A Quiet Saturday at Home

Saturday: Today we said goodbye to our friends Dave and MaryLou. After our usual bacon and eggs breakfast they loaded up their car and headed north back to Manitoba. Their plan was to spend a bit of time at the Hopi mission in northern Arizona along the way.

Sue was out of commission today. She got a pinched nerve or something like that in her back yesterday during our golf game (or maybe it started on our morning cycling trip) and this morning it was worse rather than better. So we stayed home all day, hoping that a bit of rest (and some pain killers) would help her mend.

I’d gone to Bashas in the morning for some fresh bread and saw the ‘market’ tents on the parking lot. I headed back there for lunch, picking up a couple of hot dogs for my lunch. I also bought some more pills for Sue. On the cycle there I checked out the low-flying helicopter that ultimately landed in the parking lot behind Bashas — I guess there was an emergency on the Mountain Brook golf course right on hole number 11, and emergency vehicles and the helicopter were taking someone to the hospital.

I washed all our golf clubs and used golf balls in the garage. We skyped for a long time with Alex. We watched golf on TV. Then at around 5pm I went to the golf course and hit a bucket of balls on the driving range — which felt really good. The highway was crawling with Renaissance Festival visitors. I stopped by Walgreens to pick up a DVD rental and then joined the parade to get back home.

Sue spent most of the day sitting and lying on the couch with a hot pack (thanks, MaryLou) on her back. We had our leftover pizza for supper. Then we watched a couple of movies. The first film was my download of “Rundskop” (Bullhead), a Belgian film nominated for Best Foreign Film. It was pretty good — a drama about a cattle farmer who was brutalized as a child. We’ve seen four of the five nominated films in this category and I predict that the Iranian film “A Separation” will win. The second movie we watched (well, actually only I watched it; Sue fell asleep on the couch) was the DVD I rented earlier, “Hanna”. Interesting, but a bit too ‘stylized’. When it was over we had a bit of trail mix for a night snack and watched Saturday Night Live before going to bed.