November begins in Cyprus: All Saints' Day

Sometimes November can be a bit dull and rainy in Cyprus, but today it's warm and sunny. About 25C [or 77F if you prefer to think that way]. Still no rain. Not even any forecast rain for the next ten days, although that might change.

The year we moved here, 1997, we were taken out for the day on November 1st, to a beach at the Eastern end of the island. That was also warm and sunny, and I can remember thinking that there were some bonuses to having moved here - which we did only five days beforehand. That morning I had received an email from a friend in the UK saying they had the first frost of the season overnight, and a friend in Colorado in the USA saying they had several inches of snow! A sunny beach with 25C heat seemed very pleasant by comparison.

Here's a view of our neighbourhood showing the clear blue skies overhead:


Tim is having a busy day. Halloween isn't celebrated in Cyprus (the Greek Orthodox Church don't allow it - for which I am very thankful) but today is All Saints' Day. There was a service at Tim's church for which he was playing at 10am, then he had to play for a funeral at 1pm. This afternoon he has been working on a new song book for the inter-church youth group.

I decided before we returned to Cyprus that I would take the last few days of October to get re-settled and catch up on some sleep. Then I would try to be organised from November, with house-cleaning routines, doing more writing, regular blogging, and so on.

I slept well on Monday night, and felt fine on Tuesday. Just as well, since that's the morning when I help with mothers-and-toddlers. Unfortunately, on Tuesday night Richard was listening to the radio as he went to sleep. BBC World Service, which for some reason goes off the air in Cyprus between about midnight and 5am. Even more unfortunately, I tend to wake up when it comes on again, and then find it hard to get back to sleep. And worst still, the off-air times don't seem to have adjusted to the clock-change of the weekend. So it came on at 4am. And I couldn't get back to sleep, so I finally got up at six o'clock.

I do not do well on broken nights. I am one of those people who really needs 8 hours continuous sleep every night. Seven is all right once in a while, but six or less is not good news.

Yesterday I made it through the day - one of Richard's colleagues came to lunch, and then one of the youth group leaders came to supper, cooked by Tim. I finally went to bed about 9.30pm and slept soundly... until about 3.30am when Richard got into bed. Apparently there was some technical problem at the office so he had to go back there and sort it out. After I woke, I managed to doze a bit but not fall back to sleep again. So once again I'm pretty tired.

Oh, and Tim and I have both come down with streaming colds, which we think we caught on the flights home last week. We are both taking mega-doses of Vitamin C, and getting through mega-numbers of tissues.

So all in all, I'm not feeling much like being organised. However, on a mad kind of impulse I signed up yesterday for NaNoWriMo - the site that encourages people to write a novel in a month. (It means 'National Novel Writing Month'.) Only a short novel - 50,000 words, which means about 1666 words per day - and the idea is just to keep writing rather than editing. I had an idea playing around in my mind so I thought I'd give it a go - and to my surprise, found I easily wrote 1600-ish words today in under an hour.

Then I saw something similar mentioned on Gina's blog, called NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month. Of course, they're both actually international, but never mind. That one encourages people to post on their blogs at least once per day during November. Sounds a good idea, so I signed up for that too.

So perhaps I shall be motivated by having joined these two sites. I hope so.