In ongoing effort to get myself out of my appartement (I work from home, so it truly is my castle), I decided to learn how to golf. It’s an outside activity, I can call it sport (without any actual physical effort), it’s mostly in beautifully landscaped surroundings, and I might even get to meet people outside my work or family.

I found that the Get Golf Ready program is a perfect fit for that. It’s designed to teach adults how to play golf with beginner golf lessons. For an affordable $99, you get five lessons that get you started with the game: putting, chipping, full shots, drive, a.s.o. Exactly what I was looking for!

Today I went for my first lesson:

Everyone knows you play 18 holes of golf, but today I learned that two strokes out of every par (a predetermined number of strokes required to complete a hole) are considered to be putting strokes, on average half of all strokes in a round of golf! So putting is super important, which is why we started with that. We’re a very diverse group of five student, who were let by a great golf instructor/teacher. He’s really enthusiastic and made the lesson today really fun! He took a lot of time and went well beyond the scheduled 90mins of instructions, touching all kinds of different subjects, from putting (of course), to golf rules, to etiquette, and even a short intro to the golf carts they use there.

Two Trees from the Olivas Links Golf Course.

I had a great time today and a lot of fun. I can not wait to learn more, and might just go back and practice some putting on my own now!

Three Meetups, two WordCamps, a conference, and a birthday. Coming back from a team meetup in Florence, Italy, the awesome WordCamp Orange County kicked of the month of June, which will be a busy, WordPress-filled one for me.

I’ll speak at the Ventura WP Meetup and then travel to Portland, Oregon where I’ll be co-working with Michael Fields, attend the Portland WP Meetup, participate in an advanced jQuery training, and join many other Automatticians for a jQuery conference. Back in Ventura, I will speak for the first time at the Topanga Canyon WP Meetup, and celebrate my 30th birthday one day after that. For the grand finale, I’ll be traveling to Canada for the first time in my life and volunteer at WordCamp Montreal. Throughout the month I will also meet a lot of my Automattic colleagues for the first time, which always makes for a good time.

Last but not least, I hope the new version of WordPress will be released this month, making the new default theme Twenty Thirteen available to millions of WordPress users.

This happens to me a lot. I go into a store with the intent of buying something. Let’s say a pair of pants. And more times than not, I go home empty handed. Why is that?

I spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of a buying decision. And I don’t mean things like a car or a house. Those too, of course. But I mean things like the above mentioned pair of pants. Or a home stereo. Or ice cream.

I took this picture today, in a Ventura grocery store. This is just too much choice for me! When there are 23 different flavors and brands of chocolate ice cream, I will always wonder: “What if the flavor next to is better than the one that I just bought?” I will not be able to select a product and feel confident that I made the best possible choice.

I hate buyer’s remorse. Probably because I made too many bad buying decisions in the past. I wonder how much money I spent on purchases I later regretted? That dress shirt that ended up being just too small, the membership in an animal rescue club that I agreed on in the pedestrian zone, or the two liter bottle of tonic water.

I hate buyer’s remorse. I hate it so much, I’d rather walk out of a store than buy the pair of pants the fit decently.

[EDIT]:
Philip pointed out a TED video to me, which really hit the nail on the head:

tl;dr:
Why choices make people miserable:

• Regret and anticipated regret
• Opportunity costs
• Escalation of expectations
• Self-blame