Day on the town

[aadler]

Susan’s part-time schedule has her working only three days a week, and I’m now, for the first time in years, back on a standard Monday-through-Friday. So, we were both off today, and made what use of it we could.

Susan had been wanting to see the new Downton Abbey movie. (I’ve never watched any of the episodes, though I made sure she had copies for her own pleasure while she was in California.) As a preparation for her, though, I brought up Gosford Park on my laptop, and we watched it together last night. I’ve seen that one at least three times previously, maybe more, and it never fails to fascinate me. At the time, I misunderstood something I had read and believed that Downton Abbey (the series) had been developed as a ‘prequel’ to Gosford Park; now, of course, I know the one was inspired by the other but they have no characters in common. All the same, I fairly well enjoyed myself at the theater, and have to say Maggie Smith’s character in DA-the-movie is a great deal more interesting and enjoyable than the one she played in GP.

After the movie we had lunch at an Italian café in town (shrimp scampi, and marvelously done), then drove a bit further down the road to deliver a blanket Susan had knitted for a woman with a sick dog. Grocery shopping, then home again and back under the A/C.

Her clinicals class this time through seems to have been head-and-shoulders above the types she’s had in the past; she’s had good students and even some good groups of students, but these all seem to have been on the top of their game. And, when they knew the clinical period was about over (she’ll start another cycle with another group of students next week, I think), they got together to buy matching stationery and each one wrote her a wonderful thank-you note. To give you some kind of impression of the quality of these students: I had no criticisms of their penmanship or their grammar. That is genuinely extraordinary; I am scrupulous and hard to please in such matters, and standards have been declining for a long long time, but this bunch expressed themselves well and did so without the horrendous handwriting and jarring lapses in spelling that I’ve come to recognize as all too common.

(The bad news, of course, is that the next group will probably be a lot closer to the normal run, and look worse by comparison. All told, though, Susan got a great introduction back into clinical instruction; she’s always been good at that, but it has been something like twenty years now since the last time she did it, while of course maintaining her credentials and standing as a professional nurse in the meantime.)

Oh, and remember when her purse was stolen some weeks back? She found it today in the bottom of a large tote that she’s filled with other things to bring home, and never checked because her purse had nothing to do with that extraneous stuff. So now she needs to call the police and tell them that the homeless man she reported to them wasn’t actually guilty of anything. She went through the bother and expense of replacing her driver’s license and her phone, and that doesn’t go away, but she got back a pocketbook she likes, written notes that she can use, even cash and stamps, and now no longer feels that she was punished for trying to do something nice for somebody.

Not a bad day. Morning Mass tomorrow at the chapel up the road, and I’d already agreed to screen the second season of Big Little Lies for her in the afternoon as extra recreation.

Life is going pretty decently for now.

Comments

[snogged.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you enjoyed yourself at the movies. The Italian cafe sounds lovely.

[aadler]

More expensive than I had remembered, but then the food was better as well.