A Good Weekend

After a busy week at work I was ready for a quiet weekend. I didn't get one and it was OK.

Friday we had dinner with my wife's driving instructor, Cheryl, and her boyfriend Andy. We ate at our favorite restaurant in Ascot: Mikado. It's Chinese / Thai. Good pot stickers; they call them dumplings. Usually good, friendly service. This night though we struggled with service people who learned English as a second language. All the appetisers and main courses showed up OK. Dessert delivery was all wrong, but mostly we didn't care by that point and we all ate what we received.

Memo to self: sometimes Asian service people think that what your finger is on top of is what you want, not what is visible ABOVE your finger. I seem to remember that from my travels, but hadn't run into it in a long time ... until Friday.

Wife Lara had just passed her UK driving license practical test on 24 June before we went to US. It was a major accomplishment. Driving in the UK is tough and their testing system is really tough. Lara passed on her fourth try. She'd not driven much, hardly at all actually, before starting lessons here. She insisted on learning with a manual gear box, which made passing the test more than twice as difficult in my opinion. But she persevered and received her offical UK driving license in the post when we returned to UK last week. Cheryl had shown extreme patience and really supported Lara through the weeks long ordeal. I think both women were equally happy when Lara passed.

So, Lara and Cheryl split a bottle of wine then moved on to Lemoncellos ... the second ones complementary from the house. Andy and I were designated drivers and we had a good time watching the other two. Lara kept saying, "I'll drive you golf tomorrow, so I'll have the car." I kept saying, "Right."

We got home at not too an unreasonable hour, and I was up and moving to get ready for golf at about 7:00am. From under the covers there came the softest of snoring. If I'd've bet on whether she was going to be mobile in time to take me to golf, I'd've won.

So I played golf at "my" course (Pine Ridge GC) that I've been playing at nearly every weekend since I arrived in UK six years ago. Only one person from our posse showed up that day, Collin. No worries, we played the first hole, reached the second and the group there let us play through, reached the third and two nice guys let us play with them to make a foursome. I played badly on the first and the ninth holes, but managed to hit six of seven fairways. Good for anyone. Our mate Paul showed up to play the back nine with us, so we let our two new friends go on ahead and finished out the round as a three-some. Paul played great and I'm not letting him join late any more. I managed to win the overall against Collin and broke even on our $3 bets we have every week.

I went home and as usual had the best sleep of the week on the couch for the rest of the afternoon.

About 6:30pm Lara pushes me and I get ready to go to the dinner dance we'd booked back at the golf club. We sat with the guy, Roger, who'd originally invited me to join his golf crew back when I first arrived. His wife Anne was there and two of their friends, John and Mary. Roger and Anne had just returned from a riverboat cruise up the Danube. It must have been good. They talked about it more than any of their previous excursions. The four of them are heading to Tuscany in Italy in August. The fun just never stops.

After a pretty reasonable dinner (for a change ... the food's not always been great at the club functions), a band kicked off playing light jazz. I liked them a lot and Lara and I danced chacha and salsa when ever we could convince ourselves the beat was even remotely Latin. We hung out until about 11pm and then headed home.

Sunday was pretty lazy. I got up and spent two hours getting the Jaguar advertised at an online car sale website, www.autotrader.co.uk. Our computer was doing some sort of security check that I couldn't find or figure out how to kill. It would let me type for 15 seconds then lock up for 20 seconds. I'm surprised I didn't wake up sleeping beauty with my swearing at the machine. Lara got up about noon saying she'd not slept before dawn because of the horrible snoring coming from my side of the room. It couldn't have been me. I stayed awake all night one night listening and can tell you I don't snore at all.

Later a trip to the grocery store with Lara driving and then out to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls about rounded out the activities for the day. I don't know when it happened, but a thank you card from Cheryl/Andy was tucked under our windshield wiper when we came down to the car. Must have brought us luck: Lara did well on both her driving (car) and on her driving (golf).

Lara cooked her world famous pork fillets with brown rice and baked apples for dinner. We watched "Wild, Wild West" with Will Smith on TV. And that was the weekend.

A good time was had by all.