The ball being carnival, which took place in Yialos yesterday. The air up in the village was thumping with the beat, and the music went on throughout the afternoon and into the evening. (If I hear ‘Vida Loca’ one more time, I swear I’ll spit. It’s like Summer when all we are serenaded by at night is ‘Happy Birthday to you…’) Looks like a great time was had by all. I’ve not seen any photos yet, but if I’ve got the technology right, here’s a quick video from Symi TV’s YouTube channel.

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Following carnival comes Lent, and the supermarket now has shelves packed with tahini, halva and frozen squid. Today’s Clean Monday, so ‘everything’ is shut and ‘everyone’ is at the beach flying kites and eating only dead things from the sea (and salads) as the 40 days of fasting begin. It may well be Unclean Monday for us if the water tank doesn’t fill up, and as it’s a bank holiday, George may rightly not be at work this morning, and our mains taps won’t get turned on. (No, we can’t. They are locked up, and it would be against the law, but thanks for asking.) We may get away with it, we don’t know yet, we are on a knife-edge. Well, I’m getting on with things as normal, and Neil is still in bed, but otherwise, I am sure we’re both highly concerned that 500 litres for three men over 3.5 days, possibly four, is not going to be enough.

Whatever. We’re used to it.

As for me, I am currently starting the week with a find. I found a folder of images Neil’s taken over the past couple of years, and although they’re not that up to date, there are some great shots coming to these pages over the next few days. Here’s a sample. I’m off…

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Can’t stay long. There’s due to be a planned power cut in an hour or so, and we could be without electricity from eight this morning to four this afternoon. Some place should be back on by 11.00, so we might be in luck. I never know exactly what area we come under, as we’re on the cusp, but Lemonitisa is on the list, and that’s our nearest church, so I guess we’ll be off shortly. It’s a clear, cold day by recent standards, so that’s going to be fun, but there are plenty of odd jobs to get done that will keep us warm. Not that I’ll be able to have a shower afterwards, as there won’t be any water until the power’s back on, and even then, our little tank has got to last us and downstairs right through until Tuesday because Monday is a Bank Holiday. So, I must rush and fill buckets, find blankets, check the camping gas, and make sure my phone is charged. Meanwhile, here are a few random landscapes I dragged from an ancient folder. Have a good weekend.

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Not much to report today. As far as I am aware, the harbour is still suffering from the high tide/waterline, caused by atmospheric pressure caused by climate change and a new moon or some such. The taxis sometimes have to park further out, so if you’re looking for one, and they’re not at the paddling pool as usual, they might be further along towards the bus stop. The carnival is due to happen on Sunday, so let’s hope nature has moved on by then, or things might become a little soggy.

This week, apart from wrestling with unhelpful, self-governing computer programs and the like, we also celebrated Jenine’s birthday. Neil did the cooking, we had lunch, and Sam came after work to have his. During that time, we all had a video call with the other godson over in Rhodes. This happened not long after we had started watching a film, which we put on pause. I like the way Shelley Winters and Red Buttons are fascinated by a man eating a beef curry with Bombay potatoes and matar paneer.

Anyone guess the film?

The matar paneer, by the way, called for paneer (a type of cheese), but we didn’t have any because we’re lucky if we can find a Laughing Cow in the shops in winter, so we used haloumi instead, and it was spot on. Neil has the recipe, and can be bought quite cheaply. (Neil, I mean. The recipe will cost you a fortune. Or you can look it up online.)

Since then, we’ve been under another rain and windstorm. It’s blown half a lintel off the house opposite, but we’re still intact as far as I know. Ironically, we’re still avoiding using water at the weekends to save what little we have in the tank, and this coming weekend, being Clean Monday, we may have to ration it very carefully, as we may not have a refill from Friday morning through to Tuesday. We have buckets of rainwater at the ready, so we’ll manage. I hope.

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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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