There are glorious days in Melbourne when the sun decides to come out and stay a little while. When such days happen, Tress and I are inclined to just do stuff around the house, preferably outside. On Saturday, Tress drew the short straw and did the vacuuming. I felt like I won the lottery as I prepped to continue reducing the height of the James Sterling. The preparatory work for those years when climbing a ladder beyond the first couple of steps would be a no-go zone, is best done on these gloriously sunny Saturdays. So I parked myself along the back fence and cut and trimmed away. Another couple of weekends and those hedges would be completely reduced from the imposing two-plus meters they had been, until this past weekend, standing. I’m a bit more than half way there now.

Tress came out to join me a bit later and we both continued clearing the north-west corner of the overgrown herbs, and Tress continued to savage weeds which had been popping up in different patches over the winter months. I then washed the little miata and around 1.30pm, after nearly 4 hours basking in the sun, we went in, cleaned up and headed out to lunch.

Back home later that arvo, we removed the hard top of the miata. Then we walked the little fellow and ended the day watching some Netflix docos on cooking.

It continued being sunny on Sunday and walking on cleaner carpets that morning, it felt good – Tress had made a happier soul of me. Later after St Alf’s we headed for lunch, then after a quick grocery shopping, Tress and I went back to do our separate things later in the arvo. We bumped into Jason and Mel while shopping and they said for lunch, they went back to the Malaysian restaurant we had dinner in on Friday night, but apparently they didn’t enjoy the lunch. Anyway, we picked up several bags of mulch which were on sale in Woolies and back home, Tress prepped to go shopping for a baby shower happening later this week.

After applying the mulch, I headed out in the miata and took a drive. I thought I’d head to Bunnings to pick up something to plant but with the soft top down and it being so sunny and warm, I decided to keep driving and before long I was up towards the Warburton Highway, heading Coldstream way. It was just a magnificent arvo driving lazily in the little jedi, Creedence Clearwater playing away at the crackling speakers, When I realized my phone (battery) had gone dead, I turned into a slip road and decided to head back home. Nearly an hour had passed, and I would have happily ploughed on – I probably should have…

Back home, I did a quick smoothie for Tress, and I poured myself a glass of a very crisp Pinot Grigio that had been chilling in the fridge. I then sat down to watch a little bit of the Bathurst 1000 while Tress did the ironing and our brekky smoothie and later, we both took the little fellow for a walk. We then came back home and I packed my sangers for the next day, before settling down to watch some tele to end the weekend.

All weekend there had been a flow of emails from a colleague and my boss, about a huge tender coming up. I was loathed to do any work on such a gloriously warm and sunny weekend and my boss had indicated it would be fine for me to just look at it on Monday morning. So here I am, all caught up. The darker (albeit same early start time) morning – daylight savings happened over Sunday night – made starting work this morning was a little bit more challenging but after such a refreshing weekend, I was up to it.