The mystery of the missing postage stamps continues as I cannot find them anywhere and I just know they will pitch up when I have done all my Christmas Cards and by then I wont need them.  I am a bit miffed to say the least!!!

Di and the Bobster are going back to the UK on Thursday and Di had very kindly offered to post my cards for me but the stamp hide and seek set me back somewhat so I only had a few written and ready to go so I will take them down with me tomorrow when John and I go down for a coffee to say 'au revoir' to them - we had hoped to be able to spend an evening out with them in the village before they left but this wasn't possible so we are settling for coffee.

I was going down to Polis this morning so decided to call into the Post Office with one of my cards to ask how much it would be to post to the UK so that I could go ahead and write them and post them here.  So the lovely lady in the Post Office informed me that my card would cost 66 cents to post - that is one of these tree stamps (64 cents) and a second boring one which is 2 cents which is fab and actually less to post and send across the miles than to post directly in the UK where a first class stamp is 67 pence.

I had organised to catch up with Gillian today.  She and her husband David recently had to return to the UK for personal reasons involving a family member.  Gillian has come back and David is due back on Saturday and then they are going back to the UK briefly at the beginning of December.

We had arranged to go and have a coffee and a spot of lunch at Tina's Art Cafe before it closes for the season.

I was a bit early so took the opportunity to have a little look around one or two of the gift shops that are still open.

Everyone is gearing up for Christmas which served as a reminder that I really need to get my act together!!!  We don't have many gifts to buy but I do like to take time to find something which shows we have thought about the recipient.

It was an absolutely glorious day.  So glorious that Gillian and I had to move from the first table we sat at because we got too hot!!!  We enjoyed a catch up and a lovely light lunch.  My fresh vegetable and cheese soup was absolutely delicious and I said how nice it was that Gillian had dressed in matching colours!!!

John had had a busy morning and had replaced my old dripping kitchen tap with my nice shiny new one.  He expected the job to be more difficult than it had turned out to be - not because of the tap change but because he was replacing all the isolating taps at the same time and this meant making some modifications to the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

It is normally our luck that anything that involves water generally ends up with a leak and buckets and towels and frayed tempers but it was remarkably calm when I got home.

John has now ticked off all the jobs on his list that we really wanted to get sorted this side of Christmas so he is a  happy chappy and if he is a happy chappy then I am a happy chappess.

We decided that we would take ourselves off for a little walk this afternoon because it was such a beautiful day and as we are two thirds of the way through November days like this are a real bonus particularly when you look at the sub zero temperatures in the UK and compare it with the weather we had this time last year.

We decided to go and give the little dog up the road the fat we had removed from the leg of pork we had at the weekend.  She has made a sort of home for herself at Andreas's having been dumped there with an other dog this time last year or maybe even longer ago than that.  Her companion has long gone but she remains and she is such a pretty little thing although she does chase cars which may well be her downfall.

The surrounding countryside is looking very tired now but you can see the beautiful blue of the sky beyond and not a cloud to be seen.  We know that this means it will be chilly in the house in the evening as the temperatures begin to drop.  This evening at about 7.00pm it was only 12 degrees and dropping so would have gone down to single figures.

We walked some of the route which John and Klaus had cleaned on Saturday partly because John wanted to ensure that Marianna had arranged for the bags which had been left on the side had been picked up and partly to see that it was still clean.

We passed a can, a bottle and a banana skin which we picked up and deposited into a green bin and then checked for any blue bags.  Where possible we try and deposit rubbish and bags into a green bin but on this particular route the green bins are rather spaced out so where a bag was full and heavy it was left on the side of the road and it would appear that my message to Marianna had been acted upon as there were none in view which is good.

We had not realised that one of our nearby roads is named after our lovely neighbour - Odos Laxis!!!  His mother in law Kia should recognise the road sign as it is on the corner where her friend with the lovely garden lives.

Once home we settled down for the night, ate up the left over chili and watched the remaining episodes of Hatten Garden before turning in for the night.