Wednesday bits and pieces

First of all then the story with the hair - I had a mega cut the other day because I am never exactly sure when my hairdresser is going to be available and got rid of all the old dry and sun damaged ends but kept the dark roots which looked awful.

My hairdresser says that providing you follow the instructions carefully and use good conditioner then now and again a home colour doesn't do you any harm so I thought I would save myself some money and do my own.  She said to go a few shades darker because (a) the roots wouldn't show as much and (b) the sunshine will bleach the hair anyway.  The trouble is I wasn't exactly sure what colour the majority of my hair was so plumped for something which proclaimed to be dark blonde - mmmm not sure I would call it dark blonde - Sharon said it was 'minky brown' but I think she was being charitable!  Anyway you certainly cannot see my roots now but the jury is out as to whether I like it and I certainly don't like the selfies which have given me a veritable chickens neck.

So a bit of a mixed bag and 'bitty' day today.  Ron Jeremy as we have christened the black stallion across the road is like a pig in poo today as he and his girlfriend have been joined by two other 'ladies' who need a bit of attention!  One was not up for it at all and rebuffed Ron's advances with two sharp kicks to the head!  The smaller mare with the white face is the regular horse with the one large foot that it tethered here every year.  We were concerned about her and her foot but apparently it was an old injury and she comes back every year so we guess she must be ok.

All four are currently located in the field that had the fire last week so most of the grazing there is pretty scorched - we wonder if that is like taking the horses to a barbeque???

Anyway one thing for sure is that you have to be careful at night to make sure you don't encounter Ron Jeremy when he is having a wander because he isn't tied down and he likes to have a walk about at night - being so very dark he can be quite difficult to make out in the moonlight and if he is in a bad mood (probably having been kicked in the face a couple of times) then he tends to put his head down and lunge at you!

Continuing on the animal theme my big bug seems to have come of age - he was a Cizara Ardeniae - Coprosma Hawk Moth and turned out to be a big bugger with beautiful scarlet underwings which I noticed only as he was sitting on the pavement sort of bringing them to life.

Chivers was taking too much interest in him so I moved him up and out of the way so that he could continue to stretch his wings and then hopefully take himself off to live another day.

My finger is there only to try and give some sort of idea of scale - apparently these moths can have a 7cm wing span!  Not sure I would like it quite so much if I encountered it flying around near me but sat on the pavement it was fine!

The weather is a little unsettled at the moment still warm but tending to be overcast - this has had an impact on our electricity generation but the last bill for the previous two months was still only for the standing charges and quite a considerable amount of units put in the bank for the winter.  All good news - this has certainly been a good investment for us.

I nipped down to see John and Susan as they had a couple of computer issues that they wanted me to sort out for them.  The view coming down the hill towards Latchi was beautiful.  We can take it for granted sometimes because it is there all the time and then we have to remind ourselves that people pay a lot of money for just a week or two weeks here and so we should pay better attention at times.

Poor John has had an on-going problem with what they thought started out as a ganglion on the top of his left hand - he was having an operation on that arm for something different and the surgeon decided to remove the ganglion at the same time.  For some reason this area has refused to heal and today poor John was in agony and waiting for the doctor to contact him to see what was going to happen.  He had what looked like a hole on the top of his hand and when he wiggled his fingers you could almost see the tendons moving in the hole.

Let's hope that they can get him sorted out and quickly because this has been going on for such a long time and, as a sporty person, has curtailed his activities like cycling and badminton so he is a bit like a caged lion wanting to get out and do things.

I managed to set up his wireless printer and managed to find a way of getting the exercise videos up onto Dropbox so that we could then access them from Susan's i-pad but it was going to take a while for them to upload so I left them saying I would go back tomorrow to finish it off.

John and I spent quite a while in the garden this afternoon.  Diana and Rob had very kindly given us some old wood from a pergola that I wanted John to make some trellis and ladders out of.

John had already made supports for the clockvine and corkscrew vine and for the opposite side of the gazebo to the corkscrew vine (as yet not planted up as I hit upon concrete when I tried).

My shed has a smart new structure to house the chinese tiles and which now has a couple of plants growing up either side to soften the edges.  Today he made me a lovely archway which will eventually be covered by the orange trumpet flowering plant whose name escapes me but which were original shrubs in the garden so have lived here happily for many many years with very little love care attention or water!

Hopefully when it is more established that too will hide the front of my shed and make for a more interesting feature.

I think we really have enough plants in the garden now - we just need to make sure that we have the right ones in the right place (so they don't drop in the pool!!!).

We were knackered when we had finished and looked forward to a nice quiet evening.  Sean and Sharon are fetching their daughters from the airport and we had jokingly said we would wait up for their arrival and then go down to Latchi where Zouk's was having the opening night of their Pirate night club.  By 9.00pm we were fighting with our eyelids so that was never going to happen.

Tea was a rather nice hot and spicy meatball dish with a cheeky bottle of our favourite red wine to wash it down and then to follow we had a piece of the long awaited water melon from George's garden with some veriko grapes which Pam's friend had brought from Nicosia - DELICIOUS!!