Helping around the House

Mother and Father Muir are travelling up tonight to spend a couple of days with us, so I've spent the morning in my pyjamas cleaning, tidying and generally trying to make the house look as respectable as possible in honour of their visit. I've had a DVD of the wonderful sitcom "As Time Goes By" on in the background, and have treated myself to several pots of tea, so it's been a delightful couple of hours.

Father Muir doesn't really care for cats, although he does make a special effort to be nice to Mandu for my sake (she even recently charmed him sufficiently to earn a half-hour snuggle on his lap, much to my amazement), so I've spent a bit of time scrubbing little patches of black hair from the spare room carpet, a task familiar to cat-owners everywhere, and repositioning the cat basket in order that my parents don't wake up tomorrow to discover a somewhat unwelcome stowaway in there with them. Sensing that there will be two members of an inferior species sleeping in her bedroom over the next two days, Mandu has been seeking alternative sleeping-places for the next couple of nights, and when I went upstairs earlier she was to be found balancing comfortably on top of the ironing board, warming a couple of pairs of my jeans. Now, if only she'd had a iron in her paw... that would have made an much better photo!