General family updates

It's a month since Daniel left Cyprus again, to go to Carlisle. It feels a great deal longer, somehow. It probably does for him, too, as he's been learning a great deal, meeting new people, and exploring new places. If anyone wants to know more about what he's doing, I recommend his blog Brummie at Sea - which he's been updating fairly often in the past few weeks.

Dan has heard - at last - that he should be returning to the Doulos around July 12th, when she will be in New Zealand. Flying from the UK to NZ is about as long a flight as is possible, as they're the opposite sides of the world.

Tim has been very busy in the past few weeks. As well as working on the last modules of the OTC (first year), which he wants to finish in the next month, he's been doing a lot of work at one of the local English-speaking private schools: helping in a classroom, teaching some music, sorting out problems with digital white-boards, and advising about their web-site.

Oh, and he's taking his Grade 8 piano exam on Monday, so he's had several extra piano lessons scheduled recently. I think there were four this week.

It's now a month until Tim leaves home, to move to Birmingham, since he's accepted a place at Newman University. I'm sure this month will fly past. I'm not at all looking forward to the 'empty nest'. I will actually be going with Tim to the UK for the first few weeks, a good excuse to escape the heat and humidity of Cyprus in July, and Richard will join us for a fortnight or so. But returning here in August without Tim is going to be very strange.

Richard is, as always, extremely busy with far too much to do in the office, and too few people. He still manages to go sailing most Saturdays, which does at least get him away from the office, computer, phone and so on.

I'm not sure what my future will hold, in the Autumn. I'm trying to do a bit more writing - websites and short stories, as well as blogging - but some days seem to rush by. We've had quite a flurry of visitors lately, and on days when it's hot and sticky, it's hard to get anything much done.

I had a bit of a shock this morning when I realised that my two main websites - Home education in the UK and Living in Cyprus - seem to have disappeared from Google's search pages. Instead of the usual 100 or so visitors to the home ed site in the first eight hours of the day, there were about twenty - and only three from Google's search engine. I hope it's just a temporary glitch.

Since it was so warm and muggy yesterday, I put away our thick duvet and replaced it with just a sheet. It was certainly warm enough last night, but today feels much fresher - thankfully - so perhaps I'll need to get the thin duvet out after all.