At last, I can share with you the thrilling sight of a telegraph pole being dragged up the road. I bet you had a sleepless night wondering whether you’d be seeing it today, and here it is, below. I finally managed to get my phone gallery to connect to my OneDrive without it insisting I buy Google storage and put my photos there. This is all to do with a changeover I am trying to achieve. My primary Microsoft account is an email address that I soon won’t be able to use. I can use it to sign in as a username, but if they send me anything important, I won’t get the memo. So, I want to change it to another email address, and make that one primary, except when it sent me the code, it didn’t come through until hours later (to the Otenet email, which is perfectly valid), by when it was out of time. Now, it tells me I have to wait a week before trying again.

Meanwhile, my Word colour scheme is still setting itself to have a weird beige/green background, except when I open the settings to change it, or, like now, when I am editing the document, when it reverts to normal. Ah, now I’ve gone to another programme and back again, and it’s yuk again. I do that a second time, and it reverts to white, until I start to type, and then it goes to yuk colour… Give me strength!

Anyway… More and I hope better/interesting update tomorrow. For now:

I opened the gate on Monday morning expecting to find Neil back from Yialos, and lo! There was a long wooden pole sauntering past the house. It was attached to a digger at one end and a guy at the other, who was steering it away from parked bikes and Neil, who had to wait for it to pass before he could. The pole-dragging competition went on all morning, one at a time (slowly wins the race), until calm was restored to the lane, and the chickens reappeared on the road.

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It’s great isn’t it? You’ve got the morning to get some work done, you know what you’re doing, and there are to be no disruptions. You open your PC, and go to cloud storage to find the photos of telegraph poles you took yesterday, and although they are on your phone, they have not gone up to the cloud. Why? And so begins half an hour of time wasted on trying to sync this with that when it already is. You sign in with a different account but the same one on both devices, and wait for a confirmation email that doesn’t come, so you try another way, and there’s your confirmation email – now too late, so you start again and still nothing does as it should, so you revert to the old fashioned way of talking sternly to your phone, and when that doesn’t work, you try plugging in a lead.

When that doesn’t work, you check the internet for ideas, and discover your PC has a built-in ‘connect to your phone’ function, so you explore that, and it asks you to sign in, which you do, then it says it needs you to reply to a notification in order to proceed, but no notification comes through. So, back to square one – and you’re still waiting for a code from your second attempt, and then it arrives, but it’s too late, so you try again. This time, you use another account and the code comes through and you type it in, and then the thing says ‘Error #263782’, or some other unhelpful thing, and you’re no further forward, except now, for a reason yet to be explained, the background colour of the Word program you open to start typing this blog has changed without you touching anything.

So, you can’t have the photos of the telegraph poles being dragged up our lane yesterday because I can’t get them off my handy portable device. Instead of setting about a chatty blog and a chapter of a book, my morning will be taken up with sorting out something that was fine when I went to bed. At least it’s not windy.

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I haven’t been out of the house for so long that I forgot it was Monday. Yesterday we were in ‘It’s a twister, Aunt Em,’ country, with the tiles rattling, the air conditioning thing on the roof playing like a harmonica, and the draft coming through shutters/window/towel/heavy curtain (all on the same window) on one side, and vibrating the draft excluder like a gazoo on the front door to the other side.

Luckily, it wasn’t too cold, because we’re limiting the heater following the last electricity bill. The oven is only going on once this month, the heater only when we must, the hot water is on for 20 minutes per day (heating the tank once), and we’ve given up on the dehumidifier in favour of opening the bedroom window every morning for as long as is bearable. The kettle broke down yesterday, so that’s not in use right now. (Note: check: is the hob a cheaper way to boil water?)

Also luckily, we don’t have to travel anywhere right now, because the ferries will be messed up. Apparently, the Blue Star isn’t arriving from Athens/north until 14.35 this afternoon, and isn’t leaving Rhodes until 23.50 tonight to come back. Recently, I saw someone asking about where they might eat during a forthcoming trip to Symi, and wanted to tell them to get here first, but I don’t want to put anyone off. All I’ll say is, if you are planning even a day visit to Symi in February, allow yourself an extra few days either side in case you get stuck by weather.

By the way, it’s a lot calmer this morning.

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Today, I am staying in under a cloud. A real one, not a figurative one. I’ve just been paddling in the bathroom, where the uncloseable window allows the rain to reign with a full rein. (Don’t you just love homophones?) It’s the only window in the house with no shutters, but it’s also beneath a spiral staircase, so is pretty well guarded. I don’t know. Nothing I can do about it except try and fix the window when it’s dry enough. Meanwhile…

I am raiding the old photo supply to give you a small gallery of views, which I’ll put up below. As with yesterday, these are older photos from summers past – maybe last year, maybe a few ago, I can’t remember. If I were to take any photos when I am out and about so far this year, you’d see nothing but wet pavements and the inside of the super market (sic). Now and then, the inside of the Rainbow, where we go to keep Yianni company, and the rest of the time, you’d be looking at our TV.

In years gone by, we might have been in the village square last night with souvlakia on the BBQ, families together, children playing, maybe some music and wine… The ‘old days’ of τσικνοπέμπτη, the Thursday before Lent, when meat is consumed, presumably to clear it out of the larder before Monday, which is Clean Monday in Greece, and the start of Lent. Already? I know, Easter is early this year (April 12th), I guess we’ve had and missed carnival, and there was no big outdoor τσικνοπέμπτη yesterday, and all thanks to the rain. I am guessing. Still, we have a birthday dinner to plan for Jenine next week, so we’ll put all our pre-Lent traditions into that day, and then carry on as normal.

And for the weekend? Back to chapter twelve of an ever-thickening mystery I still don’t know the way out of yet, and after that, I will be looking into moving my websites to a new host, so if these pages disappear for a few days, you will know I’ve pressed a wrong button.

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Well, here’s some cheery news. It’s raining, and the Poseidon weather map shows us looking like this:

The darkest parts are the heaviest rain, and I think the worst of that lot’s not long passed overhead. Then, fast forward to Friday night/Saturday morning, and we’re in for this:

Can’t wait. Towels at the ready. Staying home. I hate to think what the harbour looks like, but I can’t see, as I sensibly closed the shutters last night. We are now as watertight as we can be, except for the bathroom, where the window doesn’t close. Towel already down.

Mind you, yesterday afternoon, the sea was calm, and there were a couple of sailing boats out on the water. (Too far out to see in the photo below.)

I spent most of the morning trying to sort out new email addresses and trying to change my email address/login details for various things, and didn’t do too badly. Trying to get my new address set as the principal Microsoft account though, was a different matter, and one I shall return to after work. Perhaps. The change is upon me! That is, the change over from tools I have been using for at least 20 years to new ones, i.e. Thunderbird instead of Outlook (seems to do the same thing, but without the flashy bells and whistles, and what’s more, it works and is free), and later, perhaps, a different webhost for the two blogs/sites, but that can wait for a rainy day. Oh…!

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