I made it to the pub on Friday night to see my pals, although round about 10 pm, I hit a bit of a wall. On Saturday morning, Jo and I took a short drive in the new car over to Aboyne for coffee and a scone in the Black-faced Sheep, then on Sunday Jo was back on church duties, whilst I just vegetated with the Sunday Times and sport on TV.
Luca's football practice is on Mondays and that dictates when we go over to Inverurie. We had bought Luca an Adelaide United soccer strip, although we didn't realise how much he'd grown, even since we went away - it's a little on the snug side:
Hopefully he'll get a couple of months' wear out of it anyway - he'll certainly be the only boy in Inverurie with one of these shirts!
Gary had baked a cake for our birthdays and Luca cut us a slice:
We then went out for a meal to celebrate Jo's birthday. It was Monday and, just like it was on the outskirts of Adelaide, many of Inverurie's eating establishments were closed, so we chose to drive to Dunecht and go to Jaff's. Basically, it's a pub, but it has a nice separate restaurant and we had a lovely meal there - scallops and Stornaway black pudding to start, then monkfish and prawn jalfrezi.
Tuesday was when I usually meet a few pals over coffee and a scone at the golf club, but I decided my body was now ready for some much needed exercise, so afterwards I went for a slightly longer than planned 40 kms circular ride out to Drum. I was more than ready for a hot bath when I got back to the house, where Jo was entertaining our former next door neighbour Trish. There was a CAMRA committee meeting in the evening and I had missed the last few, so I felt obliged to jump on the bus and head in to Aberdeen. I missed the penultimate bus home, but fortunately the last bus did show up and I stumbled in to bed about 12:30 am.
Yesterday (Wednesday) it was back to swimming for Jo, whilst I went for another - shorter - cycle.
This morning (Thursday), Jo has just been to the optician for an eye test. For some years she's known that her eyesight has been deteriorating and the prospect of cataract operations was looming. Today it happened - she's had a full scan and has now been referred to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where there's a long waiting list for these operations. Patients are being shipped all over Scotland wherever and whenever opportunity arises. It'll be up to 10 weeks before she's been properly assessed by the medics at ARI and then it's just a waiting game. Naturally, Jo is a little concerned about all of this - nobody looks forward to going under the knife - and she's fearful of what might go wrong. She'll have plenty of time to think it all through, but, always assuming she does decide to go through with it, the light at the other end of the tunnel is improved ability to do the things she's not been able to do as well recently - she loves reading in particular. There's also the question of driving to consider - the current situation is uncertain but she hopes to clarify this soon. Fingers crossed.
This afternoon, after a long wait, I'm finally getting to see Dr. Doug Smith again - there's a dermatology clinic at our Doctor's and he'll be looking at the piece of sun-damaged skin on my nose that goes all hard and gnarly. I'll report back in the next blog posting.
To close today - want to know where the Stewarts came from?:
This graphic shows the Stewarts just above the Central Belt on the edge of the red.
