We went to dinner at Noble Park on Friday night, along with Gezza and Jason and their families. It was a nice little place called Verona, just on Blackburn Road. It was about 10mins away from Jason and Mel’s place and they had asked if we wanted to adjourn there for coffee after dinner. Their coffee machine had broken down so their generosity was even more impressive. They have been making the Malaysian version – the type where a muslin-like sieve is used to get hot boiling water through the ground to extract the coffee, which was then served with sweet condensed milk. It’s less about the coffee and more about an after dinner sweet drink which was very satisfying and it was lovely all the same.

On Sat we went to a nursery in Braeside, on Springvale Road. About a couple of weeks earlier, I had removed one of the several flax plants outside our bedroom. We wanted to replace that with something with a little more colour and with less dangling long sheaths of leaves that end up pressing against our bedroom windows. We couldn’t decide however, which plant we wanted. So it’s more research.

We had to pass Springvale on the way home so we stopped to have a Pho lunch. We had gone to Westfield at Doncaster on Thursday night and had a quick dinner at a Japanese outlet where we had soupy noodle which made us think about Pho – something we haven’t had for a while – so it was a perfect opportunity to plug that gap. We then did some quick grocery shopping there before heading back and got the little black jedi to Brighton. We recently discovered the Sandown Street beach there, which has a fenced-off and off-lead beach for pooches. We had taken the little fellow there the previous weekend and on his second visit, he was visibly more relaxed and did a whole lot more splashing around.
When we got home, Kiddo gave LBJ a bath and Tress busied herself with laundry stuff. The Wizard of Oz was on and it has been about two thousand years since I last watched it so we decided to treat ourselves to this timeless classic again. Kiddo and I were laughing a bit about the CGI but we had to remind ourselves this was almost 74 years ago!

Early Sunday morning I got up to catch the last 15 minutes of the United v Fulham game and caught Rooney’s strike to give us a narrow 1-0 lead. It was a hard won battle and very nervy to hold it out – for a 10point lead at the top of the table. I went back to sleep just before 7am.

After church we went to a place in Doncaster known as “Meals at Jackson” – very decent Malaysian food – after which we went and watched Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty”.

It has been such a quality filled summer movies wise. Skyfall, Les Miserables, The Hobbit, Life of Pi, Silver Lining Playbook, and now Zero Dark Thirty. A slight blemish was “Pitch Perfect” but even that was fun stuff. No doubt, had Kiddo not been home, we would not have caught all of those offerings.

After the movie, we came back and took the little fella out to the park for his walk and run-around, and then came home to start thinking about the start of a work week. Work has well and truly assumed normal pace and load. We had to pack up early last Friday to allow movers to move stuff out of the way. The office space where I am got renovated over the weekend and this morning we got in and had to spend some time to set everything up again. Since I was the first to get in and nothing was ready for me then, this entry was the result.

This weekend will be Kiddo’s last at home for the summer. She returns to Ngambri next weekend and Tress and I will then have to relearn how to live our lives the way we had started to know, before summer began.

It feels like God knows I’m useless for abrupt changes such as this so He has allowed me time to become accustomed to gradual warming-up runs. This feels like a prelude. Later this year Kiddo will be doing an exchange program that would take her overseas for a year and a half and Tress and I would have to really get used to being by ourselves (and LBJ). Hopefully we’d be better at it then but until then, I am very grateful for the wonderfully fun summer we’ve had so far. 

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