Wednesday 23 November 2011

A Few Little Problems...

So yesterday evening we enjoyed a lovely warming shower, got the lounge up to a pleasant temperature, made sure the cats were ok after their respective jabs and were just contemplating cooking our tea of fish-cakes and chilli sauce, salad and wedges when we had an unscheduled power-cut.  Undeterred we lit all the candles and decided to play cribbage at the table waiting for power to be restored.

When this sort of thing happens we are always a bit uncertain as to whether or not it is just affecting our house, our past record with electric being a bit of a nightmare, so John went out with torch to check that nothing had tripped, noticed that there were no street lights and so knew that it was village-wide.  We rang Dad to find out which number you should ring to check out the situation.  The number to call is 1800 which we did so that we could get some idea on timescales - tummies were beginning to rumble at this point!!!

We listened through the recorded message which mentioned every adjoining village bar Droushia but we wonder if, as we are right on the outskirts, we come under Inea which was mentioned as having a problem.  We decided to give it an hour and then if it was unrestored we would go out for something to eat.  An hour passed and so we went over to get changed - I had just got my boots on when the electricity came back on - RESULT.  

I went across to the kitchen and got the salad ready, took the wedges and fish-cakes out of the freezer when blow me the bloody electric went off again.  So what do you do??  We decided to wait a little longer and then if the situation remained the same definitely go out.  Time passed with no electric and so we got changed, got in the car and went through the village so that we could be sure the whole village was affected, sure enough it was all in darkness until we got to Stathmos where we could see lights on... would you believe it as we got to Stathmos the power was restored!!!  We took a chance, returned home and quickly got tea cooked - we didn't really need to have panicked as the electric did not go off again thank goodness.


Today we had to do some home maintenance.  Over the past few days, for some reason, the cats have been staring up at the ceiling and we had no idea why and then on Sunday when we had all our visitors, Dad was sitting on the sofa when he felt a drip of water fall onto his knee.  Obviously the cats had been able to see this and we hadn't!  This clearly needed some investigation as we weren't sure what was causing it and water can be so destructive.

As you know we insulated the lounge ceiling with the packing materials from our move and then panelled it with wood planks.  This meant that one of the planks had to be removed so that John could investigate.  It would appear that the problem is being caused by condensation and some of the packing material had a lot of that brown plastic packing tape still attached which wasn't helping because if there was condensation forming then the tape couldn't absorb it.  To double check John had to go up onto the roof to check the roof tiles.  There doesn't appear to be a problem with any of them which is good so we will have to keep an eye on the situation.

It was another lovely day today and so I took the opportunity to give what we call the turpentine tree a haircut.  We dont know what the tree is but it has a very strong smell and secretes an oily milky sticky sap from the fibrous bark.  I like the tree and the shape of the leaves but we dont want it to grow too big because it is very close to the house and the roots look like they could be a problem if left unchecked.  Last person to give the tree a cut was Trevor so it has lasted a couple of months.

John was busy looking at the wood for the pergola getting it ready for Friday.  Guess what - more wood staining to be done - just when I thought it was safe to go out in the garden!!!

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