Meanwhile, at the waterpark
Monday, and a couple of mild waterpark interruptions to the daily routine… As you know, the other day I was halfway through a shower when the plumber called, and I had to answer the door in my towel. An odd place to have a door, I grant you, but what that incident taught me is that all those scenes you see in adult films and romances where someone steps from the shower to let in the plumber simply don’t work that way in real life. The same goes for when you are halfway through a siesta, as I was on Monday afternoon when the doorbell rang. Poor chap, very apologetic and there was a reason for his call…
The reason began at about eight that morning when the doorbell ding-donged and I answered it to find our landlord on the step looking like he’d just walked off stage from a wet t-shirt competition on a SAGA Holiday Island. He wanted me to turn off the mains water, and I could hear the sound of a gushing leak from his place across the road. I pointed out that the mains water was not coming in (it was Pentecost and a bank holiday, so no-one had been around to turn on the mains taps). That confused him. What confused me was how he didn’t know that the minas only fills his sterna and not his pipes. To stop the leaking flow, all you need to do is turn off the water pump. What confused me even more was that he used to be the principal of the technical college where, I believe, such things are taught. I offered my help which with my dreadful Greek accent and his non-understanding of foreigners talking anything but Symiaka only confused him more. Satisfied that his problem was not the mains water tap in our courtyard and that all valves were shut, he squelched back across the lane to have another think or maybe win a bottle in the ‘wet landlord competition,’ I don’t know.
The rest of Monday went without a hitch. 6,000 words of a new story took up most of the day, and of those, about 3,000 had to be redone because my keyboard is wearing out. I often hit the space bar, and nothing happens, so words have to be separated after the event. With others, it’s simply a question of my seven-finger typing technique and playing the keyboard as if I was playing a keyboard. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever been taught piano. One, two, three, thumb under, cross hands, left hand playing the letters in the treble range, right hand hopping over to the qwerty area with third and second finger, both hands fighting for the same key/letter, typing some words as quickly as playing an inverted mordent, that kind of thing. I did try learning to touch type, spending 45 minutes a day with my fingers in the correct place and only certain digits on certain keys. But then, after 45 minutes of slow, laborious rehearsal, I’d go back to my usual fast and inaccurate performance of my bad typing habits. Life is to short for typing school, I decided.
Random thoughts and random photos, and now I’m out for a random walk.
