Unpredictable Cyprus weather in January

One doesn't, of course, expect warm weather in the Northern hemisphere during January. But Cyprus is renowned for having plenty of sunshine. We wear two or three layers of clothing during the daytime, sleep under a warm duvet at night, and run our central heating morning and evening, although sometimes it doesn't even cut in because the house is already warmer than 15C. I really don't mind January at all, in general.

Just over a week ago, it was a gorgeous day. Richard was out, and my friend Sheila suggested a walk, without any children. We went to the Salt Lake trail, and saw the flamingoes looking very pink:

After the amount of rain we've had, the Salt Lake is looking quite full this year. We walked for a little over an hour, and felt distinctly warm by the time we returned. I even took my fleece off during the walk, although I had to put it on again shortly after returning home. Even after fourteen years, I still find it odd that it's often warmer outside than in.

During last week, however, the temperatures plummeted. A couple of times it got as low as 3C overnight. It was no more than 12 during the daytime, and we had to run the heating a couple of times in the middle of the day just to stop ourselves from shivering.

Cleo is very much enjoying Richard's sabbatical, and keeps warm by sitting on him any time he's home. She likes his black chair, too, which nicely camouflages her - or so she thinks:

Sophia curls up in a tight ball wherever she happens to be sleeping, which is not very photogenic, but Tessie isn't quite so used to sleeping on beanbags, and was happy to pose when the sun came out:

There has been a lot more rain, too. The reservoirs are fuller than they have been for a long time, and some of the dams are even overflowing. Most of the island's water comes from the snow (in the mountains) melting in the spring, so it's very good news that we have so much water already.

But I was glad to wake up to some sunshine this morning, even though it's still a bit cold.

Roof holes and loft insulation in Cyprus

It has been a recurring theme of this blog that, when it rains (mostly in the winter in Cyprus), the roof leaks. Not over anything that matters too much, thankfully, but a steady stream over the (uncarpeted) stairs. It had almost become a way of life - when the sky turned grey, I went to fetch a bucket and the cool box to catch the worst of it.

A little over a year ago, after some other leaks had developed, Richard and his sailing buddy Tim P (The P distinguishes him from our son Tim) went on the roof and mended some of the holes they found. They stopped the bathroom leak; but, sadly, their efforts did not fix the one problem we have had ever since moving into our house - the leak over the stairs. Tim P did comment that there was a huge amount of bird mess on the roof, and he wanted to clean it off. We could not imagine how it would help; if anything, I thought that it would help to plug holes in the tiles!

Richard has kept studying the roof, off and on, and we - like a few others who have crawled on our roof - could not understand where the hole could be. And, while there is some loft space above our bathroom, where Richard did manage to spot one of the holes a year ago, the area where the leak was happening was inaccessible.

So, early in December, Richard decided that the only way to solve the problem was to cut a hole into the loft area that he could not reach. If nothing else, he thought that perhaps he could affix some kind of membrane inside the roof, to channel the water out when the next heavy rain happened. Here's the area - beautifully panelled - above our stairs, which he decided to cut into:

He had not been sure how to do it without making a mess; but Tim P had bought a useful tool for the boat, which enables holes to be cut without first cutting into the piece to be removed. So Richard borrowed it, and set to work:

It made such a dreadful noise that there was no way I could stay and take further photos. Even Richard, who tolerates loud noises better than I do, went to fetch some ear defenders. But the eventual access hole looked like this: 

To his surprise, he found that there was already a membrane inside the roof - unusual in Cyprus, but then the guy who built our house did it very well, on the whole. That cast a whole new light on the leak problem. The hole in the roof could be anywhere - it was being channelled down to the lowest point, which was, indeed, where our leak was happening. 

Richard also noted that it was very cold up there, and thought that it might be a good opportunity to put some loft insulation in - also not common in Cyprus.

The hole remained for a week or two, then he bought some hinges and other fittings, and made a very tidy job of turning the removed panel into a door: 

A couple of weeks ago, after a few dry days, he and Tim P went back onto the roof again. They searched thoroughly, but simply could not find any holes. They talked about using some special sealant to pour over the tiles, which would plug any small leaks, but Tim said, while they were there, he wanted to clean away the awful bird mess. So they borrowed the hose from the boat, and attached it to ours, and cleaned away a vast amount of - mostly ancient - bird mess, bits of bird nests, and other gunk.

The following day, it rained torrentially. I put out the bucket to catch the leak... and there was no leak.

It rained overnight, steadily, for several hours. We were not awoken by drips on the stairs... and when I got up, they were completely dry.

Apparently, the bird mess had formed some kind of dam on the roof which was catching water that then dripped through the tiles. Getting rid of this meant that the rain simply slid off the tiles as it was supposed to, and any small cracks did not cause problems.

It was like a miracle!

So, Richard found somewhere that sold loft insulation - the pink fibreglass stuff that we've used in the UK - and last weekend, they cut and fitted it. It didn't take all that long, but left a lot of dust which I've swept away and mopped.. but at night my throat seems to get scratchy and tickly even now, a week later. It's so cold that we don't want to leave windows open... so I've suggested that they don't do any more insulation until the spring.

Has it made the house any warmer? Hard to tell, really. On a cold day, houses in Cyprus just do feel cold... I'm sitting here wearing two sweaters and a fleece, and while not as cold as I was at our old house (we do have good double glazing here, and central heating that we run for a couple of hours, at about 14-15C morning and night) I'm still not warm. 

Lots of rain in Cyprus... and lots of mosquitoes too

Every cloud, as they say, has a silver lining. And sometimes it seems as if the reverse is true. We've had one of the wettest winters I can remember in Cyprus, in the past couple of months. Oh, there has been plenty of sunshine, and the daytime temperatures haven't been TOO cold. We keep having a week or two when it's mostly dry and sunny, then out of the blue, yet more rain.

Today it came on to pour just after lunch. For about five minutes, it was absolutely torrential, and even included some hailstones:

I was glad not to be outside in it. Glad, too, that the reservoirs are filling up, and the water table doing better, and that, with the new desalination plants currently being built, water shortages in Cyprus should (probably) be a thing of the past.

So, the clouds in Cyprus do indeed have a wonderfully silver lining. But the resultant rain brings another problem, which I hinted at when I wrote about going for a walk to the Aqueduct.

Yes. All this rain, and relatively mild temperatures means that there are also more mosquitoes than I can remember at any time of year, let alone January. We don't normally expect them at this time of year at all. But for the last few nights, I've been awakened by that annoying bzzzzzzzzzzz in my ear more than once. I've been here long enough that mosquito bites no longer cause pain or even itching, but it was a bit of a shock to discover, yesterday morning, just how many bites I had on my face.

Today there were even more. I look almost as if I have chicken-pox. I even took a very unflattering photo of myself, enlarging the middle area to demonstrate my current spottiness:

And there are more on my forehead:

There are some on my arms, too. None of them itch, but they're not very pretty.

This morning I did manage to squash THREE mosquitoes that were resting on the bedroom wall, low enough for me to hit them. While I don't like destroying any living creature, I'm afraid I have no compassion for mozzies. Particularly since it was evident on their demise that they had, indeed, been biting me...

Technology and communication

While there are many good things about living in Cyprus, it's not easy being thousands of miles away from our sons, most of the year. So we're very thankful for modern technology which enables us to stay in touch regularly. Tim and I often chat briefly via Google Chat (on Gmail), and we've used Yahoo! Instant messenger regularly too.

It was nearly fifteen months ago when we experimented with a game of Settlers via Skype with Tim. It was so successful that we've played several similar games since. So many, indeed, that I don't tend to blog about them any more. Last night we played another game, from 8.30 until about 9.30 (Cyprus time). We use 'Facetime' now rather than Skype, with the video camera to project the game board to Tim, but the general idea is the same as it was when we first thought of it, and it works well.

However, there are always questions, at the end, about how we might improve the quality of either the sound or the picture. We also wondered whether we could try having another computer open with a different kind of chat, so that Tim could see us as well as the game board. We did manage that the first time, but our bandwidth is not great, and it reduces the quality. So they tried Google chat... it didn't work too well on Richard's computer, so we fetched the Chromebook - wanting to give it something to do - and Richard played around with that:

Then Tim spotted that Daniel was online too. He and Becky are currently staying in Barcelona with Becky's Mum; we had a good online chat with them on Sunday evening. But Tim thought that, using the 'Google Plus Hangout' system, we might be able to have a three-way chat.

He was correct. The sound quality wasn't bad at all, and although the pictures went a bit pixellated at times, we could see small images of all three of us, and a larger one of whichever of our sons was talking at the time. So this is what we saw when Daniel or Becky was speaking:

And this is what we saw when Tim was speaking:

All very clever stuff. Dan and Becky couldn't stay for very long as they were going out, so we never did discover if we could have set it up on both the laptops here, to have a four-way chat... I couldn't quite see the point of Richard going to another room to join in, but sometimes people in my family are just curious to know what can be done in theory...

Epiphany and Twelfth Night in Cyprus.

Today is the last day of the Christmas Season. Next week, schools will start, businesses will re-open, and life will get back to an approximation of normal. As I explained last year, Epiphany - 6th January - is a big deal in Cyprus. The Greek Orthodox Church (unlike some other branches of Orthodoxy) celebrate Christmas on December 25th like we Protestants do, but Epiphany is marked too.

Not that we did anything special this year. It's a public holiday, and I had vaguely thought that, if nothing else, I would take down the Christmas decorations. After all, Epiphany is also known as Twelfth night.. right? Or so I had believed for many years. Indeed, this is apparently what I was still convinced of as recently as 2008 when we took down our Christmas decorations on January 5th, a day early, as we thought...

However, by last year I had done some research, and realised that Twelfth Night starts on the evening of January 5th. So, if one is going to follow tradition, decorations should come down at some point on the day before Epiphany. I'm not really into tradition, but this time of year seems as good at time as any to put away reminders of Christmas, or we'd get so used to them we might forget they were there.

It wasn't until yesterday evening that I suddenly remembered that there was some confusion over the date of Twelfth Night. So I looked it up again, and then, since I wasn't doing anything else for twenty minutes, I decided I might as well take everything down. 'Everything' being a bit of a misnomer as we don't really do a lot of decorating for Christmas.

First I collected the various candles and their holders that we place around the house, and our somewhat stylised Nativity scene, which we were given when we first moved here. I took down the Christmas cards too - rather reluctantly, since some of them only arrived this week, and it's highly likely that there are a few more still to come. This is the sum total of our non-tree decorations:

Next, I un-decorated the tree. That didn't take long. It looks rather a scanty set of items here, some of them slightly odd... they're quite an eclectic mixture. Some with memories attached, some because we like them, and some which just appear in the decoration box each year... 

Then the tree lights. We bought these about ten or twelve years ago - inexpensive ones, since they never seem to last more than a year or two. Evidently these ones were good value, however, as they're still going strong. Last year we just bundled them up, and they were a bit tricky to untangle when I put the tree up a few weeks ago. So this year I attempted to put them in the Christmas light holder, with not a lot of success... 

Finally, after putting everything else in boxes, it was time to take the tree apart and pack it away in its box. Sophia always seems to find this part very interesting:

Then all the boxes were packed away in a high cupboard in my study, and we sat down to watch one of my Christmas DVDs - the excellent 'King's Speech', which our sons recommended highly to us. 

A plethora of inexpensive tomatoes in Cyprus

Yesterday morning, I went to Achna Fruitaria. I wanted to buy some oranges, and a couple of sweet potatoes. I also thought I would get some bananas, since Tim has now gone back to the UK. Oh, and I wanted a few cherry tomatoes for lunch.

As always, I looked at the special offers. I noticed that amongst the pre-bagged produce for a euro, there were some cherry tomatoes. I shook my head inwardly.. we would never get through that many, even if they were a remarkably good deal. I did pick up a bag of regular tomatoes, also at a euro, however. I find them hard to resist.

However, when I looked at the ordinary cherry tomatoes, they were something like 3.79 per kilogram. I only wanted about 250g, if that... but it suddenly occurred to me that it would be far better value to buy the huge euro bag, even if we ended up throwing half of them away. And they looked to be fairly good quality.

So I staggered home with, in all, about 14kg produce (which cost me a grand total of just over 7 euros). I put all the tomatoes straight in the fridge.

Today, I thought I should sort through the cherry tomatoes, throwing out any that had gone bad, and selecting the best ones for eating. I was surprised at how many good ones there were, and chose quite a few - nearly a kilogram of them - which we can eat over the next few days:

Even more surprising, none of them were bad, or mouldy. Quite a few had split, some were a little squashy, and some had slightly brown skins, but they all smelled good. So I thought I might as well boil them quickly to produce juice, and then freeze them for future use. There were this many in the saucepan:

.. and after simmering for a few minutes and cooling, I froze five tubs, each with a little over 400g tomatoes - the equivalent of one medium sized can:

Then I looked at the large tomatoes I had also bought. I kept a few out to bake, then cleaned, chopped and simmered the rest of those too. Those eventually made NINE tubs, again at a little over 400g each:

And that would have been fine, except that when I opened the vegetable drawer of our large freezer, I realised that I already had six tubs of tomatoes, frozen from previous batches.

So now we have the equivalent of 20 cans of tomatoes in our freezer. They will be useful for making soup, and ketchup, and for general cooking use in the next few months...

But I really must try and resist buying more tomatoes when I see them on special offer!

Walk to the Kamares Aqueduct in Larnaka

It was about ten days ago that I went for a walk with friends around part of the Salt lake nature trail. We had planned to walk as far as the aqueduct, but left later than intended, and met the other friends part-way along. I commented at the time that I had never actually walked as far as the aqueduct.

So, when today was evidently going to be another warm (for January) and sunny day, I agreed to walk there..

Like yesterday, there were huge puddles everywhere:

And, yes, the sky really was that blue.

It's good - from the perspective of the island's water supply - that the ground must be so water-logged that these haven't drained away or dried up two days after the last rain. But it's rather worrying from the perspective of new mosquito breeding grounds appearing in so many places.

There was a mini waterfall with some rushing water, too, a little further along. Last year, apparently, the children splashed around in it and had fun. But it's fenced off now; it did look rather dangerous. So they were dissuaded from going down there.

Elisabeth had sat happily in the buggy for the first kilometre or so, but was eager to walk for a while. And Helen was starting to get tired. So she climbed in:

I suppose three kilometres is quite a way for a three-year-old, although she has done it before. Katie and Lukas were ahead when we caught sight of the aqueduct not far away:

According to Wikipedia, the Larnaka aqueduct (known locally as 'Kamares') was built in 1747 during the Ottoman empire, and was used to transport water until as recently as 1939.

Lukas immediately decided to climb part-way up the side of one of the many arches:

He's wearing a white shirt, near the middle of the photo.

Meanwhile, Sheila and the three girls walked across a plank bridge, beside yet another newly-formed large mosquito haven puddle.

I stayed with the buggy, and attempted to catch the sunlight just shining through one of the arches. I probably should have used one of the manual camera settings...

Katie wanted to stand next to Lukas, so Sheila helped her up:

But she didn't like it, and quickly came down again. So Sheila decided that she would climb up herself. Elisabeth put her arms out and said 'Up!' - so I lifted her up, and she sat there too:

It was all very pleasant, and we stood there chatting for a while.

The only problem was that, it being January, none of us had thought to take water with us, and we were all getting a bit thirsty. And we were nearly 3km from home. So the walk back was harder work, with Elisabeth wanting to be carried, and Helen insisting on being in the buggy for most of the way.

But we made it. I was quite surprised to see that it was 12.30 by the time we were sitting in our friends' kitchen, enjoying glasses of water. We had been out for two and a half hours. I was then a little shocked to find how very tired I felt by the time I walked the last 500m or so to our house.

Sunshine after the rain, and a pleasant walk

It's been wonderful having Tim here for the past two weeks. But all good things, as they say, come to an end - and he departed in the early hours of this morning for his flight back to the UK.

Today is officially a public holiday - I did pop out earlier to see if the fruitaria was open, but even that was closed - and, indeed, it's still technically a holiday week; many businesses and all schools are still closed, until after January 6th.

But still, it felt like the proper start of Richard's sabbatical, and of life assuming some kind of normality - if such a thing is ever possible in Cyprus - after the Christmas break.

We had very heavy rain on New Year's Eve, and for most of yesterday morning, but today the sun had come out. In the afternoon, we decided to go for a walk, just down to the PO Box.

The rain must have been even heavier than I had realised; I don't think I have ever seen quite such deep puddles in some waste ground:

I just hope they dry up soon, or we could be in for a major infestation of mosquitoes in the spring.

As we approached Larnaka town, we were amused by this life-size Christmas scene outside the municipality music school:

What amused us wasn't that Santa was apparently reading a book, but that the cat sitting under the reindeer was in fact a real cat, who watched us and twitched its ears a few times.

There were a couple more Christmas cards awaiting us at the PO Box. Mail from the UK was very delayed in December, and we collected several parcels and a couple of cards on Friday, so I wasn't really expecting much today.

The last week of 2011, racing by as ever

After all the preparation for Christmas, and an enjoyable day, it's a bit of a shock to find that it's now 2012. A week has somehow rushed by without us really noticing it. 

It began well, relatively warm and sunny. We didn't have anything planned for Boxing Day, unusually, so I pottered, and tidied, and cleaned, and generally relaxed. I think we probably played a game in the evening, maybe with our friends, but it feels like a LONG time ago now.

On Tuesday, we were invited to lunch with some other friends who used their outdoor gas-powered barbecue to cook some lamb, and potatoes, and onions... it was still warm and sunny, and we sat outside, enjoying the best of Cyprus in the winter: 

As the afternoon wore on, the sun became low in the sky and there was a bit of a chill in the air. So we moved in to the sunroom - where Lily, one of the dogs, attempted to make friends with Tim:

On Wednesday, we were invited to a 'recital'; mainly guitar students, ages about 7 to 15, plus one violin. The two families concerned have 14 children between them, although the younger ones do not yet play anything. Before we started, quite a few of us managed to fit on one sofa: 

Elisabeth, now a little over 18 months old, has become very photogenic: 

Tim arrived late, missing - deliberately! - the younger children's performances. But he was very glad to catch up with two friends from years ago... I enjoyed watching three tall thin people from three different generations (although all young at heart) and three different cultures, deep in conversation:

Unsurprisingly, a couple of recorders were brought out, and they did some jamming:

Tim had not played a treble recorder for many years, so eventually borrowed the second guitar for some more serious jamming:

On Thursday, we didn't have anything planned, and on Friday we looked after the four girls belonging to our local friends, so they could have a few hours to themselves on their anniversary. It was enjoyable but tiring and I didn't find a single moment to get out my camera!

Still, we saw them all again on Saturday, for a New Year's Eve gathering. On a very wet, thundery day when I was tired after being woken in the night by thunder and lightning. The other family they had invited were not able to be there, so it was a small group. Sheila wrote about the evening on her blog, so I won't repeat what she said... but I did take some pictures. They had managed to find some Christmas crackers - a British custom we have happily given up since moving to Cyprus. Still, it was fun opening them with the children. Elisabeth was a bit bemused to have a paper crown which was far too big for her head:

And Jacob was happy to find a pirate patch in his - or, as we decided to call it, an 'eye-pad': 

The two older children went out, the four younger ones went to sleep. The adults - including Tim - played a couple of games, then decided that, as it was 11.30 already, we might as well wait until midnight. Richard set his phone up so we could see exactly what time it was: 

Here are our hosts, getting ready for the excitement of a new year...

.. and here's the evidence:

We heard a few bangs from far-away fireworks, but it was still damp out, and nothing much seems to happen as the new year arrives. So we went home, and got some sleep. 

Happy New Year!