It has been awhile since the last update, so I thought that a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon would make for a good time to do one.
A week ago today, Drums and I were invited to a local home in town to go fishing and have dinner. Hans and Carin Ivarsson have a great house on a river, with many acres of forest all around their property (kind of reminded me of home). Hans came and picked us up at the apartment and brought us out to his house. We got there and immediately started fishing. I got to use a little pole that just sat in the water and you didn’t have to cast, allowing me to just sit in a chair and watch. Drums had a real pole and managed to get the line caught in rocks a dozen or so times. Hans, and later Drums, had to go out in a little boat to get the line unhooked from the rocks. After about an hour, I got our first and only fish…if you could call it that. It was a pike, but it was about the size of my hand, extremely small, so we released it. Unfortunately, Drums, with a real fishing rod, couldn’t catch anything.
After about three hours of fishing, and only one caught fish, we made our way inside to have dinner. We had this meat known as fleisk (sp?). It was basically a really thick piece of bacon and it was by far the best food that I have had here. We also had some potatoes and salad…it actually felt like a real American meal. Meat, potatoes, and a veggie. It was in a great room, all glassed in, overlooking the river. When dinner was over, Hans showed us the family hunting rifles and then we all watched America’s Funniest Home Videos with their young daughter, before he brought us home.
That has probably been the highlight of the last couple weeks because it was one of the few times that we have really gotten out of downtown Osby and done something different. It has been tough for me to get around on the crutches, so getting out in the fresh air was awesome.
Hockey wise, we won another game this week and then tied a game. So after stating 0-5, we are 4-0-2 in our last 6, which is very encouraging. The preseason is over now and regular season starts on Oct. 7. We picked up two good forwards that will help us out a lot, but also loss two defensemen. One of them quit and another guy, one of the two whose wife just had a baby two weeks ago, decided it would be better to spend more time at home – can’t blame him. So Coach is hoping to add another defensemen or two.
This past Wednesday I went back to the hospital for a checkup on my leg. I was able to get my first cast off and had an air cast made for me. The air cast can be taken off when I shower, which is really, really nice. Also, when I am sitting around, I can let the air out of four holes, which allows for the cast to loosen up a bit. Then, when I am moving around more, I fill the four holes with an air pump and it tightens up. This is much better than the regular cast, except I haven’t been able to sleep well with it. Drums and Ola have been great helping me out with anything I can’t do on my own. Whenever I was younger and got hurt, which happened a lot, my sister would give me a bell. This way, when I was in my bed or sitting on the couch and needed anything, I could ring it and she would come running. I actually just got Drums a bell too, so he now is able to get me anything whenever I need it. Just kidding about this, but that’d be nice.
A member of the hockey board recently got us both passes to the local gym. It is a big step up from the gym that we were using at the hockey rink (see pictures from previous post). Yesterday, we went down and lifted, I of course can only do upper body. But it was the first time I’ve done anything active in two weeks and it felt great.
Other than that and the fishing trip, there hasn’t been that much exciting going on. The regular season starts this week so everyone is looking forward to that. I’ll try to do another post in the next week or so. I’m getting excited for the Yanks playoff games now, so I’ll have some late nights over here next week and hopefully will be able to post another update.
Here are some pictures from the fishing trip.
