Is it only a week?!

Yes, only a week ago we were sitting at Heathrow waiting to board the plane, so we could return to Cyprus. It seems so much longer! The UK is like a distant memory. But it's always like that when we return; as if one life is switched off and another switched on, a bit like different TV channels. Whiehever one we're in is fully absorbing at the time, and seems to have been going on forever.

This morning I decided to organise the last few years' photos, many of which were still in sleeves from the printers. I found some albums recently that will take 300 each, and reckon I can fit two years' worth in each, by the time I've cut down the duplicates and got rid of the boring ones. With digital photos of course the process is much simpler: I only order prints of the ones I want to put in an album anyway.

I'd been doing this for about an hour when I suddenly remembered that we were having gas barrels delivered this morning. There's no mains gas in Larnaka, so people either buy barrels from the supermarkets or have them delivered. It costs a little more to have them delivered, but saves considerable back pain.

The problem this morning was that there was no way for the gas man to take the barrels to the side of the kitchen and collect the old ones, because the path was full of old branches and tree trimmings, left from about six weeks ago or more. So I went out and dragged them out of the way to a better temporary place. Then I raked and swept the pathways and trimmed some more of the fast-growing weeds - even our tiny front garden has a never-ending set of jobs, but at least it looks slightly better now.

This evening I decided I should get our finances up to date on Quicken (an excellent package which does multi-currencies easily). Easy enough for the banks, both UK and Cyprus; rather a lot on the British credit card, as we used it regularly while in the UK recently, though we always pay it off. But getting the cash to balance was tricker. Thankfully I wrote down everything we spent for our first three weeks in the UK, right down to small amounts for parking, so I only had to remember the last week or so, when we didn't do much shopping anyway. Eventually my figures matched the amount left in my UK currency wallet, so that was a relief.

Then, it being the last day of the month, I did a CD backup of the Quicken data, recently updated documents, and all the digital photos from October.

All I need to do now is an Ad-aware scan to make sure I haven't picked up any spyware, then tomorrow (as it's getting late) I'll de-fragment the hard drive when I switch it on. I know it isn't supposed to be necessary with Win2000, but my hard drive does seem to get very fragmented, perhaps because of all the digital photos that get edited, and the huge amount of email that arrives and mostly gets deleted.

Oh, and I had a Windows update arrive today. Every few minutes it asks me if I want to re-start my computer, and I keep saying, "later...'. I wanted to get the backup done first, since I've known Windows updates occasionally locking people's computers up entirely. Hence my determination to get the finances up-to-date and the backup done first!

Tomorrow perhaps I'll get back to those photo albums...