Tuesday - Missing Collars...

This morning I was up early and got the opportunity to view a spectacular sunrise.  I was up and out and walking around the estate in search of cat collars - Boris, Charlie and Chivers have all lost one over the past couple of days and my spares are running low.  Generally when we take a stroll around our house we find one lying about - Boris likes to remove his with his teeth whilst Charlie and Chivers will have been fighting and dragged them off of one another.

As I walked down out of the estate and then turned right and made my way to the layby where the boys have their sneaky fags and then up the 'new road' (now five years old and beginning to show its age!) the sun was beginning to sneak up and over Andreas' house and bathing everything in a warm orange glow.

Bigfoot and her foal have been moved into the field next to our house.  We have been concerned about how thin Bigfoot is looking as she nurses her offspring but her owners do come daily and bring food and water and move her to where there should be more to eat - the only trouble is that at this time of year there is so little in the fields for nourishment.

I left John working on his latest project as I went down to Polis with a list of things that needed doing.  John has been trying to find a suitable and aesthetically pleasing way of hiding the pipe that runs down our path to take excess water away from the water butt.

We have seen the front garden under inches of water in a very short period of time and water is so destructive.  Having said that the island is desperate for rain.  The reservoirs are down by about 80% and I have witnessed this for myself - they are scarily low - just a muddy puddle in places which is awful.

Anyway John has found that if he chips away a channel in the terracotta bricks that you can get here they make a good bridge over the pipe and look quite good but it is a slow and messy process - there is red brick dust everywhere and the work is back-breaking but he ws keen to get as much as he could done today as we have visitors tomorrow and we don't want them wading through the red dust to get to our house and we don't want the cats bringing it in on their paws as they are bound to do!

I worked my way through my list of things to do.  I took my curtains into the lovely Anastasie to get her to join then, match the pattern and make one long curtain for the guest bedroom - all for an estimated 10 euros!  I picked up John's chainsaw which has been fixed for no charge for which many thanks and then dropped off some old throws for June and the cat shelter at the Polis vets and then got some stuff to go on the back of Minnie's neck to deal with her ear mite problem.  I did the shopping in Paps and then called into Bambos the butcher to get some pork liver for the cats - in Paps you just get the liver, in Bambos' you get liver, heart, lungs, windpipe the lot - it looks like something from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre!

When I returned home it was clear that Boris had been somewhere he shouldn't as he had come home covered in some sort of gunk - god knows what it was, John had made a good attempt at cleaning him up with a towel but he was still in a mess and I had to wash his paws and legs.  We don't know if he got into one of the abandoned pools which are no more than a scummy mud at the moment but whatever it was it wasn't very pleasant and we don't know whether it was Boris that was sick whilst we were out later in the day but one of the cats regurgitated what appeared to be a small rat in the conservatory.

We were down in Paphos this afternoon - John went to talk to the aluminium people about replacing the wooden fence between us and Paul's with a more permanent and more attractive solution and for breaching the gaps between the turrets of the wall.  I went to play pickleball and then took Mum and Aunty Joyce down to Baracas beach bar to enjoy the afternoon sun and a cup of tea.  It was lovely down there - very peaceful and it occurred to me it might be a good place to take Stan and Jackie tomorrow for coffee before we set off back up the hill to show them where we live.  They may have already been as they are staying at the Helios which is in walking distance.

A welcome night in for John and I and as we had a busy day ahead of us tomorrow we retired early - I forgot to post my blog - Diana and Louise will be very cross with me.