Monday, April 11, 2011

Teed Off in Kelowna

Day Three of our Okanagan odyssey saw us going for a family mini-golf excursion, and what a predictably hapless foursome we present. Kim is about as deftly-coordinated as an arthritic moose. Young Abby's approach to golf is to stickhandle toward the hole like Phil Esposito on a breakaway. As for me, I am by turns astonishingly lucky (hole-in-one on the 17th thanks to a five-foot rebound off a curb) and pathetically inept (my approach on this hole


saw me suffering the effects of more strokes than Dick Clark).

Two-year-old Sam, pictured here sitting smugly by the Deadwood-inspired facade on the 16th green,


carried the day by scoring a consistent two strokes on every single hole, owing to his strategy of picking up his ball after each tee-off, walking it to the cup and dropping it in. I'm actually kind of proud of him for figuring out so swiftly the pointless futility of golf.

Oh, right...the point of this blog entry? It was this sign, introducing us to the 6th hole:


Speaking of hit-and-miss (or, I suppose, miss-and-miss in this case), we have here both absent and superfluous punctuation. There should, of course, be an apostrophe in NATURES to indicate who that gardener is in service to. And when will sign-writers learn that quotation marks are not for slapping around a phrase to give emphasis? In fact, because the scare claws are often employed to indicate irony, the play can backfire like a florescent green golf ball ricocheting off a windmill fan. Although now that I look at that mangy patch of moonscape depicted here, perhaps the claim of "quality service" is indeed meant to be ironic.