Winter weather...

Oh bugger the weather forecasters have got the weather right - today we woke to a right miserable old morning when we couldn't see our hands in front of our faces.  Wet and grey, grey and wet - we had planned a day trip out but didn't really fancy it - I thought I needed to go to do some food shopping for Sunday but I scoured the cupboards, fridges and freezer and declared all was good and I could get something sorted.  The photograph above is of the horses in the field next to the Skrimmers - not that you would know!

We ventured out because if the weather were to clear we had scheduled a village clean for tomorrow and I wanted some rubbish bags and we had our water bill so I wanted to go to the new Strasbourg building and see Marianna in her new office where she resides in splendid isolation!!!

OMG this building is amazing and most un-Drouseia-like as it is so modern.  It will house a theatre and a library and a museum for the whole Akamas region.  It has beautiful marble floors and mosaics and photographs of old Drouseia and Marianna says there is to be a notice board to keep the villagers informed.  Woo-hoo if that works there will be no excuse that people don't know what is going on as I shall send her a notification of the forthcoming clean-ups and then people can join us if they want to.

Although the likelihood of carrying out tomorrow's was fading fast as the day progressed we got our bags from the supermarket and went home to batten down the hatches and spend the remainder of the day indoors having a boxset binge-fest!!!

Good job John has got the gas fire working properly after all the issues we had with it and plenty of dry wood on tap as it looked like we were going to need it today.

Although our house can be bloody freezing it is much more a winter house than a summer one by virtue of the fact we have decorated it as such and for that, today I was grateful.

No sooner had we got home and sorted lunch with a mug of warming soup than the weather closed in and we got snow and lots of it.  Big big fat flakes started to fall and settle quickly - the garden was transformed into a winter wonderland and the skies were heavily laden with plenty more to come.

It snowed hard and we were so glad we hadn't bothered to go out earlier as we could well have ended up stranded down in Paphos.  Diana contacted us to say the pool engineer had battled his way up from Peyia and it had taken him an hour to get to them.

Mid way through the storm we were presented with a power failure - not too bad as we always have a load of candles around the house for the ambiance so they got lit straight away and John went out to tackle firing up the generator which took an age to get going and then when it did there was an issue with the electric cable so it kept failing.  We decided to give it a miss and just sit and read.

In the end the power was only off for a couple of hours - down in Peyia I think they had a six hour cut which is no joke when it is freezing cold particularly if your only form of heating is electric.

Once power was restored we were fine - fire lit and boxset on and something warming ready to eat for tea.  It could be worse - the first year we were here we hadn't joined the buildings and only had the gas fire for heating and it was the coldest wettest winter for 40 years.  We managed but of course we have gone soft in the interim so the thought of having to walk outside to go to bed no longer feels romantic and I am grateful that I do not have to even though traversing the conservatory can be a pretty chilly experience.

The cats were happy to be snuggled up in the warm but they did need some not so gentle persuasion to go out to attend to calls of nature.  Boris wailed at the door and looked at me incredulously when I opened it and pushed him out - it isn't my fault that he likes to wander over to the big fir tree by the car port to do his business.