Charley Farley SuperCat

First of all I have to tell you that Charlie now has his own fan club and he is busy (with a little help from me as his paws are just that little bit too chubby for the keyboard) exchanging photographs and greetings with his 'girlfriends' in Nicosia Misty and Princess who belong to our neighbour Persephone.  Very soon I reckon I shall have to set him up with his own social media page - maybe he can earn me a fortune like Grumpy Cat did - Charlie can do Grumpy - in fact he is rather good at doing Grumpy that and impersonations of Yoda when he has to have drops in his ears.

We had set aside today for DIY and it did not quite go as planned.
We were starting off by getting the conservatory ready for John to do the Triplex on the roof.  This involved removing the roof blinds which we had made out of voiles and in so doing I lost my insect collection which had been housed in the folds.  The Triplex is coming on Saturday and John has all the runners in place and he washed the windows in and out as best he could but it is a difficult exercise because it is almost impossible to reach across all the glass from the two roofs.

He then turned his attention to the wall behind the wood burner and that is when everything went a little pear shaped. He has never been really happy with the way the pipework was sealed where it went through the wall and I was always blaming him for creating sooty dust because he was forever opening the door to the fire.  John wanted to move the woodburner away from the wall so that we would have a clear run at painting behind it but then once he had managed it he found that there was a rust hole at the top of the pipe which had obviously been letting out smoke.  To cut a long story short John decided to dismantle all the pipework to see what was salvageable and then found he could not remove the very top piece which had the hole and if he cannot get that off or get it off without knackering the pipes below we will need a complete new woodburner.

Undaunted he did what he could himself and although he had phoned a business in Paphos to see if they could help he got no call back so decided to try the guy in Polis who turned out to be very helpful and is coming up tomorrow afternoon to see what is what.  Unfortunately this was only going to be a bit of a DIY tidying up exercise but you can see by the state of the wall that something major had been amiss - we are expecting the worst because that is how our luck goes.

Whilst John was busy occupied with the fire I set about doing some ironing - poor John must be getting down to the dregs of his wardrobe judging by the number of t-shirts, shirts and shorts which were needing some attention and the situation is likely to stay that way for a bit because I needed to be in shouting distance so I moved into the lounge and for some reason best known to myself decided to polish the surround of the gas fire - probably because we are likely to have to rely on it a little more this year by the looks of things.

We had arranged to go out this evening with a friend who is going through a bit of a rough time at the moment and we had heard good things about the people who used to run the Sa Bunari but who have now moved to Goudi into the Stone Lion so we decided to check it out.  Dori used to work at the Water Mill in Steni and Claire was the woman who came and cleaned our house before our silver wedding party.  They now run the Stone Lion.  Inside was their errant African Grey Parrot who went missing last week but happily returned.  We had gone to eat early just as the sun was going down and sat out on the terrace but under cover.  We had ribs (the signature dish of the Water Mill) so we expected them to be good and they were.  We had gone early so it was quiet although another group did turn up before we left.  Dori and Claire are having to build back their clientele and reputation having been ousted from Sa Bunari when they were doing so well.