My fifth Penelope Fitzgerald. I love how she uses a small detail to illustrate an entire facet of someone's personality, and how quietly she'll sneak in something equally quietly but inescapably funny.
I attacked the house. Some parts of it didn't need that excruciatingly thorough a drubbing because I delivered that severe a treatment in my first efforts after we dismissed the housecleaners. They didn't do the corners or behind the furniture, but they kept the main areas more clean on a more regular basis than I have yet. Whatever.
I weeded my closet, clothes and shoes; I removed all the shoes and suctioned out gritty, dusty accumulations beneath and on them; I dusted, swept, vacuumed and mopped the upstairs; I polished the stainless steel in the kitchen; and my scrubbing the bathroom included emptying and cleaning and weeding the medicine cabinets. But I didn't launder and iron the curtains or empty the dead moths from the ceiling light in the living room. And as soon as a guest showed up I noticed a dancing shadow on the kitchen wall cast by a defunct cobweb in one of the recessed lights.
I'd met the Canuck before and he is delightful and enthusiastic and a good conversationalist; I hadn't met the other but he was sweet too and managed to contain British bewilderment at the size of our fridge and the steaks to polite interest. The Brit was from Norwich, which I eventually connected with Coot Club, and he showed me in the frontispiece map where he lives and sails. At one point Blake jumped to the floor to prance into the kitchen, where we were congregated, and I swooped him up safe from our feet and the giant Squash-You-Flat, who I think is one of the BFG's compatriots? The Canuck then asked if wasn't Roald Dahl also the author of Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, which isn't offered even used at Amazon. AmazonUK lists it with author Mordecai Richler, but the Canuck barely remembered it and it has no reviews. That was funny. And then the Canuck made the mistake of saying that the first and last lines of Watership Down were the same, which they are not (though primroses appear in both); plus he called RDC a gourmand instead of a gourmet; and it was all in fun that I produced the texts to settle these points. Both the Canuck and the Brit scoffed at poor Noah Webster. Hmph.
It was a fun night.