A Productive Weekend

Other than the gardening photos in my previous post, I don't have any pictures to share from this past weekend.  After spending the previous two weekends hosting Ben & Laska and the two before that in DC, we had lots of catching up to do on the home front.  Most of our time was spent running errands,  shopping, fixing stuff, doing laundry, and catching up on our sleep and TV watching.  Pretty boring stuff to read about, I'm sure.

Summer has finally arrived.  June has mostly been cool and rainy, but the weather was gorgeous over the weekend and today it is downright HOT.  It's currently 88 degrees here, which is well above average.  It's supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow and cool back down to the 60's for the rest of the week, which is a bit of a relief.  88 degrees feels a lot warmer when you live in a 115-year-old house with no air conditioning.  They don't believe in window screens here, either, so when I open the front and back windows (no side windows in a rowhouse!) to get some cross-ventilation, the incoming fresh air is often accompanied by a variety of flies, mosquitoes, ladybugs, and other insects -- most of which fail to find their way back out.  I've noticed a small pile of dead flies forming in our dining room, which has an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and two skylights.  At least the warm weather makes doing laundry much easier.  By the time the washer has completed its 2-hour cycle, the previous load is already dry out on the clothesline.

Tonight we are having dinner with the people from the executive search firm who recruited Josh for his job here.  We're not sure if he is thanking them for landing him this job, or if they are thanking him for the tidy commission they earned when he accepted the position.  I guess we'll find out when the check comes...  ;-)  We are eating at Chez Bruce, a Michelin-starred restaurant that's less than 3 miles from our house.  This will be my first fine dining experience in London since we moved here, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Oh, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that our food waste bins were delivered to our house this afternoon, just a month and a half after my initial request.  But it was 5 working days from my most recent request, as promised.  Now we have a small caddy to keep in the kitchen, a larger bin to empty it into for weekly collection, and a 6-month supply of biodegradable liners.  Now I just need to find a place in the kitchen for the compost caddy, which may require some serious re-organization...