Preparing for Guests

This is a close-up of one of the old zinnias in the garden. You gotta love the multitude of colors in those petals! It's like a floral tequila sunrise.

Dave's nephew and his fiancee arrived yesterday afternoon from Spain, where they've been staying for several days for a friend's wedding. They'll be with us through the weekend and into the beginning of next week, until the day before I leave for Florida.

Of course that meant I was a cleaning whirlwind yesterday. I started by doing sensible things like cleaning the bathtub, but then I would up working on progressively unlikely tasks like cleaning the dusty floor behind the toilets and cleaning the front of all the kitchen cabinets. I know my guests aren't going to inspect the floor behind the toilets, but you know how it goes -- you clean one thing and the thing next to it looks even filthier, so then you have to clean that too.

I also had to re-hang the drapes in the dining room to turn it back into a serviceable guest bedroom. You may remember I took them down in April 2025 because we never used them (they were always open) and they looked terrible. Dave argued that it gets dark early enough that we didn't need drapes, but I said, "You can't have guests sleeping in a room on the street with no drapes." No woman, especially, is going to go for that. (I can hear my mother telling me so.)

So I got up on a chair and managed a fumbling semblance of re-hanging the drapes. Several of the little plastic hooks broke and there aren't enough functional hooks remaining on the curtain rod, so the drapes sag in places and we have to pin them closed, giving the overall effect of a decrepit drug den in a posh neighborhood. But hey, it's only for five days.

I also carefully made the bed, which Bailey promptly trashed by climbing all over the pillows and building a comfortable nest.

Last night we went to the Spaniards Inn, a historic pub next to Hampstead Heath, where foxes were noisily fighting and/or mating in the dark garden of the building next door. Welcome to London!