another day.

Nothing accelerates housecleaning like the imminent prospect of house-guests, I think.

Brother Unit arrives tomorrow evening, and all, but ALL, tomorrow morning is taken up with a para-academic meeting--a bit difficult at this point to believe it will be worth the time it will take, but there it is.

So it's going to be an intense weekend...as I'm preaching and presiding at St. Curious on Sunday, with a parish lunch group scheduled for the noon time -- and have already arranged with Offspring to blitz the remaining belongings still back at MH & U on Sunday afternoon, with their help and temporary use of a suitable TRUCK. I hope that a couple of hours will allow us to vanish permanently into the middle distance, leaving not a wrack behind or at least, if we do leave a wrack behind, it will be a wrack belonging to MH & U, not belonging to me. I also have -- hurray -- a nice little cache of gift cards for Adjacent Steakhouse so am prepared to feed the office movers sumptuously Saturday evening...

Today is cleaning day and sermon day. Last load of laundry is in the washer. Have moved nearly all the bags and boxes of books off the entrance landing and stairs.

Part of the housework project at this point is dealing with the semi-perpetual Miserable Nuisances that have never been just quite nuisance enough to be dealt with yet. So this morning I found a tube of appropriately Savage Glue, and re-attached the magnet latch to the medicine cabinet door, clamped it with a clothespin until the glue dried, and voila, the medicine cabinet door now actually CLOSES. Civilization! wonderful!

Still on the list, serious application of vacuum cleaner to the premises and some mopping of hard floors. Bathroom and kitchen need intense cleaning too... and there should be a trip to the recycle depot.

I have added three elderly bowlfuls of pot-pourri to the compost bin, and am washing the bowls. (Pause to lie down and have the vapours...) It's been a considerable time since there was any "sniff" in any of them. (Note that the Rambler is now open to receive new consignments of roses for the concoction of new pot-pourri, sigh).

Got the bills paid and the car washed earlier in the week...led the third section of the evening course I'm doing on the Passion Gospels. Buoyed by a re-reading of Isaiah 55 from Sunday's lectionary, the group seemed a little more persuaded by the analogy between lectio divina and the eating of rich things like chocolate.

And for my bedtime reading I am midway through Finding Beauty in a Broken World, by Terry Tempest Williams...the making of mosaics, prairie dogs in Bryce Canyon, and now, ossuaries in Rwanda...

Back to finding a little beauty in my excessively messy world!