You want to know how cold it can get here on Symi in the winter? Check out this photo which I have borrowed from Mihalis Tsavaris, it was on Facebook and looks like it was taken up in the hills.

We had a similar scene on our rosemary bush a couple of years go where the water runs off the roof, but it’s not been doing that this winter so far, so I can’t get a picture of my own, of icicles on Symi I mean. So, thank you Michaelis for this one.

Despite the cold we went down to Pedi for a walk on Thursday and I took the other images you can see on today’s blog. On Friday I tried to get some work done in the front room but even with both heaters on it didn’t get above 10 degrees, and typing with gloves on is not the easiest thing to do, so I gave up on that and diverted my mind to other matters.

Such as the leak the bath tap has developed and how to deal with it. That, as I write, is still on going. (Thursday morning – I am getting this done before evacuating the front room and closing the door on what I used to call ‘the fridge.’ I am now calling it ‘the freezer.’

The other freezer in the house is, currently, the bathroom, which makes for fairly unpleasant showers in the morning. But they ho! The sun is shining, we’re still breathing and we’re living on a Greek island; it’s what you have to expect. So, let’s look ahead to the weekend and what’s planned? Well, nothing really. Perhaps a walk on Sunday when the temp should be up a bit thanks to cloud heading our way. Perhaps some work in the garden (3/10 on the possibility scale), maybe another chapter of the book (9/10 as long as the front room warms up) and maybe an evening out, as we’ve not been out all week, apart from a walk. (8/10, depends on money.)

What’s a cert for next week is hunting through the postal services again as things ordered ten weeks ago have still not arrived. I suspect Christmas delays and apathy are to blame. Not by anyone here on Symi, the thing definitely has not reached the island, but by the courier service who, online, tell us that the thing waited for arrived with them, in Greece, on 21st Decemeber, they even rang but had no idea where Symi was. We’ll be hunting them down again next week.

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I’m not going to hanging around for long today. It’s actually Wednesday and I am getting this ready ahead of time, as has become my habit of late.

I find that I can witter on aimlessly more freely at this time of day, usually around lunchtime, because I’ve got my morning work out of the way and have the rest of the day to myself. Being an early morning person I like to get straight on with thing as soon as I have got up and sat down at the desk. In the old days the blog used to be my wake up routine, now it has become my wind down routine. Either way, it still gets done.

But the reason I am not hanging around for long is that my fingers are not working properly due to the cold. I have four layers on including a new woollen jumper, there are two heaters going, one either side, and now, after five hours in this large front room, the temperature has risen from nine to nearly eighteen degrees. But still my fingers are cold and stiff and I can’t type in fingerless gloves. Even the cat is not happy with the arrangements, he keeps wandering from one heater to the other finding no satisfaction with either, it seems.

But at least I am inside and not having to be working outdoors, That must be very bitter for the workmen, builders, and others who have to go outside to work. Neil went to Yialos this morning for aerobics at the gym, brave him, as a way of shaking off a cold he has picked up. He also picked up some post and shopping and carried it all the way back up the steps. I was hoping to be taking up my morning exercise routine again by now but it’s just too cold. That’s my excuse, not that I need one, and I am staying with it.

So, pointless blog post done, a couple of pics from the archives put up, a few emails to do and then an afternoon of keeping warm, either in the sitting room or back here for another chapter of the book. Oh, and in case anyone needed to know, the wind was in the wrong direction for the Blue Star to dock this morning (Wednesday) and the next boat isn’t due in, from Rhodes, until Friday. Let’s hope the wind has died down by then. Oh yes, and the Sunrise tells us that they have got their temperature up to above 20 degrees, so there’s a warm place to hide out in, should you be on Symi and venturing out and about.

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Today’s pictures are here to satisfy the curious. If you have ever wanted to know what it was like to be on Symi in the rain when the ‘Spanos’ came in from Kos, an hour late due to the bad weather I guess, then these images are here to satisfy your curiosity.

They were taken on Monday evening when we went down to Yialos to see Ian off; he’s heading back to do some work in the UK. It was light when we got down there and not yet raining, but that soon changed and the café we were waiting at, the Roloi near the clock tower, soon filled up. The Blue Star was also due in, coming back from Rhodes on its skewed timetable due to New Year’s Day. That came and went and we waited and had a drink as we did so. The Dodecanese finally came in, there was a bit of a rush about, and then off it went into the wet and dark night.

It was raining hard by this point but that didn’t stop Neil from clowning about, as you will see.

We walked back around the harbour, the original intention was to walk back up the steps, for the exercise, but the rain and water running off the steps put paid to that idea; always best to be safe on Symi in the rain. So we took a taxi back up the hill and that’s what the last image is, a shot from the back of a steamed up taxi heading out of Yialos.

There has been a lot of snow in northern Greece recently and, looking at the news reports, it’s still going on. The skies around here have been heavy and dark, though Tuesday morning was brighter. But very cold. Just the kind of weather for jumping into the recently blessed seas to retrieve the cross; which is what was happening all over the country on January 6th as it is the celebration of Epiphany. The wind yesterday was not as bad as first expected with Windfinder showing force six only, and not the force nine or ten the weather forecaster on TV was talking about. I wouldn’t be surprised though if that was the gusting force, the house has been rattling a bit.

And that of course makes things pretty cold, particularly as the site shows the wind coming from the north. I know, it’s probably colder where you are (unless you are Kon down in Australia of course, hi Kon, hi to the family too!).

The good news is that I found the missing information from my memory stick which wasn’t missing at all. For some reason the ‘open recent’ command in the programme I was using decided to open an old version of the same file, not the most recently opened one that was at the top of the ‘open recent’ files list. But you don’t need to know that.

What you might like to know though is that the weather forecast (you can never have enough of this drivel can you?) is now saying that we’re in for three degrees tonight, like it was last night apparently. Three degrees? How about The Marvelettes instead? Or perhaps The Velvelettes? Who? Quite, I had to go and look them up – you might remember ‘He was really sayin’ something’ from 1965, probably better known to us youngsters by the Bananarama cover version. And talking of really sayin’ something, I clearly am now not saying anythin’ of much interest so will now go and put on another layer of hoodies, my gloves, a hat, my overcoat and knitted scarf I bought from Rasnov castle in Romania, and watch TV.

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Strange goins-on yesterday in the magical world of computers. I plugged in my external hard drive where I keep my notes, opened a file I had been using in the morning to find all updates to it, since December 20th, had vanished. No idea what is going on there. (Will try a re-boot later and see if that helps.)

Meanwhile, while I was doing that and feeling a little under the weather, Neil was bouncing around down in Yialos at his first aerobics class of 2014. It was a cold morning again, that followed a night of heavy rain, so much so that we had drips in the bedroom, and that made me think of an answer to that age-old question: what is Symi like in the winter.

Well, you will find out by reading my blog posts, and Adriana’s when she is back, and you can also find out by reading the Symi books (see the right hand column). But here’s an example of what it can be like, based on Sunday evening. Wet. Agreed it was a big rain storm but it was wet inside the house and outside. Here’s how our house is in the winter:

The kitchen, at the back, gets little ventilation due it it’s design and so turns black and needs washing with bleach, and painting every year, and the rain drips through the ceiling no matter how often you (or Ian) repairs the roof and the cracks. The hall has a mysterious puddle in a certain place due to rain, and the big window can leak. The bathroom, despite having the window open most of the time, also slowly gets black mould, and is always cold. The sitting room can get wet inside depending on which way the wind is blowing, it comes through the window, under the door and sometimes through the roof but it doesn’t usually get damp as it’s the room that gets heated the most.

The  moussandra office has just this year stared to get drips in it, through the old pitched roof, and sometimes these drip into the bedroom below where the window has a broken shutter that has been listed for repair for about a year now – it’s one of those ‘avrio’ things, I reckon we’ll end up having to get it fixed ourselves. But that’s also now leaking and gets black mould around it which needs cleaning off. The front room has only leaked vertically once but does get horizontal leaks under the balcony doors and front door, which is so expanded in the rain that it is a job to open it. Oh, and the house is also cold and the inside of my wardrobe damp.

And that’s not because of how we live or anything; we don’t use gas heaters – the worse thing for producing black mould, it’s just how the houses are. Other people’s houses are sometimes worse, sometimes better than ours, it all depends. But people do ask and that’s just one example of how it can be. Yesterday morning I looked out of the window as I was hanging up the floor-towels to dry and said to myself, ‘We didn’t do so badly last night.’ It can always be worse.

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