Thursday

Glorious November back again today - clear bright and warm and the sky seems so much more blue than in the height of the summer.  The cats are loving it outside - Pops is taking advantage of the remaining stretch of wall which has no aluminium panelling! 

Mins has taken the higher ground and is at a vantage point above the outside shower - she was disgruntled that she could not sleep on the steamer chairs because we have removed the cushions because of the condensation overnight.

Feeling her pain we retrieved the old brown cushions with the semi waterproof covers which no longer have a home in the garden and put them on the steamers - first to test them out was Charlie who gave his seal of approval.  Boris was AWOL - not sure where he goes but he keeps returning with injuries - he has an abscess on his shoulder from a bite and another small one on his leg from another bite.  We have treated it with the dermagel we keep in the cupboard and he is carrying on regardless.

Off for day 5 of my fish mosaic project - it is Sharon's birthday today so I dropped off her card and present - she must have been in the shower so I left it hanging on the gate.  There was lots of cake at craft today as a result and very nice it was too!!

Savvas the man who taught us how to carve gourds is back to replace the other Eleni who had to go home sick on Friday.  He is a lovely man although he speaks no English we have a lot of smiles and head nodding from him.  He started by washing my mosaic - this is to remove the fabric upon which we have stuck our tiles with the foul smelling fish glue.


Then we had to mix up a sort of slip to pour onto the right side and use a brush to make sure that all the cracks between the tiles are filled - you think you have done it and then little air bubbles appear!  This is then left to dry just a little before we had to wipe off the excess and use a Stanley knife to scrape around the tiles exposing the colours and thereby all the flaws and errors!!

The fish will now be washed and left to dry ready for the finish tomorrow when the frames will be cleaned and stained and then they will be given their hooks to be hung - they weight a ton!!

Back home the goats are back - shame they never came round when Sally and Tommy were here as they would have loved to have seen them.  Not very much for them to eat at the moment as we have had no real rain for ages and everything is very dry and brown.

We decided to make the most of the afternoon and headed down to Paphos to try and do a little Christmas shopping - we have very little to do so get lulled into a false sense of security thinking we have ages to get it done but with all the other things that we do the weeks just fly by - it is a week since we had to go to Larnaca to the airport!

It was glorious down in Paphos and we headed for the airconditioned Mall to get the small gifts for the secret santa and present game - there are a number of places there which have nice little gifts for around €5 which is the price limit.

We did a little and then ran out of ideas and made our way back home for a box-set binge - watching the remaining 5 episodes of Paranoid with the fire lit for comfort!