Cold Wet and Windy...

You will realise that this post is for Tuesday and today is actually Friday 9th and my birthday - the report will be posted in a couple of days - it has been a lovely day.

Not much to blog about today as we haven't set foot outside the door.  This is not entirely true because until the conservatory is completed we still have to do the 'Raindrop Dash' between the two buildings, but aside from getting up this morning and dashing across and then dashing back later for a shower and dashing across that is it!

The promise of Spring which has been with us for the last couple of days has been withdrawn and replaced with rain and wind today and temperatures barely reaching double figures.  Our plans for today went out of the window as they all centred around outdoor activities - a rethink was in order!

We have been watching the BBC series Prisoner's Wives (last episode this evening) and have quite enjoyed it and that prompted us to revisit a series from way back in our youth called Widows.  Sometimes films or programmes from your past are disappointing when you watch them again and although this is very firmly a product of the 80s it is enjoyable nevertheless!  We have watched two episodes today and squeezed in a film that Sean and Sharon left for us to watch because every time it looked like it was' brightening up' it started to rain again.

We have also been doing some investigation for Mum into a coin she was left by my Aunt.  The coin was set in a mount to be hung on a necklace but the mount is broken.  The coin turns out to be an Austrian Ducat dated 1915.  Apparently these coins are restrikes, which means that they bear a 1915 date but were actually struck later.  They are bought and sold as bullion coins, i.e. for their gold content alone and were produced in high purity goold, 23.75 carats, making them among the highest purity gold coins ever issued for circulation.  

Mum has been having trouble with her Wii Fit Board - something that she uses every day and she really hates not having the opportunity to do her early morning exercise. They brought it up with them yesterday for John to have a look at so forced to be indoors he decided to see what was wrong.  Things like Wii are hugely expensive over here so we were hopeful that we might be able to rescue it for her.  In the end it looks like just a resync was required.   It will be good if that is all that was wrong with it as that cost us nothing and Mum will be pleased. In the meantime we have found that one of our controllers is knackered so we need to find one off the net which is cheap.  You can pick those up back in the UK for next to nothing but here is a different story so I am busy scouring tintyweb to see what I can find and it can be my birthday present to myself!

Whilst John was sorting out the Wii I turned my attention to tea and I have tried my hand at making Pastisio or Pastichio which is a sort of Cyprus equivalent of lasagne or more exactly a cross between macaroni cheese and lasagne.  Laura and Mark will be pleased to see that I have been using the pestle and mortar which they brought me back from Cuba as I needed to crush some cloves which were going in to flavour the meat.  The photograph on the right is what mine is supposed to look like when it comes out of the oven - I have yet to cook mine so I am hopeful it will be something like.  John is guinea-pig taster tonight and if it passes his exacting standards I will publish the recipe.

That's it for tonight - not very inspiring I know but what would you write about if you had been indoors all day?

P.S.  I have found my controller!
P.P.S. My Pastichio is good enough for the food page!