I was going to get a lot done today. The sun was shining, I felt reasonably energetic. And, indeed, I did start fairly well with cleaning out the fridge, sorting out some fruit, making some more raw applesauce to freeze, doing two loads of laundry, and trying out a new recipe for our breadmaker using sun-dried tomatoes - and it was very good when we ate it warm at lunch-time!
However it was COLD out. I kept dropping pegs as I hung out wet washing, and suddenly realised my fingers were almost numb. So I abandoned my intention to cut the rest of the grass and do some weeding. That will have to wait for slightly warmer weather (predicted for next week). Instead I came inside and turned on the kerosene heater, something we usually only do in the evenings. However mid-February is often surprisingly chilly in Cyprus.
I wasn't going to switch the computer on till mid-afternoon. But shortly before lunch Richard phoned to say we'd had an email with yet more questions from our buyer's solicitor in the UK (via our solicitor) about our house there, which we're selling. In particular, he wanted to have a list of all the alterations and renovations we did, and whether we had permission for any of them. Apparently these days solicitors have to ask lots of detailed questions, and get all kinds of assurances or indemnities, because of the tiny risk of being sued in the future for not discovering something vital. Things have changed a lot in the UK in the past 20 years, it seems...
Last October when we sorted out the last of our stuff in the house, we came across a folder stuffed with documents dating back to the 1980s. My intuition made me keep it although I couldn't imagine what use it might be. It has turned out to be extremely useful: it contains the original survey we had on the house in 1982, the mortgage offer, all the quotations we had for the massive amounts of work we had done, plans we had drawn up, and other useful information. From that, plus a few photos I took of 'before-and-after' scenes from the house, we were able to draw up what we hope is a reasonably comprehensive list of repairs and alterations we made on the house. Since they were almost all internal, we didn't have permission for any of them. Perhaps these days we would need to, but we took advice and listened to experts, and did everything correctly as far as possible.
So that took up a couple of hours this afternoon, when I was planning to tidy the study a bit and sort out some of the recent paperwork. And by mid-afternoon I don't have much impetus to do anything much that requires physical or mental energy. So I simply read and wrote email and forum mail, and catalogued another 50 books at Bibliophil. I like the system: it allows for ratings, reviews and even Google-style 'labels' to be applied, but it's quite time-consuming. I think my estimate of entering 50 books per day is a little over-ambitious since it takes about an hour to enter 20-25 books, even when I have them already reviewed elsewhere and can simply copy-and-paste bits for short reviews at Bibliophil. Perhaps I should aim for 25 per day, although in that case it'll be at least June before I've entered them all.
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