I have been wanting to return to driving an SUV for a few weeks/months now. With little Abby (sort of) in our lives now, I thought we could use a little more space in a vehicle and I also wanted to be able to get up and down the Hume in something more SUV like. I think the David and Co’s trip from Malaysia to see us in May, sort of etched in my head that this thought of a car with more space is not a bad one, so my efforts to look for a new ride crystallised.

After many weeks of to-ing and fro-ing between a couple (or more) of options, I landed on good old Mazda. We picked up the car on Friday arvo and it has been really nice.

On Saturday, we walked the little fellow after brekky, and on the way back, we stopped by FHC and picked up a couple of movie tickets. Then we headed home and cleaned the house. About a couple of hours, we got back to FHC, had a quick lunch and jumped into the wonderful movie that Oppenheimer is. The story of the scientist (Oppenheimer, played by the very intense Cillian Murphy) who lead the Manhattan Project and who was then a target of a scheming bureaucrat with a brittle ego (Strauss, played by Robert Downey Junior) and seeking to climb the Washington ladder was a captivating one, probably because it was crafted by the hands of Christopher Nolan. The edge around whether the atomic bomb was going to be successfully created by the Allies before the Nazis did, the moral dilemma Oppenheimer stared at endlessly, his personal life, his battles across so many fronts – there are so many things going on but all woven so well together. The cutting in between different times, the interaction of the famous names in science (including Einstein), the politics of senate committee hearing, the scandalous hearing to retain the security clearance of Oppenheimer… so many bits that just keep coming at you with unabated fascination. I thoroughly enjoyed the 3 hour film.

After the movie, we did a grocery shopping before coming home to walk the boys again. Later, we ducked out to pick up a “baby gym” for when little Abby visits in a few weeks.

Later that night, we picked up a call from someone in St Alf’s who asked me to replace him for communion duty the next day.

At St Alf’s the next day, it was the last Sunday on gifts before we return to Deuteronomy. We then went to lunch at Danny’s on Blackburn Road, before coming home to cook the week’s lunches. We tried adding red rice to the regular jasmine that we always used, and it took the rice cooker a lot longer to cook it but the results were very good. It’s supposed to be healthier (lower GI) so we should probably do this more from now.