up from sloth
It occurred to me to take before and after pictures of the house today. This is just to remind that I intended to do that. A before picture of the microwave would be too gross, and an after picture would tragically fail to include the microwave cart currently out of stock at the closest Target unless I did something insane like go to the two other nearby Targets.* A before picture of the dining table as an example of the mess would probably suffice, but an after picture would similarly fail to include new white tapers for the candelabra and therefore be inadequate.
Also, do you see what I am doing? I am not cleaning. I am typing.
I have houseguests on Monday, one Ukrainian whom I've never met and the other whom I've seen once at a wedding in the past nine years and who is more RDC's friend than mine and also someone else's ex-husband. I don't know anything about the Ukraine. At least previously if not currently extremely fertile soil. Kiev. Chernobyl. Odessa. The Endless Steppe. The Dnieper and the Dniester, because of Russian History to 1905. The Crimean War, because of a biography (for children) of Florence Nightingale. I'm not sure if it's Little or White Russia, though I know Belarus, which I cannot spell off the top of my head--no, I can, but not so confidently as not to check--is the other. Everything Is Illuminated.
I'm still typing. Meanwhile, Blake has been preening on my lap. He has finished dropping feathers and is now growing them in. I'm wearing RDC's navy terrycloth robe instead of my periwinkle fleece one, and I don't know how I can still be surprised at what he can produce, but there are strips of feather casings as long as my little fingernail. He's only little.
Oo, a list. Then I'll stop typing and do the list.
Put away everything on the dining table, coffee table, and bedroom floor, and in the dishwasher.
Clean the microwave.
Clean the buddy cage (tomorrow, so it'll be as clean as possible for guests).
Clean the bathroom.
Flowers for the mantel and for my office/the guest room.
Groceries.
White tapers.
Finish painting the kitchen window and razor it clean.
Launder guest linens and week's stuff. Be glad of more than one set of sheets when a sudden downpour begins just as I'm about to leave.
Air den and study.
Dust bedroom furniture and trim.
Dust dining and living room furniture and trim.
Rake up under-feeder detritus.
Fill feeder (I did this before starting typing. See? Already productive)
Iron (tomorrow)
Vacuum everything.
Clean self.
Meet JJM and JPM @ MNS at 3:00. She didn't show up until almost 3:30, but she was Gandalf, and a wizard is never late but arrives precisely when he means to. I was extremely glad she was tardy because I was renewing my membership in possibly the longest and stupidest line ever. I hadn't put The Rest of Life in my bag because I was being polite but I should know better. So instead of reading I got to notice the folks around me. If JJM had been on time I would have compounded my feeling guilty about making her wait with unnecessarily voicing negative (although truthful) observations about those around me. Instead, she showed up just as I got to the front of the line. I bought our IMAX tickets and my membership and gave her tea from Fortnum & Mason (RDC was in London last week) and was not pissy. Instead I dug for Incan artefacts with JPM in "dirt" made of ground-up tires (I am such a grown-up for caring that the dirt didn't make me dirty) and looked at some dead animals (I like the diaromas) before the "Coral Reef" IMAX.
Dinner @ Watercourse and "Metamorphoses" @ Avenue Theatre with KDF @ 6:00. I hadn't been to Watercourse approxiately since Trey moved, three years ago. Its menu is no longer a sheet of paper but in a sleeve! unless that's the difference between lunch and dinner. I deliberately said "perfumey" and couldn't think of the character I was imitating but suggested Cuffy taking off Mona's nail polish, and she understood. She is my people.
"Metamorphoses" was great if not as heartbreakingly wrenchingly amazing as in New York. The pool was smaller, but so was the theatre, and it had one thing the Circle in the Square pool had not, that I recall: an underwater connection to backstage, so that when Poseidon drowned Ceyx he could erupt as if from nowhere and then subside under the waves. Before Phaeton entered, "Blister in the Sun" blared from speakers, which was a great choice. Eurydice's faint "Who?" communicated all it needed to in just that one syllable but, sadly if not surprisingly, the man and the woman watching Eros and Psyche and talking about love didn't inspire that sense of inevitability, for good or ill, that love means.
But it was still wonderful.
What I did instead of clean:
Put together hatchlings photo collage. I had several photographs in an 8x10 glass and just acquired a frame with eight apertures of different sizes. I kept a few outdated photographs because I love the Zs together but they haven't seen each other in 2.5 years; and I love the more recent pictures of the froglettes but I am not going to frame a photograph of the butt dance (when a spontaneous performance of the butt dance broke out, KREL uselessly reminded her children over my and RDC's laughter that the butt dance was only for their parents and au pair) so I kept one from five years back of the two-year-old reading Sense and Sensibility to the newborn; and despite one Z being the most beautiful child in the history of children, except maybe Emlet, Tess as a flowergirl is a faery changeling. And the only landscape photograph I had for the 5x7 aperture is my sister's cat, so my niece Kitty dominates the frame. CLH should be pleased.
Homesick: My Own Story. Only at the end did I realize I had read it before. None of the anecdotes from a missionary childhood in China stuck with me from 25 years ago, but the idea of an uncaring teacher insisting a child adopt the Palmer script method despite being perfectly legible did.
Ate two bananas, cut into slices. Miss Manners opines that bananas are properly eaten with a knife and fork, but my reason to cut up the banana was not manners but so that I could then knife out a dollop of homemade Nutella and spear a disk of fruit with the chocolatey-hazelnutty blade.
* 30 September 2004: Most of the cleaning strike-outs date from last night; since the potential houseguests got stuck in Flagstaff I stayed slothful for longer. I did attempt the other two Targets but one was illusory and the other was also out of stock.
