Half way through summer....?

 The end of July always feels like something of a milestone to me, particularly when we're in Cyprus all summer. The hot weather usually starts to feel uncomfortable by mid-to-late June, and it feels like the end is in sight by mid-to-late September. And yes I know that means that the half-way spot should be about a week into August... but I would prefer it to be today. 

I didn't take many photos in the past month. Much of what interested us was at a distance: my younger son and his wife moved to a new location, where he's now the vicar of a lively church. I watched the installation by livestream, and some of the Sunday services too. My other son and his family made a trip to the Logos Hope, where they spent two years when the children were much younger. Not a long trip, as it docked in Edinburgh for a few days.

But we've stayed in Larnaca, which turns out to have been a good thing, for a variety of reasons. It was important to be here in July because our local friends (and cat-feeders) have mostly been out of the country. And since they have three cats, I was the one who fed them when everyone was away, on about ten or twelve days of the month.

These are outdoor-indoor cats who only need to be fed once a day; they only have dry food and water. Two of them needed quite a lot of stroking and attention too; the other one looked at me rather superciliously after eating, and stalked away. I watered their garden, too. 

I went over first thing in the morning, when it was light but not sunny, and 'only' about 25-26 degrees Celcius. It made a pleasant 15-minute walk, leaving around 5.45-6.00am. Sometimes it was a bit over-warm when I walked home again, but it was still mostly possible to stay in the shade. It's not so easy to motivate myself to keep walking every day when it's hot out, and sometimes, if I'm not feeding cats, I only manage about half a kilometre.

At the start of the month, we had an aluminium-building expert replace some of our windows which looked like this: 

with this: 

It's purely cosmetic; the white bar things don't provide any extra strength to the windows. Apparently they were a trend at one point, made to look like the old smaller-paned windows. They're not unattractive when all the bars are in place. Unfortunately the sun eventually breaks down some of the glue that holds them in place, and they slide down, as in the first picture. We had some replaced a few years ago, too. We still have windows with bars that look fine, but no doubt they, too, will eventually need to be changed.

In the middle of July, St Helena's church had a major overhaul, with new air conditioners installed and the entire inside repainted and repaired. The communion rail was moved, and some of the wires had to be replaced. New trunking was put in to neaten several trailing cables.

There were professional decorators in, but several of the congregation worked hard, moving furniture to the centre, and ensuring equipment and wall decorations were taken down carefully.

Richard got involved because he previously did the installation of speakers and other PA equipment. He spent many hours dealing with the wiring and soldering, to get everything back in place for the following Sunday. 

We celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary with a meal out. Some years we've ordered in a takeaway for our evening meal. But this year it was on a Sunday, and we're still traditional enough that (usually, anyway) we have our main meal at lunchtime on Sundays. We talked about going to the sea front, but it was too hot for me to walk even the short distance from the marina car park to any of the restaurants. So we went to the mall, which is air conditioned, and where there are a few quite nice restaurants.

We went to Verde Caferesto: 

The menu was fairly extensive, and not too highly priced. Richard had a large chop with salad and fries; I decided on some halloumi tacos (an interesting combination of cultural specialities!) with sweet potato fries, and it was delicious. 

It was more than I needed, but I didn't think it would reheat well, so I ate it all. It was worth the feeling of being very over-full later...

The following day we drove to Limassol to have lunch with friends there, taking with us some friends of our friends, who were staying in our guest flat. After an excellent lunch, we were surprised with a special cake to celebrate our anniversary:

And so, with these and other low-key activities - or lack of activity - the month has passed. I have managed to avoid using the oven, although the air fryer has been on a few times. I'm not quite bored with salads yet, so hope to keep making a variety of them through August. I've worked on photo books, I've read fourteen books and reviewed them, I've done puzzles online, and written emails on discussion groups and forums. I try to stay in my air conditioned study from about 10am until 6pm or so, with a brief foray out for lunch, and (when relevant) hanging out laundry. It's not very sociable, but I don't feel at all sociable in the heat.

There haven't - yet - been many roaches, thankfully; at the end of June Lady Jane was going outside on the upstairs balcony, finding them - on our neighbours' roof, perhaps - and bringing them in, usually to the bathroom. We've started closing the door that gives her access to the balcony as soon as it starts to get dark, and since then haven't had any nasty surprises when going to bed. It probably helps that I found a lavender-scented toilet cleaner, and apparently they don't like that scent at all, so it stops them coming up the pipes.

On the other hand, we've had a lot of tiny ants in the kitchen, as happened last year. I don't know where they come from, or where they have their nest. They just appeared one day.  If there's anything out on the counter-top, they'll find it. They even found a loaf of bread which I had enclosed in TWO double-sealed plastic bags. If Lady Jane leaves even a tiny piece of her wet food after her lunch, the saucer will be covered in ants within an hour. 

So I'm using bio-kill (now called 'clean kill') on any clumps or trails of ants that I find. I don't really like doing it, but we can't have ants all over the kitchen. I'm using a lemon-scented spray, too, on the counter tops and when washing the floors, in the hope of disrupting their trails. Theoretically ants don't like the smell of lemon, but it hasn't kept them away. Perhaps Cyprus ants do like lemon, as there are so many lemon trees here.

It's been hot... but not as hot as some of the heatwaves we've heard about in mainland Europe and the UK. It's been a bit humid in the evenings, but nowhere near as bad as it sometimes is. Perhaps August will be worse... but I hope not.

I finished the end-of-June post with an image of the predicted weather for the following week. So here's one for July. It doesn't look all that different, but in practice it's hotter in the daytime, and already 28 degrees or so by 6am most mornings.

Random Larnaka images for the end of June

 May appeared to last rather a long time. But I'm not sure quite what happened to June.  As it's the last day already, here are some random local photos from the past month that I didn't use in the only other post I wrote in June. I wrote a similar post at the end of May; it may become a trend on this blog. 

We think this is some kind of fashion show that took place in Salina Park early in the month. Everything was set up the evening before, and taken down by the following evening. 

Onion quiche. With home-made shortcrust pastry, home-made vegan cheese, and home-made oat milk.  But not actually vegan, as I used regular eggs. It was very tasty!

Continued construction work at the end of the Salt Lake trail: 

The snapdragon that seeded itself in the pavement outside our house, still going strong on June 12th, without any watering - and no rain either, since the end of May:

And the sad stump of the snapdragon, after the municipal weed-trimmers went around, as often happens before summer really gets going:

First frappé of the year, June 24th, as the temperature approached 30 degrees during the daytime:

First evening with all salads, on the same day. Hopefully I won't use the oven again until September:

Lady Jane, unimpressed by the boxes of the 'Patchwork' game...

The Larnaka Salt Lake, still with some water, but also a lot of pink - apparently due to extra breeding of the algae and tiny shrimp. It happens every year, as reported by the Cyprus Mail. 

Friends and family in the UK have reported extremely high temperatures over the past week or so, higher than those in Cyprus.  It's more difficult there - and in much of Western Europe - where houses are not designed for the heat and air conditioning is only really common in shops and public buildings. On the other hand, heatwaves there usually only last a few days, perhaps a week at most.  Here it's at least a couple of months. 

Still the rise in temperature has been gradual this year, really only feeling over-warm to me in the past week. Some years it has been far worse.  I continued early morning walks with my friend Sheila until the end of last week, but on Saturday morning we were both hot and sticky by the time we got back here. It's very draining. So we agreed to leave it, now, until at least September. 

Moving on from spring

 Towards the end of April I wrote about moving on from winter - packing away our warm clothes, duvet etc. In May, we enjoyed slightly cooler weather than usual, and a surprising amount of rain. According to the Cyprus mail, rainfall was more than twice as much as normal for the month. But still there's a potential water problem, and hose pipes are still banned, other than for watering plants.

By the end of May, the temperatures were increasing, though the humidity was still low. It was time to start getting ready for the summer. By July I won't want to do anything much during the daytime. On the last Saturday of May, I did some extra laundry, so I could put away even our thinner jackets, as well as stray gloves and hats that were still out. 

We hang things on lines here, and they were all dry within a couple of hours. 

Random Larnaka images for the end of May

 Once again, after a couple of posts on specific themes, I still have other images that give something of the flavour of Cyprus.  So here is a selection from May with brief explanations:

Lady Jane investigating some plants on the upstairs balcony outside our bedroom (the only outside place she can get to). Neighbours were doing a lot of improvements and changes to their house and outside areas, and were going to get rid of these plants if we didn't want them. 

The brown metal structures in the Salt Lake Park are now surrounded by a flimsy fence. We still have no idea what they are for. 

Yet another microwave oven (Samsung brand)

 In March last year I wrote about how much we liked the Westpoint microwave we had bought a few months earlier. It replaced one which had become corroded and rusty inside; the interior surface looked more sturdy than the previous one, but we were careful to keep the door open after each use, to cover anything we cooked in it for more than a minute or two, and to dry it if there was obvious moisture inside.

And it kept working well...except for one little thing. The digital time display started to deteriorate. I suppose we'd had it for about nine months when the first bar, the bottom one at the right, started to vanish. At first it was just fainter than the rest, but over the course of a few days it disappeared entirely. 

It wasn't a huge issue, just mildly annoying that, for instance, a digital 8 looked like a digital capital A, and a digital 3 looked like a backwards capital F.  Then, a few months later, the top bar became fainter, and also vanished not long afterwards.  I don't know why I didn't take a photo of this - I take photos of pretty much everything else, after all. The only one I can find is one I took of the whole kitchen when it was quite messy, so cropping to just the microwave makes it very poor quality:

But perhaps it's still clear that it should say 12:07 and the 7 just looks like a back-slash. 

Update about shopping and ultra-processed products

 During January, I tracked all our grocery shopping, and even took photos. I was following an unofficial 'challenge' to see how long we could go without buying anything other than fresh or minimally processed foods.

I updated this at the end of February, listing the processed (possibly ultra-processed) products that we had bought during the month. They were still minimal. And by that stage I was taking more notice of the ingredients of even standard products which we had previously bought: packaged tortillas, for instance, or pitta bread. 

I did try making pitta bread early in March, but it wasn't very successful:

Quite apart from the strange shapes, there were almost no pockets on the inside. And it was a lot more complex than naan bread, which I do make about once a month; my recipe makes eight, so we use two and freeze the rest in twos. 

Moving on from winter

 It's usually some time in April when we start to feel a bit warmer, and as if winter has finally come to an end. Not that we experience 'real' winter here; there's no snow, rarely any ice, and the sun usually shines at some point. But the houses feel cold, with the high ceilings and tiled floors. 

At the end of March I was still wearing two warm layers in the house, sometimes three. I wore a knitted hat and sometimes gloves when going out for a walk, morning or evening. We were using our microwave wheat bags every night, the heating was coming on when the temperature dropped too low, and we were snuggling under our double thickness duvets at night. 

Then we spent just over two weeks in the UK, where it was chillier but mostly sunny. The houses, with carpets and better insulated walls, are rather warmer than those in Cyprus. We had heard that Cyprus had had a major dust storm and a lot of rain while we were away. But when we came back, it felt significantly warmer than it had at the end of March.

The first night back, we threw off the thinner part of the duvet, just using the medium one. We didn't even think of using wheat bags. In the morning, I only wanted one warm layer, and when we went out for walks I had no need of hat or gloves. We had turned the heating off before we travelled: we've seen no reason to turn it on again since returning. 

Two weeks out of Cyprus

 Earlier in the year, we had talked about the possibility of flying to the UK early in April, so that we could see Richard's mother on her birthday. She's living in a very nice care home now, in Sussex and they make quite a thing of birthdays. 

We then pondered going first to Carlisle, to spend Easter with our older son and his family. We checked with them that they weren't going anywhere else, and we started idly looking for flights.

Then I spotted flights from Larnaka to Glasgow on March 31st at just 27 pounds per person. It was with EasyJet: a budget airline that we have used many times, and which we generally like.  That price doesn't include any luggage, of course, other than an under-seat bag. We tend to upgrade to what they call 'easy boarding' which gives us an overhead carry-on as well, but even so - the price was excellent. 

We know from experience that prices vary all the time, and can be extremely high over the Easter period, so we booked at once. Then we filled in the details - a rental car, accommodation when not staying with the family etc - and finally booked a flight back on April 15th. 

We were all packed and ready at least half an hour before our friend Sheila came to pick us up to take us to the airport on March 31st. 

The flight wasn't until after 9.30pm, which is when I usually like to be getting ready for bed.  So I was delighted to realise that it was an almost-empty flight. This meant that once we had taken off, we could have three seats each, and lie down to rest. I didn't get a lot of sleep, but I think at least a couple of hours.  So when we arrived at Glasgow in the early hours, I wasn't as tired as I might have been.