As Tress and I walked into our usual Italian joint last Friday night and settled down to end the first week back at work, life felt like it has returned to our normal routine. The weekend certainly saw an ignition of our regular activities that pushed us along that path.

On Sat morning, I headed out to St Alf’s for a sweeping/cleaning duty as Tress started vacuuming the house. It was unusually messy at St Alf’s so the work took longer. I also bumped into Paul W, who had been doing some mowing and whipper snippering and we chatted for a couple of minutes before he took off. Back home, I started to clean up the mess that a hot, windy and gusty week had wrought. Raking, sweeping and blowing, it took a while to sort through the mess to have the outside of the house appear much less strewn and chaotic. When I finished and got back in to clean myself up, the inside of the house too, felt so much fresher for having been cleaned well.

Tress and I then headed out for a late lunch, did some basic grocery shopping before we headed home to get ready for our “Dinner Tonight” duty at New Hope, just down the road from St Alf’s. By the time it finished close to 7pm, I was ready for a feet-up-wine-in-hand winding up of the day. Tress and I certainly slept well that night as we woke only late-ish, and had a quick brekky before heading out to St Alf’s, where Peter delivered the second of the new series on 1 Kings. The story of Solomon’s early reign, sorting through his friends and enemies with his father the ageing and dying David, sounded a bit like Vito advising the younger Corleone, Michael. The passing of the baton from the senior outgoing Godfather to the heir and new head of the family, rang through the message as Peter talked about David advising Solomon to deal with various friends and enemies.

After lunch at our usual place off High Street at “Wong”-Caster, we went home and I gave the cars a wash, cooked the week’s lunches and then had the sprinklers on post mowing and getting ready for the warm week ahead. Again, it was late on before we could put our feet up, and we started on a new series on tele – the “Treadstone” Bourne spin-off.

All the familiar activities took us back into our routine which in turn took my mind off the troubling bushfires that appear to have ebbed. Threats of huge fires continue to burn at the Alpine, and holiday destinations along the South Coast of NSW and Gippsland continue to dust away the aftermath in attempts to resume business. Some places urged the public to return, saying at the same time however, that they weren’t ready to take bookings for another week. For those folks so badly affected, I bet they couldn’t wait to return to their routines too.