Earlier last week Tress and I decided to catch up with relos. So I sent A Hooi and U Seng a text message to see if they could do dinner. They could and we caught up on Friday night. We met up in Jazz Ria in Balwyn (second Friday in a row) and had dinner and talked till closing time. I decided to shout – we have been recipients of their generosity over the years and we haven’t really reciprocated very much. Almost every year at Christmas time, there’d be a dinner in their home with many from the family showing up and Auntie Anne would invariably lay a spread guaranteed to warrant weeks to work off.
The next day we had our usual lazy morning of coffee and quick and light brekky, but a bit earlier than usual. For one reason of another I was up very early and didn’t go back to sleep. We then went to pick up a dishwasher from the Good Guys at Nunawading – it was for unit at Edinburgh Road. The agent had contacted us earlier in the week to say the old one had broken down.
Dishwasher bought, we went and did our usual errands and after lunch at Madam K’s went home and did some gardening. The weather was magnificent and we wanted to max out the time we spent outdoor. Being out on the lawn without woollies and in a pair of shorts, under the sun and at temperature of 18/19, it was gorgeous. We spent a few hours pottering around. We removed the flex plant outside our bedroom. That plant has become larger and is not optically invigorating. We’re now looking for a more functional replacement –to either our olfactory or visual senses but preferably both. Tress also did the vacuuming and the whole house looked and felt cleaner and fresher.
After we got cleaned up, there was still time to get to the library. I discovered Robert Hughes’ “The Fatal Shores” and Tress picked up a few DVD’s.
I suspect stumbling over Hughes in a suburban library on a late Saturday afternoon is going to be a little eureka moment for me. I read the introduction and first few pages and thought what a great writer this was. So I googled him and found out he was yet another one of those literary greats whose earlier years were partly captured by Clive James in his memoir series. Hughes was the brother of Tom Hughes, a one-time Attorney General who is in turn Lucy Turnbull’s father. Lucy is Malcolm’s wife. It appears unfair how all these smart people are connected to each other in such tight circles north of the border. Connecting the dots was a rewarding google exercise. I later watched bits of the BBC series “Shock of the new” and I must include him as a favourite now.
So Hawks had a ripper of a game against Geelong that night (Sat) but we watched the DVD’s Tress took home from the library instead. My following of the Hawks has now reached a stage where for a big and important game – one where I expect we’d lose – I’d have trouble watching. It’d be different if we were in the MCG watching it live. Somehow the tension is less, possibly swallowed up by the excitement live action and crowd atmosphere. The tension of watching the battles on television is different and harder to deal with for the absence of those elements.
It’s the same with United games. I have become so tensed watching these games I have opted not to watch instead. Especially lately, when even under Van Gaal, we still appear to be struggling to play winning football. Well at least Hawks won (having trailed by 5 goals at one stage) and United drew so that’s not a complete disaster.
Sunday we had a soon to retire bishop give the sermon. Bishop Barbara Darling looked like a lovely mum type of person – probably really kind. Her sermon was relatively straight forward. It dealt with the message of letting God lead and not to direct God to do what we’d like instead. Simple but important lesson. We left straight after the service, to have lunch with Chews, Hipos and the Burgers at Westfield. I’m a reluctant diner in yum cha places these days, because the customer has to fit into the restaurant’s profit driven model of splitting the dining into two separate seatings. This means you either show up on time or you’re left with a small window to quickly finish your meal and leave. It’s not the sort of place I’d want to go to. I’d rather pay a fraction of the cost and go through a drive in instead, if I wanted lunch that way. Anyway the company was good and since we were the last ones to arrive, I didn’t feel the unpleasantness of the experience.
We ended the weekend with the usual cooking – another couple of days’ supply of soup neatly tucked away… the rhythm rocks on.
Ante 