Neither rain nor wind nor lousy play will keep the hacker from his appointed round

I'm proud to say this was my first shot off the tee.
Sadly, I didn't birdie. 

When you're a beginning golfer, sometimes the well-hit shots hurt more than the bad ones.

Case in point: My first ball off the tee today at Village Greens, a par-3 course in Sinking Spring – the site of last week's adventure – struck a wooden fence to my left and bounced within a reasonable distance of the fairway. The fence was the only barrier between the course and some homes on the other side of an alley. Last week, in fact, my first ball went far enough to clear the fence so it could land, unimpeded, in someone's driveway.

Anyhoo: lousy shot, but it wasn't disastrous. Better yet, it was still playable.
A second example of a terrible shot: I sliced another ball off the tee sometime in the front nine. It went high into a pine tree, crashing near the base and two inches in front of a thick branch. Rather than take a penalty stroke, I played this bad ball, chopped down on it with my lob wedge and brought it back to a reasonable spot on the fairway.

Bad shots I can handle. Hell, bad shots I can count on. And that's part of the problem.
Because every once in a while, I'll hit the ball well, using proper form, weight distribution and everything else – then overshoot the green. Suddenly my pitching wedge will carry the ball farther than I've been able to hit all day. When I need to just push the ball a bit, my 7-iron suddenly becomes a driver and launches the ball a mile, where a hole earlier, that same club couldn't carry it more than 20 yards.

Nowhere was this more perfectly demonstrated than on hole 18, a par-4, 250-yard hole with a nice, wide fairway where the green sits atop a hill. It could have been my best hole of the day — and I had a pair of pars and a bogie already. I used my 5-wood off the tee, and the ball went a little less than halfway down the fairway. My second shot was a 4-iron, which had the distance and aim to get me within one shot of getting on the green.

I've been uneven with the wedges all day. Sometimes they gave me just what I needed, more often they landed short. I figured my 8-iron would give me the distance to get the ball up the hill and onto the green, with one stroke to spare for par.

As I'd done with my earlier two shots, I hit the 8-iron as well as I could – a beautiful, arcing shot that went high in the air, straight toward the pin and landed on the green. And kept going. When I got up the hill, the ball was 5 yards from the edge of the green, at the far end of the hole. Out came the lob wedge. Once again, I overshot, getting it too high and rolling the ball past the green onto the high-grassed fringe on the other side. One more shot to get it back onto the green, and three putts left me with an 8 for the hole.

Another tee shot, though I bogied this hole.
When you're a novice, a bogie's good enough.

Bad, but not as bad as some holes I played earlier today. Twice I scored a 9 and once a 10 (but if anyone asks, I'll tell them it's a 3 in binary).

Oh, I had a few bright spots. Twice I hit the green from the tee and was able to two-putt one for par and three-putt the other for a bogie. On the back nine, I parred another hole after actually hitting my lob wedge the way I wanted.

Striking that fine balance between hitting the ball the way you want and hitting it the way you expect is still beyond my reach. So is breaking 100, for now. Even at Village Green, I shot 119 – 63 over par.