Armed with a new set of irons (more on those later), I played for the first time since early November.

It was about as I expected — a grab bag of good and bad. There were good shots and a couple of birdies. There was one day when I couldn’t keep the driver in play. There were some fat and ugly iron shots. And there was zero short game skills.

But it was golf. And that was good.

I played four different courses, all fairly close to my parents’ place in suburban Surprise. Triolgy at Vistancia was the best of the four. Wickenberg Country Club was a piece of garbage. The other two were fine, but nothing special.

In the upcoming days, I need to finalize my 2010 golf numbers. I don’t have solid numbers on rounds/holes played, even though I keep claiming that I’m going to track those. I think the number of courses played is up over 2009, but not near the high water mark since I started keeping those numbers in 2002 or so. There were some new courses on the list, but I don’t think I added any new states in my long-term goal of playing golf in every state the country before I die.