Tress and I were both pretty zonked out last Friday, after a normal busy work week. She had spent Friday at Jeff’s Shed, where WVA had organised a youth conference and she and some other colleagues had volunteered to help out. For dinner, we went to our favourite local Thai – a tiny hole-in-wall joint on the way to the Maury’s where we had our favourite whole fried barra. It was good to just enjoy the meal and talk.
The next day the little fellow had his quarterly grooming session; Amber came by as usual bright and early and took him for over an hour of washing and clipping. It was a cold morning and later, Tress vacuumed the house while I trimmed the James Sterling and generally kept the outside trimmed and cleaned. We finished our work well past 1.30pm and after lunch and some grocery shopping, we went home and got ready for dinner at Alex and Li Har’s.
We hadn’t seen them for a while so when Alex texted me on Friday night while we were at the Thai place, we said yes pretty quickly. When he texted back again to say there would only be 5 couples all in we felt it could be a good thing; a change from his usual party with multiple families.
So on Sat night we drove over to Donvale. They are building their new home in Balwyn and they’ve been renting their temporary home in Donvale. The other guests were lovely people and we had a really good time of just eating, drinking and getting to know each other. One of the couples – a fairly new migrant – had brought delicious dosas (thosai) to cook as well as a fish (a huge pomfret from Malaysia) to steam so the food was pretty special too, as were the very good wines.
We got home past 11pm, went to bed at midnight and I was up again at ten to 5am, to catch the Scousers’ game against Real Madrid. It was a good game – far better than the one United lost to Chelsea the week before. Bale scored a screamer and the Scousers’ keeper had a couple of bloopers so Real triumphed yet again.
After St Alf’s later in the morning (where we were on communion duty), we headed to Shopping Town for duty (again) for the Salvo’s Red Shield appeal. When we got home and walked the little fellow, the early morning rise and busy day took its toll and I felt bushed. I still had the week’s lunches to cook so when it was all finally done just after 6pm, I could all but stretch my feet out in front of the telly to catch Gordon Ramsay swear away in this season’s MasterChef.
Coming in this morning, I decided to pace myself in Tim Winton’s “Dirt Music” – I only have less than 70 pages to go and I don’t have anything else to read this week. It was difficult to do as Tim Winton’s wonderful novel is building up to a crescendo of an ending. I wanted to savour it however, so I listened to Gurumul and Paul Kelly’s “Amazing Grace”, as I felt that with Sim’s great news earlier in the week, with a full week’s work done and a wonderful weekend of activities and “rest” all covered, I felt God’s grace has really been amazing this week.
Ante 