I awoke at 5:57, 3 minutes before my alarm was set to go off (how does that work?). It’s still dark outside. The sun came up at 6:30. By then I’d finished my first cup of coffee and woken up Sue. A plate of fresh mangos and bananas and it’s time to go golfing!

We were paired up with Fritz and Gerald. Fritz (German) was a 70-year-old ex-CEO of a health insurance company, and had Suzanne, a 30-something-year-old ‘caddy’ pulling his golf cart around for him while he ‘flailed’ away at his golf ball. Gerald was an 86-year-old English professor (of engineering) who couldn’t hit the ball quite as far as he did in his prime. He too had a caddie, Archie, an old black man who quietly gave him (and me too!) tips as we made our way around the front 9 holes. Gerald and Archie left us for the second nine. Monday is ‘cheap gold’ day at the Metropolitan, so it’s quite busy and our took us 5 hours.

We filled the car with gas on the way home. Lunch up in our apartment — I had leftover pizza and a Black Label beer (remember the slogan “Hey Mabel, Black Label!” when we used to have Black Label in Canada?).

Then Sue started a load of laundry and we went to buy more beer and groceries. Back at home we soon had a big drying rack of clothes hanging out on our balcony. I managed to find the same hairdresser I always go to in Canada, and got myself looking cleaned up and spiffy, too.

We’d had so much trouble staying awake watching ‘our shows’ yesterday evening we decided to continue our series this afternoon, BEFORE supper. We watched 2 more episodes of “Homeland”.

I had some fine spicy chili-flavored Biltong with my G&T for happy hour. I was looking at the movie options at our local cinemas and noted that they are showing a couple of those ‘packaged’ Oscar-nominated shorts — live-action and animated. We still had not watched any of the ‘best foreign’ films, and only one of the ‘best documentary feature’ movies. So I looked online to see what our options were and found a couple that I could download. That slowed down the internet pipe enough to make reading Facebook posts on Sue’s iPad nearly impossible! What to do?

Supper was an ‘at-home’ braai today. The temperature wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been here for our first 3 or 4 weeks. In fact, the high was 24 and it was cool enough to slip on a sweater while I stood out on our balcony flipping the pork tenderloin and boerwurst on the Weber. Washed that down with cold (large) Windhoek Draught Lager. And just like that we are right back “in the groove” here!

After supper I ‘paused’ the big movie downloads so we could watch a bit of TV. We hung in there for a while — Sue better than I — but by 9:30 we finally surrendered and went to bed.