Ed Icionsub

What is summer without a good baseball game? I haven’t been to a game yet this year. Nashville does not have a major league team, but our minors team is pretty good, the Nashville Sounds. We are the farm team for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Interesting facts: of 826 Sounds players who have appeared in at least one game for the Nashville Sounds since 1978, over 500 of those players have gone on to play in the major leagues.

Also, 39 Nashville Sounds players who have gone on to the majors have been named to their league’s post-season All-Star unit.

It tickles me to hear the baseball announcer on the Playstation video baseball games call out, “A swing and a miss.” It repeats the same couple of phrases about a hundred times each game. It gets to the point that “a swing and a miss” becomes a taunt that dogs you for days after you’ve played the game.

It’s so bad that now I hear it in my head when I’m watching ESPN or even the sport clips and highlights during the sports segment of the nightly news. LOL

The May issue of Golf Digest listed 7 Myrtle Beach area golf courses in their “America’s 100 Greatest Public Golf Courses” list for 2009-2010.

Myrtle Beach placed more public golf courses on the new Golf Digest’s list than any other golf destination in the country, followed by the Pinehurst and Pebble Beach areas.

I’m happy to say that I have played in all three areas and Myrtle Beach is still my favorite area for both quality and variety, hands down.

Back in the 1980′s, I took at job at a consulting company who did a lot of business with the Federal Government and the U. S. military. A big part of doing business in those days was getting your connections to join you for a round of golf. So I learned how to play golf and I have been playing ever since.

Maybe it was the 80′s or maybe it was the DC area, but I never had a problem getting tee times smack on the time frame I wanted or very close to it. I could even get a quick pick up game if I had the chance to cut out of the office a couple hours and play 9 holes before dark.

But then I started going to Myrtle Beach every year and that is the one place in America known for their golf courses. Everyone goes there and everyone needs to know about www.48hourteetimes.com so their golf time can be based around convention schedules and family time at the beach. So setting up the right schedule ahead of time is very important.

The smartest thing to do about scheduling plus saving a little money on the course fees is to log in to the 48 hour tee times web site and set up everything right there.  You have to admit that 48 hours is pretty quick when the courses are in such demand. But trust me, they are worth it!

Today was a great day for fathers. It’s our own day for being recognized by family and friends, and the gifts and special meals are nice, too. The new leather wallet and the Playstation 3 game were a nice surprise and very much appreciated. But to be honest, the recognition and the thank you’s mean a lot more to me these days than the new “stuff.” Thanks, boys and girls!

There have been conflicting reports lately about whether or not using your brain cells will result in better memory and thinking skills, or does it affect the brain at all?

I think that the more you use your brain, the smarter you get. For example, I played this game that was a lot like Scrabble. You have to make words out of a board of tiles that shift and change each turn. It’s fun and addicting. But my point is that I started playing this game and was averaging 3 and 4 letter words. But as I played more games over several days, I was able to start using words with 5, 6 and 7 letters. I am certain that my vocabulary and spelling skills have both improved since I started playing this game.

Next month we will be spending a weekend in one of my favorite family-friendly resorts: Myrtle Beach. We have been going for years and always have a wonderful time. I was searching for resorts for golf in Myrtle Beach and have it all planned out.

Although the rest of the family wants to go for the beach and the ocean, I am going to enjoy 3 days of golf on the best courses in South Carolina. I found golf packages in Myrtle Beach that save me money and are strategically located near the beach as well as the best golf courses.

My boss told me about a web site that he likes to use to arrange for tee times: http://www.ttimesonly.com/ so that is the next step in planning my mini-vacation in Myrtle Beach. After I set up my gold games, then I will let the family plan around the times I’ll be golfing and we’ll all have plenty of time to enjoy ourselves.

We took the grandson to a free Easter egg hunt this afternoon at the Buchanan House landmark.

There were a couple of hundred kids there, and the hunt organizers had broken them down into three age ranges to make the hunt more fair. Our grandson is 7, so he was in the second grouping. He had so much fun running through the side yard looking for the eggs.

There was an article in the paper that say over 60% of workers in the U. S. did not take their earned vacation time last year. That might be a good thing if you can can accumulate unlimited hours or days that carry over each year. But at my company we have to used the days earned within a year or we lose that time. So you can believe that I use my vacation time,

This year I have plans to go to the biggest and best golf tournament in the the world, held every year in Augusta, Georgia. I have a friend who lives in nearby Aiken, SC, so the deal is that I buy the The Masters Tickets for both of us and I get to stay at his house for a week during the tournament.

Last year I did not get to attend any baseball games all year, so this year I have to make up for that. I will get both Fenway Park Tickets for a game in July, and then Wrigley Field Tickets for the Cubs against the Cardinals. This game has been an annual tradition for us for 15 years, with the exception of last year and the passing of a brother in law. Obviously, we had to cancel our plans and attend the funeral. But this year, we are back to our yearly trek to Chicago in the heat of summer to cheer for the Cardinals.

Wow – just saw a commercial with Eric Clapton for a cell phone. I think the phone is a T-Mobile exclusive, which actually is making me consider switching from AT&T so I can get this phone. It has a special design on the case and in the commercial, it shows Eric Clapton strumming what looks like guitar struts on the phone display. I wonder if that is a special application that lets you play the phone like a guitar? How would that even work? Not that it matter so much to me – I can’t play the guitar anyway. I just like the case design and the thought that it has a variety of cool apps that you can get for it. Plus, I’m a huge Clapton fan – from way back.