I am all at sixes and sevens today with regard to what actual day it is - I had it in my head that it was a Saturday and I am not entirely sure why!

It was another glorious start to the day - I opened the bedroom shutter to see Chivvy-Pops staring in - he was waiting to be fed!

The glorious light which is shed by a much lower sun this time of the year and the warmth which comes with it because of the recent clock change makes you feel glad to be alive and ready to face the world.  We are lucky and we have so much to be grateful for - interestingly I was listening to someone on the tintyweb speaking this week who said "...rather than think you would be happy with things which you do not have just be happy with the things which you do have" and we have our health and we have food in our cupboards, money in our bank account (not much granted!), a roof over our heads and friends and family who love us.  Everything else is all really rather incidental when you think about it - which is all rather deep for what turned out to be a Thursday!

I had a bimble around the garden this morning.  I am loathe to cut things back just yet as they are still flowering - things like the clock vine.  We split the original plant earlier this year and happily the second plant has survived and thrived and is flowering.   I cut the vine back earlier because it had been struggling with whatever the problem has been this year with the vines.  I noticed this morning that it has begun to sprout again which is completely the wrong time of year.  I had put the allium bulbs and tulip bulbs mum gave me into a pot temporarily to make sure they were ok and this morning I decided I would transplant them into the front garden and then I used the leftover soil to plant some cuttings of the geranium we have in a pot which Dad loved - it is a dark dark red one which came originally from Christos's taverna.

It was such a beautiful morning that we decided to have our breakfast outside.  We were almost too hot sat under the gazebo which has been given a new covering with the leftover triplex from the conservatory project.

We decided that we would go up to the community office and pay our water bill and next year's community charge - our three monthly bill for water was under 30 euros and our annual community charge is just over 100 euros so exceptionally reasonable in our book!  We passed Marianna in her truck as we were approaching the office but she said she was only going to be 5 minutes so would be go in and wait for her.  We took the opportunity to have a look around the cavernous building that is our community office.  Downstairs we now have three looms - not sure if they are working but they look quite impressive!  The cleaner was concerned that Marianna wasn't there but in our pigeon Gringlish we explained that she was only going to be five minutes and so that was ok!  Bills paid we carried on down to Polis as John wanted to go to the wood yard as he is going to build some pelmets for over the kitchen door and over the kitchen window.

I went next door to have a little look around the furniture shop that is there - I forgot what a nice place this was - it has some smashing furniture in there and at pretty reasonable prices it you think you don't have to travel down to Paphos to get it.  I particularly liked the green high backed chairs - not that we need them - I just thought they looked stylish with the upholstery and cushions.  Anyway John got the wood he wanted and we called into Glykkis to get some curtain track and made our way back home taking in all the glorious scenery en route - although it is fabulously warm the recent rain means that the island is slowly turning green.

We quickly nipped into Paps where I bumped into Gillian Carbine.  Gillian was with her daughter-in-law B'a, sadly Gillian's son, B'as husband, is no longer with us he was killed in an accident on the island and in spite of all the tragedies which Gillian has had to face she is doing a Christmas shoebox appeal for those less fortunate and I had wanted to donate something.   She said that pasta and rice were good items so I purchased several bags and gave them to her.


So this was the temperature that greeted us when we got back home - a very warm 30 degrees in the conservatory!

We had a phone call this afternoon from George and Pam - amazingly the parcel we had sent, which was scheduled to take a week to 10 days, had already arrived and he had opened it.

Thankfully nothing had got broken in transit so he was the proud recipient of a little taste of Cyprus.  We had sent this for his special birthday on 11th November and were so glad that it had arrived in time - if not early!

Inside there were olives, shoushouko, salted nuts, zivania, red wine, oregano, halloumi, honey, marmalade and a Droushian lemon and possibly other things as I can't actually remember!

It was so lovely to talk to George (and to Pam) and to be able to wish him Kronia Polla!  We will call him on his actual birthday and raise a glass or two to him and have fingers crossed that he and Pam will be back over next year so we can actually do it together in person.

The sunset this evening was spectacular and it augurs well for tomorrow - it is going to be pretty hot playing pickleball if that is the case!!