Sunshine and some heat at last - great! Drove in to Aberdeen at 7 am this morning with beautiful clear blue skies on Deeside - until I came to Drumoak and ran into a wall of haar - and it stayed that way in Aberdeen all day. It's a sign of high pressure however and it always brings heat and sun to inland areas like Banchory - but you have to get away from the coast.
I left the office about 2:30 pm and it was cloudy and just 11 C in Bridge of Don, but I had arranged a game of golf at Banchory and, sure enough, it was still shorts weather there - lovely. Keith Gray, Harry Salter, Rob Pollard and I played an 18 hole fourball and then had some lovely Young's Waggledance (with honey added!) on the balcony.
I picked up my car again this morning and returned the loan car I'd been driving for the last month or so. In fact, it was 5 weeks ago today that I had the accident. The loan car was very nice, but it's also nice to have an old friend back.
From the car repair shop, it was straight to the dentist for my 6 monthly check-up. No great problems, but the hygienist is going to do a deep clean of a pocket that is building up next to my top rear right tooth, which has been heavily filled already. Hopefully this will avoid the need for extraction.
So that was today. I arrived home tonight and Ross' pal, Dan and his brother, Peter are both here having a look at our downstairs shower room - a job that was stalled a bit until after Dan's recent wedding. Glad it's progressing at last. We've also been promised again by Derek Glass that he'll move the old Merc in our drive - on Wednesday - but don't hold your breath - we've had so many promises already over the last few years.
But what about our weekend in the West of Scotland? We got off to a bit of a bad start when we were late leaving Banchory and just made it down to Hamilton in time for my scheduled 4 pm appointment at Sport Orthotics (http://www.sportorthotics.co.uk/). It was somewhere that Lucy had found on the internet - nice web site, but we were a bit doubtful when we saw it was just a little sports shop in the very run-down centre of the town - even more so when we found out that the Orthotist had forgotten about our appointment and had left at 2pm! A few phone calls and a quick coffee soon sorted this out, and the guy seemed quite nice when we finally met him. We spent over an hour there - he examined my knee(s) and video'd me on the treadmill, which clearly showed my knee moving out of alignment each time I put my foot down.
I go back in 2 weeks for a proper measurement for new insoles, but the very strong indication from him was that this would only be a primary step. He seemed keen for me to consider a knee brace - if not now, then it would certainly be the next stage.
We had lasagne at Mary and Brian's and then we headed down to Houston to meet Guy and 2 of Brian's pals to go back to the Fox and Hounds to watch the Champions League final. Nice evening. When we got back to Glamis Avenue, Jo and Mary were still chatting - and at least 2 bottles of wine had been consumed!
On Sunday morning, we went round to Julie's before the Mass and the First Communion service. The boys were wearing (hired) kilt outfits, but they were covered by the albs (I didn't know this word either) before and during service. Mary's good friend, Katherine, was there too:
The sun came out for photos in the front garden:
Julie photographed Jo and I with the boys, as Guy looked on:
After the service, it was back to the Whaleys' for a BBQ. They had a mini-marquee extension, which worked out pretty well. The boys finally got to show us their kilt outfits:
Lovely day - but, again, we were late leaving. We got home about 7 pm and settled down to catch up with some of the TV programmes we'd recorded - notably the final 2 episodes of The Bridge - great.
