Author: Rudy

The weather forecast for today was nice in the morning, with strong winds for the afternoon. So, after our Saturday morning bacon and eggs, Sue decreed that we would get on our bikes and get our exercise in the morning before the 45mph winds arrival.

We decided to ride into Mesa to the big market at Baseline and Signal Butte. The shoulders on Hwy#60 have been repaved and it was time for us to check out this route. The ride was fantastic. Lots of shoulder, so even though there’s a lot of traffic on that highway it felt sort of like riding to Kleefeld on Hwy#52 — too much traffic noise to visit but you feel safe in your lane. No shoulder at all for the first couple of miles on Baseline but hardly any traffic. Actually the 15km ride only took us half an hour. Once we got to the market we idled around for a bit on our bikes — didn’t have the guts to go in and ‘shop’ in our spandex — and then headed right back home. Not a bad ride, but probably too boring to repeat regularly. The regular route around Gold Canyon is more interesting — hills, neighborhoods, no traffic.

After lunch Sue gave me a haircut. I hadn’t had one since we were in Chile last winter. Not quite a year. But Sue said it looked real ugly, and apparently everyone else thought so too. So finally Delilah had her way and I was powerless to resist.

Since Sunday is reserved for sitting in front of the television (watching NFL) we decided to go golfing at 3pm. Perfect weather. Nobody else on the course. Cloudy but comfortably warm. No wind. No wind? So much for those weather forecasts. We both had fun, and felt we were making progress. I shot 52, with a 10 on the final hole (damn sand trap), certainly one of my best scores so far. And Sue was getting under her drives. So that was a good afternoon.

Back at the house we barbecued cheeseburgers and watched TV. Then to bed.

Forgot all about having a ‘special’ Remembrance Day celebration today. I read the introduction to the Steve Jobs bio book this morning.

At 1:30 we went for a walk — ended up walking along the wash between two little developments — not easy to walk on the big stones with lots of brambles scraping our shins — we won’t do that again. But it was a long walk and served the purpose. We showered and ‘cleaned up’ and then sat around waiting for the proper time to arrive for us to go out for our Friday Night Pizza.

At 6pm we got in the van and headed out. We returned our movie rental. Then we parked on the full lot in front of the new Hitching Post restaurant on King’s Ranch Road. A happening place! Inside it didn’t look all that much different than the Garage Pizza, a place we frequented last year, but which has since closed. Lots of tables and old people sitting around them. An old Kenny Rogers wanna-be was singing and playing guitar along with his karaoke tracks. Blues song. Sounded good. Full house. We found an available arboreta table in the corner and sat down. No peanuts in the shell here, but at least they had the handy-dandy roll of paper towel on each table.

We ordered: a glass of merlot for Sue, a pint jar of “Kilt-lifter” brew for me. A medium #1 pizza. “Good choice,” says our waiter. The big flat screens are showing the NFL channel, CNN, a basketball game, and NASCAR. Lots of tables have a plastic basket of chicken and fries on them — seems like the ‘broasted’ chicken is a specialty.

Our pizza arrives. Not bad. Now I’m hungry. And Kenny Rodgers has the old-timers up on the dance floor! A couple of old round-bellied guys with red golfing faces and neatly combed heads are leading ladies with dark brown dyed hair and new jeans and neatly pressed cowgirl blouses around on the dance floor. One couple is the reverse; he’s got the dark dyed hair and she’s got a neat gray hair-do to match her big shiny earrings. The old women sitting at some of the big tables are watching her jealously — how did that old bag manage to snag such a handsome young buck?

By the time I’ve finished my second pint jar and Sue has boxed up the 4 pieces of leftover pizza I’m ready to get out of here. We’re not old enough for this. Old guys in new Walmart Wrangler jeans prancing up to Kenny Rodgers with requests for old Waylon and Willie songs dedicated to their sweethearts. Good times. Even the ‘youngish’ couple sitting next to our table are clearly ‘made-up’ upon closer inspection. She’s got long black straight hair better suited to a teenager, and is squinting through her make-up, typing away at her Blackberry while he plays with his iPhone. Even when their food arrives, she’s got one hand on her phone while the other holds her sandwich. It’s disgusting.

Sue drives us back to our house. Next week we’ll check out the Firemen’s Pub across the street. I find what looks like a pretty good movie in the “unwatched movies” folder on my computer and start it playing back on the TV. Whoa, I’m tired! better lay my head down a bit. When I wake up the movie is just over. Sue has watched it by herself. We close up and head off to bed.

Today we decided that our ‘activity’ for the day would be golfing (for a second day in a row). So we spent our morning inside; reading, computing, sudokus, eggs and toast. Got an email from Uncle Abe which triggered a whole series of Nikkel emails back and forth. Fun times. Also, we finally booked our flights back here from Winnipeg for January 1. Nice to get that settled.

Then, just before lunch, our Amazon book order arrived. The Steve Jobs book for me and 3 books for Sue. Great! Now we’ve got something to do for the long (Remembrance Day) weekend.

We went to the golf course just after 3pm. It was cooler and windier today, but still a great day for golfing. I shot quite a bit better than yesterday, although somehow I managed to miss recording our scores for one hole and so I don’t actually know how well I shot — well, maybe I should just add ’em up as is.

It was getting quite dark by the time we teed off on our last hole. We’d already heard the coyotes on hole #9 howling — now they were just lying there quietly, waiting for us to clear off. We stopped at Walgreen’s to pick up another RedBox movie (Source Code) before taking the long way round back to our house. A very big moon was slowly rising up from behind Superstition Mountain. Very impressive.

When we got home I lit the barbecue and was cooking chicken while Sue was making salads when the kids Skyped us. Big news: Tim has finalized the deal for a new location for Oak Leaf. A big relief for them; finally an end to the uncertainty about where they’ll be after Christmas.

We had supper and settled in to watch our movie. Sue thought we might have seen it before and I had already decided that Plan B would be to go to the Fireman’s Pub to watch Thursday Night Football if the movie was a repeat. But no, we hadn’t seen it before — so no football tonight. The movie was ‘okay’.

After the movie we watched The National on live-stream, then Letterman before calling it a day.

After breakfast (yes, after BREAKFAST) we watched the RedBox DVD we picked up at Walgreens yesterday — Mordecai Richler’s “Barney’s Version”, nominated for Best Makeup Oscar last year. Two hours of great movie. And it’s fun watching movies in the morning — we don’t fall asleep during the slow parts.

After a quick lunch, we went for our first hike. An hour and a half on Silly Mountain. Cool weather, but sunny — perfect for hiking. Showered and then headed into Mesa. Returned our cell phone to Walmart. Bought a new office chair and new jeans. Back home I put the chair together. Then the doorbell rang and my antenna order arrived. I hooked up my computer to the TV, and the audio to the Bose system. I played with the antenna a bit — got 3 Digital channels with the antenna inside the house. I’ll try it again with it mounted outside.

Supper. A bit of computer work for me, reading for Sue. Then we watched Frontline and some late night TV. Off to bed.

Rained at night, and the morning air was downright cold. Sent an invoice to the ICS in Hong Kong for work on MaryLou’s book. Skyped with Dave D for a bit while Sue was busy on the MagicJack phone and reading. We had a late lunch. I did a bit of web work until 3pm when Sue and I went for a long walk. We rented a movie from Walgreens and walked back to our house. It was cool and a bit windy, but we were still wearing shorts. That’s better than back home, where the first snow of the year has fallen.

After supper we settled down to watch Monday Night Football, a great game in which the Bears managed to upset the Eagles in a hard-fought battle. Then we watched the CBC National (Livestream) before calling it a day.

Although most of North America had an extra hour of sleep last night, not us in Arizona. Like Saskatchewan, we don’t observe Daylight Savings Time. But as of today, we’re just an hour behind Steinbach.

So we watched our regular Sunday morning ‘news’ shows — Fareed and Reliable Sources on CNN. Then it was time for football. Ironically we get more choices of games at home than we do here in Arizona, because at home we get Detroit, Minnesota, and Winnipeg channels, and often they pick up different games at each location. Here we had to settle for the local CBS and FOX channels. Oh well, it was just fine.

As we were watching the second game of the afternoon we got a call on our new MagicJack phone — Dorothy and Bob Schinkel were just 15 minutes from our place, shopping at the big Mesa Flea Market. So they came over and we barbecued steaks and had supper together. Had a fine visit.

About halfway through the Sunday Night Football game the Schinkels got back into their Porsche and headed back across town to their home in Goodyear. Strawberries and ice cream for snack. A great first weekend here in Arizona.

After yesterday’s dust storm and last night’s rain shower, we woke up to a gray, cloudy, and cold Arizona morning. Superstition Mountain was shrouded in cloud. I tinkered with the “TracFone” cell phone we bought at Walmart yesterday — and couldn’t get it to register in our zip code. So I guess we’ll return that.

We had bacon and eggs for breakfast and eventually got into our cycling shorts and went for a morning bike ride. There were signs posted along the way advertising garage sales and an “Art Tour”. We stopped at quite a few garage sales along the way. When we got to the end of our 10km loop we stopped at the Walgreen’s and bought a “MagicJack” phone that plugs into our computer. We picked up bread at Bashas’ on the way home.

Lunch. Then I installed the new MagicJack phone and pulled out all the handsets in the cupboard and plugged them in. Registered the phone and it all seemed to work. Now we have a phone number! I paid an extra $10 for a Winnipeg number so the long distance shouldn’t be a problem for people at home to call us. Sue and I each called our moms and everything was cool.

I went outside to work on the yard for a bit. Finally got the sprinkler system to work only to find out that there are a couple of major ‘leaks’ in the lines. I’ll either need to get them fixed or just turn the whole thing off. It was a bit cool outside, but now that the sun was out it seemed a whole lot nicer than it had been in the morning.

Supper was warmed up leftover pizza. I was on the ‘help live chat’ option with the MagicJack techies trying to figure out why we got ‘busy’ signals when we called our new number. Didn’t get the issue resolved. They will email us when they have a solution.

Then we got a Skype call from Tim and Alex — and when they called our new MagicJack number it all worked! So I don’t know what’s up with that. Discussed flight back to Phoenix after Christmas options with them.

Well, the Bombers lost a big game to Calgary this afternoon, but the Lions appear to be beating the Alouettes big time tonight. That’ll put the Bombers in first place in the east for the playoffs. Looking forward to Sunday NFL games tomorrow.

Time for a little TV.

We went to exchange our Mediacom TV box today. Not that easy. Had to call Richard in Manitoba to get authorization to exchange our box for an HD box. The lady at the Mediacom office felt sorry for us, but couldn’t really make the switch without Richard’s okay. We went to Walmart to shop for sandals and a cell phone before returning to Mediacom — where the lady finally called Richard directly and we got our HD box.

Back at home I plugged it in only to find that we still didn’t get any of the HD channels. So I skyped Mediacom and they did a reset from their end. While we waited for that to take effect, Sue and I went for a walk. We went to Ed and Val’s house and put their garbage bin back into the garage and returned the garage door opener. Then we went to Basha’s and ordered a pizza. By now the sky was already quite gray with blowing sand.

We had an early supper and watched a bit of TV. Not much good on. I finally connected my Mac to the TV and we watched the CBC National news (live streaming) and Thursday’s episode of “At Issue” and Rex Murphy. Felt like we were at home. We’ll probably do that more regularly.

Got up early and went for a bike ride – the old route. We stopped at Walgreens to buy a few items. We barely had time to have lunch before picking up Ed and Val. We dragged some of their extra furniture out onto the driveway – they’d arranged for Salvation Army to pick it up later that afternoon. Then we took them to the Mesa Airport and said goodbye. We had to hurry home because the Mediacom guy was supposed to come and ‘connect us’ between 1 and 5pm. He showed up around 3pm. The good news was that he got our TV and internet all hooked up. The bad news was the set-top box wasn’t HD. We’ll try to exchange it tomorrow.

For supper we had leftovers. Then a bit of TV, Skyping with Alex, and tired to bed. Weather forecast calls for a dust storm tomorrow afternoon. We’ll have to make our Walmart trip in the morning.