Perusing the Internet between students Tuesday, I see this: “Christina Slammed over Performance.” And I think “But, of course.”

It was about Christina Aguilera flubbing a few lines in the Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl on Sunday. Horrible woman that she is, Aguilera, singing one of the toughest songs there is to sing before about 111 million people, became the 110th million person to make a mistake.

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The AOL headline on Friday asked the question, “Do you remember where you were 25 years ago?” and it didn’t take a photo of the Space Shuttle Challenger to jog my memory.

There are some things you don’t forget. Read More

My husband wanted to get me a real birthday present this year, he really did. Because he gets nervous doing it on his own, he dangled all kinds of nice ideas. Jewelry even. I guess he still remembers how I reacted the year he got a new TV for our bedroom and tried to pass it off as a gift.

So he really tried. And what did I do? Read More

I might complain that I’m sore from my two days of golf over the last week, but when you’re married to someone who has spent the last five days shoveling dirt, they win.

Yes, Rick is still sweating and digging a giant hole in our front yard – it’s like watching an old prison movie. Any time now, he tells me, he will locate the rest of the sprinkler pipe damaged by the people looking for the other damaged pipe. I don’t really understand and I don’t want to, but I do know I want to rent “Cool Hand Luke” tonight.

Besides all that, I have a golf career to look after.

I don’t actually play golf. But I do have new shoes, a new glove (who knew it goes on your non-dominant hand?) and a new shirt from Kohl’s that isn’t really a golf shirt per se, but kind of looked like it to me and it goes with my long shorts that really aren’t golf shorts but looked like they would pass.

All I’m missing are clubs.

Rick thought I didn’t really need the shoes or the shirt. But after years of turning down invitations to golf outings, I finally accepted one last week and after showing up with borrowed shoes a full size and a half too big, and an outfit that was not nearly as cute as what the other women were wearing, I needed the upgrade for the outing this week.

I used to turn these things down because, well, as I said, I don’t actually play golf. When I say I don’t play, I mean I have never set foot on a real golf course except to cover the British Open (thank God they didn’t know that) and assorted other tournaments. I have hit balls at the driving range and I have gone to a local, kids’-caliber nine-hole course out with my 12-year-old son Alec but mostly to carry his bag, so I don’t count that.

I’ve always felt a little left out, as I’d guess other women do, when it comes to golf. Men have a definite advantage in this area, using golf to network and schmooze and make important business connections while drinking large quantities of beer and missing work.

But as I have found out, it’s not easy.

I tried to suggest to my friend Peggy Kusinski, who recruited me for last week’s charity event, that maybe I shouldn’t actually play. That instead, I could just hang around and talk to people – do the schmoozing part without the golf part.

But I guess I missed the point of the golf event. Hanging around the clubhouse while everyone else is playing would leave you alone in the clubhouse. So, in her infinite wisdom, Peggy put me with four extremely nice, extremely fun women she thought I would enjoy playing with.

By extremely nice and extremely fun, I mean they cheated.

Like many tournaments, it was a best-ball format, which means whoever makes the best shot, everyone takes their next shot from there. In our case, if our best shot was anywhere but on the fairway or on the green, we made certain adjustments. Frankly, after playing like this, I don’t know why anyone would want to do it any other way.

What amazed me is that despite the cheating and using golf carts and stopping after the 18th hole even though we started on the third, it still took us five and a half hours to play.

I don’t get this. Is this supposed to be one of the game’s attractions? No sporting event, especially one in which I participate, should take five and a half hours. Even with really great company (who let me use their clubs), I was still hot, sweaty, had a headache and was ready to pack it in after nine.

At the risk of bragging, I wasn’t bad. I mean, I actually made contact most of the time, a testimony to my athletic ability and the fact that they now make drivers with heads the size of a bowling ball. And no one hardly noticed when I failed to make contact or hit the ball straight up in the air or sliced it into the woods.

Women are understanding that way. We spend most of our lives telling each other that our shortcomings (bad golf games, bad hair, big hips) are not only OK but great. We do this because we are the gentler sex. Also because we count on our friends to return the favor.

And so I left last week’s tournament feeling really good about myself.

And then yesterday, I found out I was playing with men.

Now it’s not like I’m not used to being around sweaty men. I make a living out of this. And I did feel better with new shoes that fit and a glove that went on the correct hand and that shirt from Kohl’s. But I had a feeling the men wouldn’t cheat (they didn’t) and might not be as impressed when I made contact but only hit the ball 20 yards.

As it turned out, I was lucky and they were also extremely nice and extremely fun. By extremely nice and extremely fun, I mean they drank a lot. And they stopped to let me out at the ladies tee on each hole without so much as rolling their eyes.

I suspect this is what contributed to our round of golf lasting more than SIX hours. A person could drive to Ohio in six hours.

Learn Italian. Have a day at the spa with time for lunch (not that I’ve ever done that but I’m just imagining you could).

Again, I developed a migraine (though that could have been from the Leinenkugel Summer Shandy, which if you haven’t tried it, you really should. Nice and fruity). And I was surprisingly exhausted despite the cart (all that getting in and out at the ladies tee, perhaps. Or again, maybe the Leinenkugel).

But it was a nice day. I rented clubs, but the guys told me which ones to use. And they really inspired me. Not to be mean, but even really non-athletic looking men can hit a golf ball a very long way, so I aspire to do that some day.

And I aspire to play in another golf event.

I mean, now that I have the shoes and all.

I would have wished my husband a Happy Father’s Day this morning, but I couldn’t find him.

Rick always – and I mean, always – wakes up before I do, so having to hunt him down is not something with which I am unfamiliar.

I looked in the kitchen, where he normally empties the dishwasher, but he wasn’t there.

I looked in the laundry room, where he often passes time making up for a week of dirty clothes on Sunday mornings, but he wasn’t there.

I looked in the driveway, where he might be washing both cars, but he wasn’t there and both cars were in the garage, which meant he wasn’t off filling mine up with gas because I have a long trip tomorrow. Then I remembered he did that yesterday.

I looked in the basement and saw only an empty treadmill, which he uses not because he likes to walk really fast or to sweat – he truly does not enjoy doing either — but because he wants to control his blood pressure and lower any risk that he will leave his children at a young age.

Then I remembered and looked out our living room window and sure enough, there he was, shovel in hand and big smile on his dripping face, standing next to a large mound of dirt wearing old ratty jeans and a soaked Alabama t-shirt (bought in for five bucks when I was doing a story there a couple hundred years ago) at 8:30 in the morning.

I’m sure many fathers this morning are working jobs they’d rather not be working. I’m just as sure there are many out golfing, at the gym, sleeping or having a nice breakfast. I’m pretty sure not many are standing next to a big pile of dirt and kind of liking it.

Why would my husband be standing next to a big pile of dirt on Father’s Day morning or any morning, you ask? Well, I will tell you.

Because it’s a given that when your family is still trying to make up for your wife’s lost job’s wages and agonizing over your new insurance premiums that are about to go up 135 percent, someone is going to tell you that if you don’t replace your roof and soon, you won’t have one. And just when you have digested that, while getting your kids off to school with your wife out of town, you’re going to walk into your laundry room and see several inches of sludge-filled water coursing out of the drain on the floor. And you’re going to know, because you just went through this last year, that this means your front yard, including the shrubbery you just planted, is going to be dug up in order to locate the pipe that just burst.

Because you just went through this and because you’re a man who pays close attention to such things, you also suspect they will do something while trying to find the pipe that will make the repair even tougher and the job more expensive. What you don’t know yet, even though you tried to warn them, is that they are also going to bust up your sprinkler system in the process.

So you watch them dig and listen to them explain why they just cost you several thousand more dollars, and instead of yelling at them – because you are not the type of man to do that – you go into the house and get your camera and your 12-year-old son and you start taking pictures of exactly where the broken sprinkler pipe and shredded wires are, so that when they cover the hole, you will know where to find them so you can fix them yourself.

Then you take the son who shares your passion for fixing things to the hardware store – and even bring  your almost-15-year-old complaining daughter along (on the way to taking her to get a second piercing in her ear) – and make a fun project out of the whole thing.

Even though you weigh only marginally more than the shovel you’re using and you’re of a religious persuasion that enjoys jokes about how challenged their men are at fixing things, you spend the better part of a Saturday digging the dirt back out of the hole they used a crane to fill.

Of course, you can’t find the sprinkler pipe or the wires right away, despite the pictures, so you dig way more dirt than you planned. But you still don’t get in a foul mood and take it out on the family the way your wife might, and even clean up in time to spend the entire day with them.

And then on Father’s Day, you wake up before anyone else in the neighborhood, put on the jeans your daughter thinks are embarrassing (though they’re better than the acid-washed pair you usually wear for jobs like this) and locate the wires, which produces the proud and dirty smile you flash your wife, who has arisen several hours later.

But you still don’t finish the job. You come in and shower (since you’re a very hygienic kind of guy, even though you don’t mind dirt) because you know your son won’t wake up for several more hours and you promised him he could help connect all the wires.

None of this sounds the least bit fun to your wife and truthfully, you would have preferred to just finish the job. But you know your son is looking forward to it and because of that, you are too.

This is your idea of a good Father’s Day.

This is your family’s idea of a great father.

(Happy Father’s Day, honey! We love you.)