Friday, December 11, 2015

Air Head....

For whatever reason, over the past couple weeks, I'm having trouble shaking the cob webs out of my head and I feel like I'm moving in a vat of molasses.  I suspect it relates to being glued to my office chair and staring at a computer and doing absolutely no physical activity.  November can be a bummer....

What's new?   Another staff change in the equipment maintenance end.  Starting in mid-November I hired Neil L. to be KGC's new mechanic.  He's being busy grinding reels, repairing various items, and finishing off some pet projects I've had on the books for awhile.  The best one, as boring as it sounds, is a small trailer he is fabricating that will come in handy for transporting all but the largest pieces of equipment the club presently owns.  Whether you picked up on it or not, when a piece of equipment breaks down not only is it left on the course to help drive home the point of how undependable and aged our fleet is but some equipment, having a hydrostatic drive, are difficult to tow.  The trailer will make it possible to haul most of the fleet back to shop where Neil can make use of the shop and its resources.

Homemade Tilt Trailer
Putting the course to bed went fairly well with all the preventative treatments be applied without any obvious hitches.  Cold temperatures starting near the end of November shut down any growth and pretty much pushed the turf into dormancy.

Graph from Weather Station
 As an aside, you can view the historical weather (only from August 2015 to present) for KGC's weather station by going HERE and scrolling down about half way to the bottom of the page.  There you can choose to view daily, weekly, or monthly weather stats.

The last week has been interesting with about 4 to 5 inches of snow on the ground and all the rain (1" since Dec. 4 up until Dec. 9).  Take a look at this:

More Weather History
Over 80 mm (or about 3.75") of rain in the past 30 days!  That can't be good.  However, I dug around on Monday and didn't see any real bad news ice wise.  On Wednesday I dug where I could get to and again didn't see any bad news and actually came across some greens that thawed.  Today I dug around again and the only ice is on the greens with a tarp (#7 and #15) which is why we tarp those ones since they are prone to ice.  Long story short, things look rosy.  The fresh snow over the past couple days and the coarse granular, "blocky" snow down to the green surface should, with any luck, give us good protection from the next warm spell.

The hope now is more snow and more of this:

Skiing with my "Homies" on the hill last Sunday