June 6th...

We were having an at home day so I had earmarked a day of gardening as everything has started to get very overgrown and untidy.  The Californian poppies are lovely but they get very leggy and are now past their best.  In the back border they were swamping the solanum and the lovely grass that Hazel gave us.  It was time for a haircut - the garden equivalent of a number 1 all over!

The solanums outside the kitchen have got very big now - they are a couple of the very few plants we retained from the original garden.  I want to grow these up so that if and when they build in the field next door we have some privacy.  In the winter this is where we get sunshine so if it is nice enough to sit outside and eat this is where we do it.  I can't manage them myself so I have to call in the big guns (John) to trim the top.

Whilst I was gardening John was taking a look at the bike which appeared to have a slow puncture.  Fortunately he was able to get of the bottom of it and it appears it was just a leaky valve.

The bike has a couple of issues which need looking at so I followed John down to Marino's to leave it for him to have a look at.  Between John, Marino and the dog, some pigeon English and some pigeon Greek and a lot of hand gesticulation they manage to make one another understand and Marino tells John that 'nothing is a problem' and that it will be ready tomorrow afternoon at around 4.00pm which is great as we really want to use the bike more often but it has been a bit hard to start recently.

Still if we ever want to sell the bike we know that one of the village boys who sits in the turning bay and has an illicit fag every afternoon at about 4.00pm will be first on the list to purchase it!

We leave the bike down in Prodromi and make our way back home to more gardening and it is a hot day and getting hotter but once I had started I got to the point of no return!

Why is it that you can clear load upon load of weeds and rubbish and the garden looks exactly the same?  John says it looks much tidier but I am not so sure!! 

We took a break in the afternoon for one of our regular cuddle sessions with Tom and Jerry.  We are delighted to learn that Irene's charm offensive yesterday at the ladies lunch was successful and Lucie from Kathikas has agreed to take them both together in a couple of weeks' time which is brilliant news and they will have a wonderful home.  They have no idea what very lucky kittens they are!

My job for this afternoon was to remove the pinenuts from the cones I had collected from the 'Egyptian's' house down the road.  Now that I know what I am looking for I can recognise the little buggers - I am not going to reinvent the wheel but to get an idea of the experience read this: Extracting Pinenuts - Why Bother? let's just say that my hands ended up looking like Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins and I had a strong odour of Harpic about me at the finish.  I say the finish - this is really just the beginning - I have to get John to remove the nuts from the unyielding outer shell next!

Tonight we were meeting up with David and Denise.  We had been out with them previously with Running Susan and John.  Denise had warned me that David was a night owl so we weren't meeting in Molos until 8.00pm for drinks before eating - I hadn't realised quite what a night owl David is as we didn't order our food until after 10.00pm which came as a bit of a shock to the system particuarly as we had been busy all day and hadn't had that much to eat.  We got home after 1.00am - I had turned into a pumpkin!  Great food though!