I went to bed at around 1:00 last night — Sue had already been sleeping for a few hours but had the TV on. PBS. “Return to the Wild” — the story about the FAMILY left behind by the kid who dies all alone up in an old bus in Alaska. We’d read “Into the Wild”, the book by Jon Krakauer, and we’d seen the movie too. Now here was a documentary about the parents and siblings of the main character. I found it very interesting, but I only watched the first 20 minutes and then fell asleep. Well, apparently Sue woke up when I went to sleep and watched the last part of the show. And couldn’t fall asleep again until 5:00. Not because of the show; just ‘because’. So this morning I made coffee and looked up the show online, found it on the PBS site, and the two of us sat there and watched the 1-hour documentary again.

After breakfast we were going to go for a walk. But then my accountant and financial advisor decided it was time for us to do ‘year end’. Yikes! Talk about wasting a perfectly good morning looking at spreadsheets. I’m not joking! The good news was that we can carry on for a while yet. The bad news was that we wouldn’t have lunch until after 1 o’clock. Whew!

So after lunch Sue went to the pool to read. I worked on our Danube journal and photos. We finally did go for that walk in the late afternoon. Then happy hour.

Sue made a delicious curried chicken dish for supper. Then we sat down to try to finish up a few odds and ends on our ‘Oscar’ movie list. First, “Into the Woods”, which is nominated for 3 awards, including Meryl Streep for Best Supporting Actress. Really? A Disney musical medley of three classic fairy tales? Sue and I caught each other yawning regularly through the first half hour. We ended up ‘speed-watching’ the rest of it, just so we could say we’ve seen it. Well, that was the last of the ‘major’ movies on our list. We still have a few ‘onesies’ to watch. A couple of documentaries and foreign films. Speaking of which, we watched “Leviathan”,  a Russian movie nominated for Best Foreign Film. It’s nearly two and a half hours long. And it’s quite depressing — a story of power and corruption, basically the story of Job in the Bible, but set in a decaying fishing village in Russia. The movie already won the Golden Globe for best foreign film.

After the movie we switched to The National and the ‘At Issue’ panel for something more uplifting.