What do you think? Keep this - or just go the whole hog and get rid of what Carole calls "facial furniture"? I have to tell you Jo hasn't even noticed yet. She came up to me this morning and asked me to look at her eyes (she's still having trouble with them) - "what do you think?", she said. I said they looked OK to me but they're obviously not working very well - still didn't notice. Oh well.
We've had an interesting week - Gary, Carole and Luca came over on Sunday for Gary's slightly belated birthday dinner. We gave Gary his presents, which included a Thistle face mask:
After lunch, in accordance with tradition:
Of course, we still had to socially distance so Jo and I sat at one end of the table whilst Gary, Carole and Luca sat at the other end. We think Luca's a little bemused by the current regulations - if he was two years younger, we'd be allowed to give him a hug, but, if you're over 11 you're treated like an adult. I guess we'll have to be patient.
Similar procedures had to apply when Dawn arrived on Monday evening. She had her own bedroom, bathroom and chair - yes, she was allowed to sit in my "throne"!
On Tuesday, Jo, Dawn and I went for a walk in the woods along the Banchory Paths. Here they are returning through the Tor-na-Coille car park:
We had been pointing out to Dawn the remaining painted stones at the sides of the paths. Many of them have been lifted now and we believe there's going to be a post-Covid display of them somewhere. In the meantime, a local photographer has put together a montage of some of them and displayed the results in a shop window on the High Street:
In the evening, Dawn treated us to dinner at Banchory Lodge hotel. It was our first post-lockdown experience of eating out and it was very nice and we felt pretty safe, although we were a little disappointed that none of the staff were wearing face protection.
Wednesday morning was damp but we had arranged to go over to Inverurie for a late lunch with Gary, Carole and Luca (sandwiches and cheesecake). On Thursday, the weather perked up and Dawn and I went for a short bike ride westwards along the south side of the Dee. Dawn had brought her own bike:
In the afternoon we took a drive out to Ballater and on to Braemar. By this time, it was pretty warm and the sun was shining, so we had a picnic lunch on the green at Ballater - croissants and strawberry/raspberry tarts/meringues - very nice. Dawn took a short tour of the gift shops whilst Jo and I had a beer at the back of the Barrel lounge.
On now to Braemar where we had booked dinner at the new Cairn Grill. First of all, however, we took Dawn to have a look at the upmarket Fife Arms, where they took coronavirus precautions very seriously - hand sanitiser first, then an electronic temperature check. You have to look at a screen and fit your face in to the shape - a bit like airport passport checks - and then it reads your temperature. No problems for Dawn and me, but, as usual, Jo couldn't get the machine to work so her temperature had to be taken manually by the doorman with the gun-like reader.
We weren't allowed to go in to the hotel proper, where all the expensive art works and sculptures are, but we wandered through the Flying Stag bar, through the small library section and out towards the side door where there were hundreds more antlers on the ceiling and animal heads on the walls:
Dawn wasn't keen on the display.
Dinner - steaks all round - was lovely and then we headed home, just in time for our usual Thursday night Zoom call with Barry and Helen.
It was hot and sunny again on Friday morning so we decided on another walk to work up an appetite for our bacon butty lunch. We did the north side of the river this time, approaching it through Alexander Park athletics track, walking along the riverbank eastwards the length of the golf course. There were a couple of minor hurdles to cross:
Dawn headed home mid-afternoon but her journey must have taken her 6 or 7 hours due to the motorway being closed at Dunblane and subsequently losing her way.
That's about it for now, although I should report that our seagull issue seems to be over, thankfully. No sooner had I ordered the bird scarers than they seemed to disappear. Whether it's because the chicks have now fully fledged or what, we don't know, but it's uncanny that they disappeared at the point of us beginning to take desperate measures. I'm going to leave the two owl-like scarers out but I never even got round to using the large balloon eye, which now resides in our back bedroom:
