Weekend trivia

Good morning and a happy new week to you. A few new photos from a stroll and other events, a couple of quick tales, and then I must get back to what I was doing.

It’s about time for a waterworks update. As you may have read, this on-going work isn’t affecting us, or at least, it’s not affecting our water supply… So far. The workmen, two affable chaps who turn up after they have finished their day jobs and fiddle about up on the roof. I sometimes see them on their way to work, riding in the back of a flatbed heading up the mountain. They don’t usually arrive at our house until five, and if we are out, we leave the gate off the latch to save them climbing over the wall. On Friday, they arrived early. That in itself is not a problem, and I was at home. Unfortunately, I was at home in the shower and covered in soap and shampoo. ‘Perimeni!’ I shouted through the bathroom window into the courtyard – wait! A quick scramble and I opened the gate to them wearing soap suds and a towel. They were apologetic, but not as apologetic as I should have been looking like Christopher Biggins in a bathhouse. I was laughing and told them not to worry, returning to my shower as they clambered up to the roof. A little later, I went out and left them to it.

That evening, we had guests to dinner, and I was concerned that the plumbers might be doing their thing above while we sat at the courtyard table, but when we came home, they had gone. The conversation did turn to the on-going work, and I mentioned that our only issue was a drip on the mains pipe when the water came in. Luckily, one of our guests was (and still is) the kind of man who is handy around the house. ‘I could fix that if I had a spanner and some tape,’ he foolishly offered. ‘It just so happens that I have just the thing,’ I replied. The leak was fixed before we’d finished the salad. Nice.

I found the time for a walk early on Saturday morning, wrote a few thousand words and, on Sunday, was up to go to the bathroom at three, and, on returning to the bedroom, was wide awake. So, it’s 8.50 as I write this yesterday, and I have 4,000 words down already. The body wants to sleep, but the mind won’t let it; that’s the reason I wake so early. My subconscious is still thrilled the fact that I don’t need to wake up at any particular time, and also excited that it doesn’t matter when I get up and start work. It interrupts my dreams as if saying, ‘You’ve had your four hours, now up and look sharpish.’ I rather like it.

That’s the news this Sunday/Monday morning. Now I am returning myself to the North Wales coast (imagined) and a semi-ruined lighthouse where a Ukrainian horseman and an English viscount are keeping watch for despicable villains.

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Symi Saturday Photos

Here’s a sweeping up from the floor of the photo department; a few random leftovers from the last couple of weeks. The hot news from the desk today is that all my saved logins and passwords (in Firefox) disagreed overnight. There was one of those Microsoft updates happening last night, the kind where they tell you ‘this will only take a few minutes’ and you still have time for a holiday to Tenerife while you wait. Suspicious.

Woke up today to find everything working fine except for every single saved login/password from the last five or six years has completely vanished from my Firefox settings. I eventually tracked down their help department and have sent a message via the community support as they don’t appear to encourage you to speak to one of their paid staff. Luckily, I have a secret and up to date spreadsheet where I record (most) passwords, so I was able to log back into the Symi Dream blog admin. Such a pain in the Boris if you ask me.

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Walking early

Out for a walk yesterday around six, hence these couple of photos. I saw on Facebook that the first turf for the repairs to the football pitch has arrived, and noticed from the hillside path that the ground is no longer just mud, and work has started. All good news for our three football teams one, or all of which recently received a signed shirt from the Aston Villa team.

I saw the usual sights on the walk yesterday. Men waiting for work pickups at the bus stop, people cleaning steps and brushing the lanes outside their houses, the goats on the path to the monastery, passing me as if on their morning commute, and later, ladies heading to Agia Marina to tend the graves. By the way, if you are heading that way, the bridge is being worked on, and the ravine, and it’s passable on foot and possibly on a moped, with care – see photos below. It was a quiet, calm morning, and very pleasant. Even though I had my music playing, my mind was on a story, and when I reached home an hour later, I had to sit and write down the notes for it. I’d had an entire scene in my head but won’t be able to recreate it exactly – where’s brain to paper transference technology at these days?

And, for those following the water story… I left the gate unlatched yesterday and, when we returned, the boys were busy at work on the tower where several more yards of black piping had been added and trailed. We told them about the leak on the new joint, and they said they would attend to it. I was also able to ascertain, in our mix of Anglo-Greek-Albanian, that the work they were doing, the tank #2 and solar water heater, are for the apartment downstairs and for the landlord’s house, and there was no need for them to interfere with our water supply. They laughed when I looked relieved and were grateful for the celebratory beers we gave them from our fridge. (It has been there since Christmas, but it’s still within date.)

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Drip feeding the saga

[Hi, John from Birmingham. I hope you got home safely, and thank you for popping down to deliver your message on Tuesday. Thank you also for reading the blog and giving feedback; always appreciated.]

If it hadn’t been for the watery shenanigans at our house, we wouldn’t have been in the square when one of our readers sought us out to compliment us on the blog. I was at home at five, having just finished work and the doorbell rang on the last chime of the village clock. Thinking Neil had forgotten his key, I answered it to find our friendly plumber, so I said hello and left him to get on with things. A few minutes later, a hot water tank arrived, followed by some solar panels. A little while after that, once Neil was home, and we were settling in for a quiet night with Designated Survivor, the drilling and banging started up on the tower, so we decided to go out for an hour or two and let the boys get on with it. They’d gone when we got back, but half a solar heating system (for one of three houses and we’re not sure which) had been installed. Or partly installed as something was banging about up there in the breeze during the night.

Wednesday morning, I went to check the water was coming in and water the plants, when I noticed a new tap had been put onto the landlords in-feed – that’s the one that runs against gravity, up and over the road. I also noticed that the mains feed was now leaking and I could only stop it by turning off the in-feed form the Dimos (town hall mains). It’s not our water draining back as that’s not possible and I hoped it wasn’t the landlord’s either, but once the mains was off, the drips stopped. So what that is, is us paying for the leak until the boys return, hopefully, tonight, and I can try and explain it needs tightening. I’d do it myself, but that would probably result in the entire village being without water as I’d only make a mess of it. And I only own one spanner.

None of this is bothering us, it’s not troublesome, but I am keeping a close eye and have Symi Property Services on speed dial for when it goes horribly wrong, and I need them to come and repair someone else’s errors again – or maybe I am being uncharacteristically pessimistic. Oh, did I tell you about the bathroom door? I can’t remember, but if I didn’t… When nephew George arrived, we went to fetch the spare mattress from the spare bathroom, used as a winter storage area. At first, I thought the metal door had expanded in the heat as it was stuck, but further and lengthy investigation revealed that the lock had broken, somehow, in the closed position. Not the key lock as the key is on the inside, but the snib for the door handle. Luckily, our perfect neighbour had dealt with breaking into locked, metal security doors before  (legitimately as a locksmith) and, after a few sweaty hours, managed to drill and cut out a section of the steel surround and remove the lock. Who puts a metal security door on what was an outside bathroom? It was a good job no-one was in it at the time, as there is no other way in or out. Ah well, the joys of island life.

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Up and Down

That’s up and down the hill yesterday morning, finally. It was a muggy damp start to the day with a cloud over Nimos and humidity high. At least, that’s what it felt like when I was at work at the desk and sweating by 5.00. I was later out and up the hill and down again by eight with the rest of the day to myself.

There’s been some development on the on-going water saga. I mentioned the mysterious barrel up on the roof? Well, on Monday night two workmen came to investigate the pipes and attach a couple of new ones to the tank on the tower, tank #2. This they did, but haven’t yet attached the other ends to anything, so I am still not sure what this tank #2 will be doing. Meanwhile, though, they fiddled with the in-feed from the Dimos, trying to work out how our neighbour was to get water into his sterna. Here’s how the pipes go: the mains comes into the courtyard where the meter is (it should be in the street but it’s not, which is why it’s not been read for two or more years despite asking the landlord to sort it, and that’s why our next water bill will be €260 at least – Michalis at the Dimos worked it out for me). Anyway…

The mains comes in, through the meter and directly into our tank (#1) where there’s a stopcock, so it doesn’t overflow. Between the meter and the tank is a tap which runs our hosepipe so we can use it directly from the mains on water days. There’s another one which goes directly up, over our wall, across the road and into the landlord’s house and it’s anyone’s guess where after. In the old days before the tank, we’d close our water-in valve and open his, and the Dimos supply would take the anti-gravity route across to his sterna. I tried to explain all this in faltering Greek to a faltering Albanian plumber who was convinced our landlord’s supply had something to do with our tank #1 and didn’t seem able to understand two concepts. One, that the valve to the landlord’s sterna wasn’t working and needed replacing, and two, this meant that when the mains isn’t feeding in and we turn on the hosepipe, we’re siphoning off his water for our plants – that gravity route in reverse.

The mastorases, there were two, went away in the end, leaving our gate open, not telling us they were going and, after I’d checked for damage, found they’d left the lid off our fresh water tank (#1). The fun and games will continue as tank #2 now has pipes, and they will have to be attached to something somewhere. But hey! In the middle of all this… Our kitchen hot tap has not been working since before Christmas, so we’ve been boiling kettles or filling the bowl from the bathroom. It would run and then run out as if the pressure was dropping and I suspected muck in the pipes brought up by the pump when the sterna broke. Recently, the tap gave up altogether and nothing was coming out. A couple of days ago, for no reason we can think of, it started working again. Another mystery to add to the list.

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