how golf transformed my sunday

i was supposed to be off somewhere this afternoon. i was supposed to meet a couple of friends over coffee. we have been talking about it for more than a month but work put my social life on a steady hold the past couple of months and i only got to find some free time this weekend. i even had to beg off from an invitation to a bible study today...

but i never received the call nor text. maybe they got busy. it was okay. i had my friends xtn and jaggy over for lunch - we had baked chicken (my original recipe!!!) and leftover lechon paksiw from dj's last night.

i was at xtn's apartment last night. they were packing stuff for xtn's move to a new apartment while i spent nearly three hours chatting on facebook - i never had so much fun as the one i had last night! i caught up with so many friends from way back and chatted with several people who i just recently met. it was awesome. it was the longest i was on facebook!

i don't have access to facebook at work ("forbidden site" - wink, wink) and i only see updates through my email. sometimes i see some messages or wall posts/comments that i really want to send a quick reply to and couldn't - it makes me so frustrated. when i finally get around to login and visit my page, the comments are usually too old to even bother to reply. grrr! :) and i end up spending no more than 5 minutes everytime. last night was different! i had so much fun!

anyway, so i was chatting last night while my friends jaggy and xtn was packing stuff. except for setting up the boxes, i didn't really help them much - yes, am too bad :) they finished sometime after 1 and they went to bed. i left xtn's apartment a quarter before 3am. i sleep late. everytime.

at about 12 noon today, i was awoken by xtn's call. they were coming over and was asking if i had food for lunch. i presented the leftover food from last night. then i recalled that i still had the marinated chicken in the fridge which i was supposed to bake last weekend to bring to the set of anselmo's film shoot. i decided to have it for lunch.

it took an hour to bake the skinless breast chicken parts and we didn't get to have lunch until it was after 1pm. over lunch, we were switching channels between the pga golf championship on cbs and this funny but otherwise dreadful leslie nielsen spoof of harrison ford's "the fugitive".

we didn't get to finish the movie. cbs' coverage of the pga championship offered a more compelling real-life entertainment. during the past three weeks, i have learned so much about the sport of golf more than any other time. sure, i knew how the scoring goes but i was never so sure what to call those "birdies", "bogeys", or "eagles" before. i didn't know golf could be exciting either. or, perhaps, was it because tiger was playing?

so we were watching the championship and i was openly rooting for south korean y.e. yang. i always root for the underdog. i was never too optimistic though of him taking the crown from tiger this year but when he made the double eagle in the 14th hole, my asian pride started to swell.

in the final hole, when he birdied his final putt, my camera was already aimed at my tv screen. i had to capture the moment! no asian has won the championship in its 91 year history. no person has won over tiger in a major championship (when tiger has the lead going into the final round) ever! and yang, who is more than 100 rankings away from tiger did it! it was so amazing. the sight of him giving his wife a long, tearful embrace, sealed the moment for me. i will never dismiss golf as a boring game again. in fact, i am thinking now of learning how to play it!

here are some pictures of images i saw on my tv screen today.

the final ranking

yang hoists the trophy

the final birdie putt

a visibly upset tiger woods