a day at home...

Saturday at home and what a difference a day made, twenty four little hours, brought the sun and the flowers where there used to be rain!!!  Bright blue skies and little fluffy clouds above the mountains - fabulous but then this is Cyprus in January!

The first winter we were here was the wettest, coldest winter for 40 years, I cannot say it was a baptism of fire because that would have been warm it was a baptism of all things cold wet and miserable as this photograph shows.

That year we didn't have the two buildings joined so we had to run from the lounge to our bedrooms braving the elements as we did so.  It seemed a romantic thing to do in the summer when it was dry and warm but in reality it was grim - we soon rectified that by adding the conservatory.

We were totally unprepared for the ravages of the rain and had water coming in where we had no idea it could even do so - sometimes it rained so hard we ran out of towels trying to stem the flow.  Each year we have made improvements to try and reduce the risk and now I think we have done everything we can and now we are less filled with dread when the winter storms arrive.

No such storms today - wall to wall sunshine which meant I managed to get two loads of washing done, out on the line and dry which can't be bad this early in the year.

The fine dry weather allowed me to get out and about in the garden and get a bit of clearing up done and some weeding.  The garden is springing to life and we should soon get some welcome colour.

We had a phone call from our lovely neighbour Charalambous who was up with Galatia from Nicosia - he had an Epiphany present for us (today is Epiphany and a bank holiday in Cyprus and was originally much more significant to the Cypriots than Christmas Day).  He had brought us 10 wooden pallets so we would not be cold - how very very kind of him - we asked no questions as to their heritage we were just very grateful and stacked them away somewhere safe until we need them.  John would tell you that this year we have burned very little by way of real logs which is great news but we have run out of storage space!

It was a real pleasure to get the sheets washed dried and back on the bed all in one day in January - John loves fresh hay and he loves fresh hay even better on a Saturday after the Mighty Blades have won their match and we have enjoyed a nice supper and a glass of wine.

I had seen a 'life hack' on the internet to sort out your airing cupboard.  I don't have an airing cupboard per se but I have a cupboard as close to the water tank as possible which is dedicated to bedding.  I have a thing about duvet covers and brought a load with me from the UK when we moved, now seven years in some of the linen has seen better days and so I decided to sort it out.  The hack is to store the duvet cover, pillowcases and sheets inside one pillow case so you have the bed set together.  I decided to do this and sift out some of the old stuff and anything that I couldn't match up.  This is all part of my New Year's resolution to try and be less cluttered - apparently if you want to be happy you need to be clean and tidy because if you are not you are likely to be full of angst.  John and I are natural hoarders so getting rid of things doesn't come easy.  Mum's charity shop will reap the benefit of our endeavours though.

It was a lovely day and with it being a Church bank holiday the shops would have been shut so there was no reason to go out and down to town.  I had supper in hand so we were quite happy to be consigned to barracks.

The forecast until next weekend is fine and so we are having a good start to the year.  A nice day like today fills you with enthusiasm and we are planning our Droushia days out and village cleans and DIY projects because before we know it it will be too hot to do too much.