Loquats and Lemons

This is how our front mespila tree looked this afternoon. Packed with fruit! Yet not quite ripe enough to eat much of it. I knew that leaving it a few days would mean that birds would get at it, as it would all become fully ripe together. The solution is to pick some at this stage and cook it - they look a little like apricots, cook a bit like plums, and taste somewhere like a cross between the two, with a hint of rhubarb. I didn't want to make jam, though. There are still four or five jars left from last year's batch. Richard said he wanted some fool, though, and I thought I might as well start some freezing.

So I picked quite a few. The worst thing about loquats is preparing them; they have very large stones inside - and not just one per fruit, but about three or four. Soft, satiny and oval. So the fruit has to be washed, then halved, and the stones and stalk removed. There never seems to be much fruit left by the time the stones have gone, but still it made two kilograms of fruit in all. I froze three half-kilos in rigid plastic containers in sugar solution (1lb of sugar to 1kg water according to my recipe book - and that was enough for the three half-kilos) with a the juice of a small lemon and a dash of vitamin C powder to preserve the colour. I stewed the last half-kilo gently with the juice of a lemon, 150g sugar and some water, then pureed it in the blender and mixed with some custard in preparation for a mespila fool for tomorrow's lunch (Richard's request).

About 25 lemons fell out of the trees today - it was extremely windy this afternoon - so I also washed and pared 20 of them, and froze the parings in two containers in preparation for lemonade when there are no more lemons available. Then I juiced the lemons, plus a few extra small ones, to make two litres of juice and froze that in two separate containers. I still have a massive pile of lemons, but at least I used slightly more than the number that fell today.  

Frozen Assets....

Sometimes it takes months - even years - for an idea to come to fruition in our household. But not always!

On Tuesday someone suggested freezing lemon juice from our surplus lemons. And then I realised that our mespila (loquats) were ripening fast and I never have room to freeze any of those, although I'd like to. I wondered vaguely whether we could fit a chest freezer in the house somewhere.

On Wednesday I pondered the passageway outside the kitchen where our little upright four-drawer freezer sits, but Richard pointed out that if we had a chest freezer that was significantly bigger, there wouldn't be room for us to get past - certainly not carrying anything. He did suggest we could put a chest freezer in the dining room but the rest of us vetoed that.

Then I wondered about replacing the four-door freezer with a much taller one, so it would take up the same floor space but have twice as much room inside. But it seemed a pity - the little freezer is just fine and should last for years. Instead I started thinking about our fridge-freezer, which has never really been big enough, and which was having problems with the door - it didn't seal very well, sometimes the freezer door didn't shut properly, and the paint is wearing off. It was a very cheap one when we bought it, and it's done us well, but maybe it was time to think of replacing it, before it actually died and left us with large quantities of defrosting food... we do have some money from a legacy so it wasn't an impossible idea.

On Thursday morning, Richard suggested looking at a couple of shops to see the prices and what's available. We went first to Giorgos Theodorou, the shop where we've bought most of our appliances over the years. The owner knows Richard, and they're excellent at repairing things that go wrong - rapid, efficient, and minimal cost. He showed us various options. The chest freezers available weren't all that big, and apparently they get a lot of frost. So we rejected that idea. We also decided definitely against the big upright freezers. But we were bewildered by the array of fridge-freezers, whose freezer capacity is apparently measured in cubic feet, with most of them having about seven or seven-and-a-half cubic feet. We did look briefly at an American style side-by-side fridge-freezer (with freezer size 9 cubic feet) but it was too big for our kitchen, and nearly twice the price of most of the fridges!

Then we went to Dalco, a newer shop which sends out catalogues of kitchen equipment and appliances. We quickly realised that similar-sized fridges were around the same prices as the other store, although it was hard to compare exactly, since their freezer capacities were measured in litres - most of the bigger ones about 160.

Over lunch we discussed it, and decided we really could do with a significantly bigger fridge-freezer. We measured the freezer part of ours and realised that it was about 50 litres. So the Dalco ones were around three times the size. A rough calculation showed that 7 cubic feet wasn't so different - a little less, perhaps, but still a great deal more than we currently have. Overall we preferred buying from Giorgos, since we know his shop to be so reliable and helpful, and in Cyprus relationships are very important.

Richard had a meeting that afternoon, and we assumed that everywhere would be closed for a long weekend as it's Easter here. I thought maybe we'd get around to it some time next week....

However he returned around 4pm, and said we might as well go and order the fridge! So off we rushed to Giorgos, pondered some more, found out his freezer capacities in litres to compare, and made our decision! Then - to my amazement - he said they would deliver at 9am the following morning. Apparently they were not taking Good Friday off at all, although they would be closed Easter Saturday and Monday.

So on Thursday night Richard and Dan moved the old fridge to the other side of the kitchen, and I cleaned the floor underneath (yuck!!) in preparation for the new fridge freezer, which did indeed come almost on the dot of nine o'clock. It was rather a tight fit through the kitchen door, but thankfully it did get through in the end.

During the day I've transferred stuff to the new fridge freezer, once it got cold enough, and we discovered that our Metro supermarket was open after all, so we did our shopping and bought some extra freezer containers. I even managed to defrost the small upright freezer (by dint of transferring its entire contents to the new freezer space - which still left room!) so there's now more space in that too. By the evening I had emptied and cleaned out the old fridge-freezer, so Richard and Dan moved it out to the garage where it can stay until we find someone who wants a fridge short-term.

Supermarkets

Last week when we were in Metro, doing our usual weekly grocery shopping, another British couple mentioned that they had found a much cheaper supermarket out near Aradippou. That's two or three miles away, but the prices they mentioned sounded excellent. They said that if we spent typically about £80 on food, we would probably save at least £10, maybe twice that much, if we went to the other place. They told us how to find it, and we decided to visit it.

Tomorrow is Good Friday in the Eastern (Orthodox) calendar, so it's a public holiday and we thought probably the supermarkets would be closed. So we went today, and drove out to this new place, which is called Elomas. It's a cash & carry style supermarket with things just in boxes rather than neatly arranged on shelves. That's fine: it's rather what we thought. A bit like Kwik-Save in the UK, which we used regularly. As we went in we saw a wide variety of fruit juices, for 50c per litre (we usually pay 86c per litre) - so we picked up several!

However, we became gradually less impressed as we went around. Yes, the prices were excellent - but the choice was limited, even more so than Kwik-Save. There seemed to be a vast number of Nestlé products, which we don't buy [the babymilk action site explains why, just in case anyone wonders]. There wasn't anything whole-grain or organic, no fruity teas, no nuts - at least, not that we could find. The refrigerated section was small with only a few types of cheese ready-wrapped - no delicatessan at all - and the freezer section was even smaller, with a few types of frozen vegetables and other convenience foods. There didn't seem to be any fresh meat at all.

Still, we picked up some inexpensive toothpaste, baked beans, and evaporated milk (when we found a brand that wasn't Nestlé after some searching!) and one or two other bits and pieces. The prices were certainly very good.

There was a large fresh fruit and vegetable section which looked good, although the prices were no better than Metro's. So we bought a couple of bags of oranges, and a couple of punnets of strawberries.

In all we spent about £15, and I suppose if we had bought the same at Metro it would have cost nearer £20. But we still need to go to Metro for all the things we couldn't buy. On the way out we decided it might be worth coming back if we have a party: prices on juice and other drinks were excellent, and there were bulk buys available on crisps and other party-type food. But for ordinary weekly shopping it doesn't seem worthwhile driving this far out just for a few items, when we would still have to go to Metro anyway.

We were less impressed still when we opened up one of the punnets of strawberries, and found that several of them had gone bad. Not just a bit squashy, but actually black with mould. Yuck. I suppose about a quarter of them were affected and had to be thrown away - which makes them considerably less good value! We've never had that problem in any of our Metro strawberry purchases. Perhaps the problem is that Elomas doesn't appear to have any air-conditioning. I should think it will be unbearably hot in the summer.

Lemons and yet more lemons

We have SOOO many lemons this year. Four trees, and they're all doing well. I'm not even having to pick them... every morning when I go outside, I find at least half a dozen windfall lemons, all in good condition. Sometimes more. Here's a picture of a trayful that hasn't yet been used...

I'm making lemonade every week - that takes ten lemons to make three litres of dilutable squash. I've made some lemon curd (two lemons to a jar), a lemon dessert when we had a friend for supper on Monday, and a lemon cake when we had one of the boys' friends for supper on Tuesday. We keep trying to give them away, but it seems that nearly everyone we know either has a lemon tree themselves (also producing magnificently) or a neighbour who is supplying them with plenty.

Discussing this with someone recently, she said, 'Do you freeze them?' No, I said, we don't. How does one do that? Apparently they can either be sliced, to use directly in water in the summer, or the juice can be frozen. Something I had never thought of...

So the following day I looked up freezing lemons in my wonderful Good Housekeeping cookery book (almost falling to pieces, but never mind). It said much the same - also that the pith, either grated or in strips can be frozen too. Which got me thinking... there are about four months of the year when lemons aren't available, either on trees or in the supermarket. So that's four months when I can't make lemonade. If I could freeze just 16 litres of juice, plus the pith from a load of lemons, I could make it all year round.

The problem of course is that we have only one four-drawer freezer, which is always tightly packed, plus a small bit of freezer space over our fridge, also usually jam-packed. I wonder if there's room anywhere for a chest freezer......  

Hedgehog!

There's a hedgehog in our compost heap, eating bread.

Sounds a bit like that classic children's book I remember from when the boys were small: 'There's a hippopotamus on our roof, eating cake'! But the hedgehog is real - I saw it scuttling away from me a couple of days ago, from the middle heap (where I'm currently adding stuff) into a little hole in the left-side heap, which we finished adding to a month or so ago.

I tend to add anything that isn't meat to our compost heaps, I don't just restrict it to raw peelings and annual weeds. We throw all weeds on, and anything edible that's vegetarian and so not likely to attract rats. That includes old crusts of bread, or bread rolls that have been forgotten. On Saturday I found a couple of bags of elderly bread in the kitchen so I threw them on top of the heap...

Yesterday I glanced at the hole where the hedgehog had disappeared to, wondering if it was still around, and noticed to my amazement a bread roll sticking out of it. The hedgehog must have dragged it in there somehow, it certainly couldn't have got there on its own. Today I had another look and the roll was only just visible, pulled much further into the hole. Not possible to photograph, unfortunately. I hope the hedgehog is enjoying it and that it will help itself to anything it fancies from the heap.

The best thing about hedgehogs is that they eat snails and slugs, and I had been noticing that there were fewer of them on the citrus trees then ever before.

I just hope the cats don't decide to attack... many years ago when Cleo was a kitten she did try to bat at a hedgehog, and obviously didn't like what happened to her paw! The hedgehog ran away and so did she. But the other cats are much less timid.

Mains Water

When we first moved to Cyprus, the mains water was only switched on two or three times per week, for about 12 hours at a time. We knew because there's a special mains tap in the kitchen (as well as the regular hot and cold taps that give us water from the tanks.) When there was no mains to fill the tanks, we simply learned to be careful. Quick showers rather than deep baths; washing-up water tipped over the plants; washing machine only run when mains was on; plants in the summer only watered when mains was on. When it was really bad we didn't even flush the loo all the time.

We also kept about 24 plastic water bottles, a litre and a half each, to fill up from the mains water when it was on. I think we only ran out of tank water five or six times in about four years, and we only once ran out of drinking water - then went to buy some more from the supermarket.

When a de-salination plant was introduced to the island about three years ago after several seasons of extreme drought, we were promised permanent mains water. And so it seemed at first. What luxury it was to have drinking water on tap all the time. Something we took totally for granted in the UK, of course.

Still, we decided to continue keeping plastic bottles to fill with drinking water, just in case. We gradually cut down the number, and now usually just keep about six. Not that I always remember to fill them, of course! But they're a convenient way of carrying drinking water around the house, or in the car, and for filling the coffee machine.

What's more, there are still odd times when the mains goes off without warning. Sometimes we see or hear workmen digging up a road nearby and assume it's been switched off to build some new sewers or lay some new pipes. It's a nuisance when it happens - almost more so than when it was predictable, since there's no guarantee that we have any drinking water at all if nobody has filled the bottles! However it doesn't usually last for more than half a day, so it's not too much of a disaster.

Yesterday when we got up the mains was at good pressure - and before going to church I had a sudden urge to fill up the bottles, all of which were empty. So I filled about five of them.

When we got back from church, about 11am, the mains had gone off. We didn't expect it to last long and I was pleased we did at least have plenty of drinking water. I was a bit surprised when there was still no water by the evening, but I washed up carefully - though I'm afraid I just poured the water down the sink rather than over plants! - but still assumed it would be on by this morning.

It wasn't when I got up. There was only one bottle of drinking water left from yesterday, and although I assumed the tanks would still be all right for another day or two, I know we're nothing like as careful as we used to be. It still wasn't on by 8.30 so I had a very quick shower.

But... thankfully by nine o'clock there was a dribble of water, which got slightly stronger in the next hour or so, and now it's fine again. So I could water my new plants - which is rather important! - and fill the water bottles again. The laundry will have to wait till tomorrow, though.

No idea why it was off this time; they don't usually do maintenance on Sundays, particularly not Palm Sunday, and an emergency wouldn't need the water off for nearly 24 hours. Still, it ensures I'll keep the water bottles filled more often at least for the next few days....

Computers: Love them or hate them?

What is it about computers? You use them for weeks, even months, without any problems. Or nothing major, anyway. Well... my CD-Rom drive wasn't working - it refused to open, and if I managed with the help of a knife to get it open, it wouldn't accept a CD. But that's OK, I don't use them much. Oh, and my keyboard was obviously not doing well: every time I switched the computer on in the morning I got a horrible beeping noise until I unplugged the keyboard and then plugged it in again. But I got used to it.

Also the monitor was large and ugly and not brilliant. And I was using Windows 98SE which is reasonably stable (as Windows products go) and I'd had it for four years, so why change? Microsoft don't support it any longer but I had virus protection (Avast!) and a firewall (router and the free version of Zone Alarm) and anti-spyware programs (Ad-Aware and Spybot) and I use Firefox as my browser...and I'm fairly streetwise as far as the Internet Highway goes. So all in all I reckoned I was reasonably secure. Last year I even made backups of all my documents and the financial data on the boys'computer, and deleted all my temporary files, and de-fragmented - on the last day of each month. So efficient.... they even burned a backup CD for me last June.

Somehow I haven't got around to it so much lately. It all seems like such a hassle. I copy my digital photos on the Ofoto site so they're safe enough there, and there's not much else that really matters....

For my birthday, as a total surprise, Richard bought me a flat screen monitor. We had talked about it a couple of years ago when they were still very expensive. I'd quite forgotten about it, in fact. So it was a great gift. He installed it for me with ease.... well, almost with ease. He hadn't realised it was impossible to use my Cd-Rom drive, so had to do something clever via the boys'computer over the network. But anyway, it worked, and looks so much better on my desk. It's clearer too, and I can see more of most web pages than I could before.

I had some birthday money too, and he suggested I should really get a new CD-Rom drive, maybe one that will write CDs so I can do my own backups. Good idea, I said, and what about a keyboard too? Mine was old and evidently wasn't going to last long, and they're not particularly expensive. So he went out to our friendly local computer shop, and bought these on my behalf. I tried out three different keyboards before deciding on a neat-looking black-and-silver one.

So everything was fine. Tim found some good software for writing CDs; Richard installed it and showed me how to use it, so I made a CD of all my digital photos - 500 megabytes of them in all. And everything was fine. I decided I would make a backup of everything at the end of the month (to be tidy....)

On Saturday I was using 'Hello' to send the photos to my blog which are just below this entry. When it prompts me to find the photos, it asks if I want to use Windows Explorer or Picasa2. I've always used Explorer, since I hadn't managed to get Picasa to instal. I downloaded it a few weeks ago and tried to, but every time it simply locked up my computer so nothing would work, and I had to restart it with the button on the front.

But this time I decided I really wanted to try it - it sounded like an excellent product that would help me find my photos much more easily. So I tried installing it again, and once again my computer locked up. Richard came into the study as I was looking at information about it, and I asked him if my computer had all the requirements needed - I have no clue about RAM and Hertz and so on. He said it should be OK, but he wondered if I had a good enough version of Quicktime. I didn't know, but we found one and installed it. Then tried again to instal Picasa, and once again the computer locked up.

But then, when I tried to restart the computer, it wouldn't. At least, it appeared to and it let me log in, but all that appeared on screen was my background. No taskbar, no icons. The mouse pointer moved, but I couldn't even do a right-button click to bring up a 'properties'dialogue. So I restarted it again, and the same thing happened. Richard tried to restart it into 'Safe mode', and even that didn't work. Uh-oh....

After much discussion - all four of us - the boys said the first thing to do was to rescue my documents. The only way to do that, apparently, was to use a Linux bootable CD to read my hard drive and copy everything via the network onto their computer. So Tim spent three hours downloading a system called Ubuntu which he thought would be good. Sure enough, it booted up (what a good thing I had a working CD-Rom drive by then!!) although I didn't like the background of the screen: it was an unpleasant shade of brown which looked as if someone had sneezed all over it. But looks don't matter in these circumstances... and I was relieved and pleased to learn that I could indeed copy my files to the boys'computer.

Unfortunately, I could only copy some of them before the CD locked up. Apparently it didn't have enough RAM to deal with such a complex operating system. So Daniel proposed something simpler and plainer, which only took about 15 minutes to download. This produced something that looks a bit like FTP and enabled me to copy everything - documents, photos, downloaded programs, settings, email... over to their computer. Whew!

We did talk about me having Linux, but that doesn't work with my email software (Pegasus). Although I could perhaps have tried something else such as Thunderbird, Linux also doesn't work with the Hello program (or Picasa, for that matter). I would have been quite happy to simply reinstal Win98 again, but Richard said that was silly because I would simply hit more and more problems in future as it's not going to be compatible with new software. So he suggested I have Windows 2000, which apparently is much more secure than Windows ME.

So Sunday after church he formatted my hard drive and installed Win2000 for me. Then we installed all the various programs I was using beforehand, and we copied back all my documents (although not the ones which were backups of the boys'computer) and Daniel even managed to rescue my previous Firefox browser settings and passwords. By about 8pm it was all more-or-less working and I could catch up on the email I'd been missing. We even managed to instal Picasa which seems to be am amazing program, although I haven't yet done much experimenting with it.

The only remaining problem is the scanner. It took ages to find a driver that would work, and although my computer now recognises it, scanning produces a horrible red glow over everything. It's possible that the scanner is the one thing that was compatible with Win98 but not with Win2000. Ah well, I haven't used it much since we had the digital camera.

I am very, very thankful to be part of such a tecnically-aware family who were able to rescue all my files and settings and help me get it all working again. I guess there were more important things on my computer than I had realised... it wasn't until I thought I might have lost them all that I got worried about it. The moral, of course, is to do frequent regular backups of EVERYTHING.

This morning I thought I might do a backup onto CD, only to realise that the one thing we haven't reinstalled is the CD-writing software. So maybe I'll wait till the end of the month. After all, everything's still backed up onto the boys'computer at present....

Mespila in Cyprus

This is the loquat tree in our front garden. The fruit is known as 'mespila' here in Cyprus, so that's what we tend to call them too. They're about the size of plums when they're ripe, and the colour of apricots. The taste is a little like a combination of the two although there are three or four largish stones in each fruit.

Usually they are ripe by this time of year, or nearly so; however they're only just starting to turn orange so it'll probably be another couple of weeks at least before we can eat them raw. There's a good crop,anyway, assuming we get to them before the birds do. I'll probably make some jam with the earlier fruit, which tends to be a little tart when raw. I might freeze some too for future desserts, but we don't have a whole lot of freezer space.

Half Way to Ninety...

I had a birthday this week. I'm now officially, as my brother put it, half way to 90. Does that make me middle-aged? How about if I live to 98, as my oldest grandmother did? Or maybe 100, as Richard's oldest grandmother did? Should I wait another four or five years before I decide to be middle-aged? Not that I plan to be like one of those Agatha Christie 'women in their forties', who always seem rather sad with their 'sensible' shoes and tweedy skirts and cardigans. It's jeans and trainers for me for a while yet. Indeed I'll probably still dress this way when I'm 90 or more. I can't see any reason not to, unless of course I become too arthritic to get into jeans easily.

New Bougie

Tim gave me a new bougainvillea for my birthday. I planted it out the back along the new border of flowers, where I hope it will grow to disguise that awful paint-stain on hte wall.  

Strawberry Plants

Daniel gave me a couple of strawberry plants (and a very nice tin of chocolate biscuits). After some thought, I decided to put the strawberries in with the flowers at the back. We've tried other, less sunny places for strawberry plants in previous years, with no success whatsoever. One of them is just behind the pink geranium, the other on the right of the picture, just in front of a small ornamental pepper plant. 

My flowers, yet again....

The flowers in the front are really looking much better now! The compost and the additional rain and watering (and a dash of Phostrogen) seem to have helped. Of course the weeds are growing as fast too...  

'Tyre'd? No, 'Exhaust'ed!

What fun cars are.

This morning around 9am we set off as usual for our weekly supermarket shop. Only we needed to get some petrol first. Half way to the petrol station, when we were paused at a crossroads, a motorbike pulled up beside us with the man on it pointing at the back of the car and obviously saying that there was something drastically wrong with it. In Greek, but the gesticulating was pretty clear...

The exhaust had been rather noisy for a while, and ten days ago we knew it would need changing soon, so I wondered if it had finally dropped off, or was hanging by a thread. So Richard pulled into the next side street and we got out to look.

Not the exhaust but the rear tyre on my side. It was completely flat. Too far to drive on to the petrol station, and we didn't have the foot pump with us...

So I stayed with the car and Richard went home to get it. Only five minutes walk but he took about twenty minutes... apparently when he got back he realised it was slightly broken but didn't have any screwdrivers at home, so he had to wake up Tim to borrow one from him before coming back.

Pumping was surprisingly effective and enabled us to drive on to petrol station (after a brief detour to the Thrift Store). There Richard used the proper air system to check all the tyres, and found that the rear passenger side tyre had lost some of its air already. Evidently there was a hole somewhere, so after filling it up again we drove to the place where he gets tyres changed. It wasn't all that long ago that we had new tyres so he hoped it would be fixable.

The engineer was available, and quickly found the end of a key embedded in the tyre. Then it was a simple matter to mend it apparently - it took about ten minutes in all, for which we were charged £4. Which is about £4.50 sterling or $9 US, if anyone's interested. Not unreasonable as a charge, although compared to normal Cypriot wages it was a huge amount for ten minutes' manual labour (a music teacher, for instance, gets between £6 and £7.50 per hour for one-on-one tuition).

Anyway we were happy to have it mended, and certainly didn't mind paying that charge. But... when the engineer lifted the car up so he could get at the tyre, we saw just how bad the exhaust was. Uh-oh. Evidently it needed changing immediately, not in a few weeks as we had thought. Ah well, the exhaust-changing place wasn't far from the tyre-changing place, so we drove on to there.

The exhaust man was able to look at the car immediately, but when it was up on the ramp he banged about at its underside and muttered a lot, and although he speaks very little English it was clear that there was more wrong than just the exhaust. His son arrived - who speaks more English - and we understood that the catalytic convertor - whatever that might be! - also needed changing. Our ordinary mechanic (who does all the main servicing, but can't do exhausts or tyres) had warned Richard that this would need changing before long so he wasn't too surprised, but of course it meant rather a longer job than just mending or changing the exhaust. It was also rather more expensive!

Unlike most of Europe, where exhaust service places have in stock the parts for a variety of cars, they build them from scratch here. So it took about an hour of welding and adjusting before it was all ready. We went over to Orphanides, the big supermarket which has clothes and house/garden items upstairs, and had a wander round. We did think about buying our weekly groceries there but we don't really like Orphanides - it's too crowded and the lights hurt my eyes. We also don't know our way around very well. So we just looked at some clothes and electrical appliances, then sat at the café and had a drink.

Eventually the car was fixed and we were given a year's guarantee. But it was past noon by the time we got to our friendly local Metro supermarket, and we were both extremely hungry and tired by the time we finally got home.

Downtown Larnaka

Dan had to be up early this morning for a theatre performance, so I decided to go out at about 8am to the Post Office. We don't get mail delivered to our house - we do have an American style box on one of our gates but it's not very secure. So we pay the grand total of £18 per year for a secure box at the Post Office downtown. It's about 2km away, I suppose, so a pleasant walk, but now the weather's getting warmer I prefer to go first thing. Last time Richard went there was a slip saying there was a parcel too big for the box, so I had to go inside to collect it.

As I came out of the PO I was struck by this amazing tree blossoming in gorgeous colour directly over the road. It was quite sunny so the colours in the photo don't look as stunning as they did at the time. One day I'll work out when I should adjust the various settings!  

St Lazarus and Lights

In case anyone's wondering what was behind the tree, it was the famous St Lazarus Church where (reputedly) the bones of Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, were held before the invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Here's a view of it without the obscuring tree.

As I walked back along the main shopping street, I noticed a small lorry with a crane, and men doing something to the lights. Not the ordinary street lights, but the Christmas lights which have been up since late last year. Were they finally taking them down, I wondered? But if so, why were they all switched on - particularly as it was broad daylight?

Then I realised they weren't taking them down at all, they were replacing dead bulbs with working ones. Looks like these lights will be staying all year, then... 

Rain and Guests

It rained on Friday. Strange, the weather site had stopped predicting it at all, but it was quite a heavy downpour when it came. About two hours of it, though the last hour was drizzle and (thankfully) Tim's ceiling didn't leak.

We had a guest for Friday and Saturday. Someone we first knew many years ago when we lived in Birmingham. He went to the same church as we did, and lived not far away. Then a year after we went to live temporarily in Colorado Springs in the USA (1992-1994) this friend and his wife came to live there too, working for the same organisation and we got to know them better.

Then we moved back to Birmingham, and in 1997 we moved to Cyprus. So it was good to catch up with him; he had been in Limassol for a conference and came to spend a couple of days with us before flying back. He and Richard talked until the early hours both nights he was here.

On Sunday we had another guest just for lunch. We didn't know we were going to, because Richard had confused the dates of his arrival. It was a young man from Sweden who works in Tanzania, and who landed in Larnaka airport mid-morning after all-night flights via the Middle East. Ouch. Tim was cooking roast chicken and trimmings for lunch, so it was easy enough to have an extra person. I rustled up a quick dessert and we had a pleasant time. This guy is now staying at Richard's office in the guest room there, and learning from him about Internet Radio.

Tonight we're having yet another guest for our evening meal - a friend who used to work here, but currently lives and works in Egypt. He's here for a week while his wife goes to various meetings locally with their organisation. Richard and he have a lot to catch up on, so despite Monday being rather hectic, he'll share our meal.

One of the mailing lists I'm on has been discussing hospitality. It's not my strong suit, and I realised we hadn't had guests for meals (other than visitors who were actually staying with us) for quite some time. I knew it was something I should make more of an effort with. So we invited people to lunch for two Sundays in a row, as a starting point... now suddenly it seems we're being inundated. God has a sense of humour!

It wasn't supposed to rain this morning but when I got up it was grey and the atmosphere felt damp, so I decided not to make a start on the vast pile of laundry awaiting me. I haven't done any washing since Thursday, since our visitor came on Friday morning and I never do laundry on Sundays. The basket is more than overflowing and the guest bed still has its sheets...

I was right, though, as it did start to spit with rain around 9.30, and this afternoon it's raining a bit, off and on. Getting washing dry in wet weather is almost impossible so it's much better to leave it another day.

Out and About, Work and Relaxation, Dolphin and Type....

Last night Richard and I, and a couple of colleagues from Egypt who are working with him at present, drove to Limassol to have a meal with a couple in another organisation. Egyptian husband, Cypriot wife. We had a very pleasant evening with excellent food, and it was warm enough that we sat outside after eating until about 10.30pm, when we left. It's an hour's drive back so we were rather later than I had hoped, but never mind. The boys were still up and beginning to get worried about us...!

Warm again today. A little weeding first thing, and a bit of lawn-mowing late afternoon. It's a pity it's dark so early as the evenings are really very pleasant, although even by sixish the garden is full of mosquitoes, even when we keep the weeds down. I suppose it's all the trees that encourage them, and we love the trees. We don't get bitten as much as we did at first, and the bites no longer swell up or become itchy, but I still prefer to keep out of the way of mozzies.

Tim got up early and did some of his curriculum work!! Maths and English only, but he did the final workbook test in each so he'll be doing official tests tomorrow. He's doing geometry in maths - American style, so full of formal proofs of things that are really quite obvious. No enjoyable proofs like we had to do at school - actually finding things out and being able to use whatever techniques we liked. Still, Tim seems to be making more sense of this than Daniel did. For Dan it was too painfully detailed and he always wanted to use some other method than what was expected. For Tim it's just boring, but he likes it better than algebra. I wish these American curriculums used the British style of introducing algebra and geometry at a much younger age and then doing them interspersed with other maths, rather than making such a huge deal out of them. It's not as if either is particularly difficult, but so much focus on just one topic becomes heavy and tedious.

There was a jumble sale at lunchtime at the Anglican Church. They do them about four times a year and often have a good selection of stuff. Not too many books today, but I picked up one that looked interesting, and a few classical CDs at 50c each (a little less than 60p sterling) which seemed good value. Oh, and a few jigsaws, which the lady on the stall said were almost certainly complete. I'll do them in the summer when it's too hot for anything much more. We haven't had any new jigsaws for a few years now.

Tim's piano lesson was cancelled because his teacher was helping at the jumble sale. But Daniel had a busy afternoon, teaching the 7-11s at Antidote Theatre because the directors were away. Unfortunately they didn't ask him until just under a week ago so he didn't have a chance to spend time in the class beforehand, and just to make it even more difficult, they didn't have the class in the usual theatre place, as the stage is being re-built. So they started in the car park and then moved to the foyer. Dan said it went reasonably well, which is encouraging as he was quite worried about having to teach 20 children he didn't know! Rather him than me...

Now he's out at karate. Richard's back at the office working with the Egyptians. Tim's watching something on TV. So I'm back at the computer....

A few days ago I signed up for 'Project Dolphin' - an interesting idea that tells us how many keystrokes we do at the computer each day! It then sends a 'pulse' once an hour (or once a day) to log this at the site. I'm not quite sure what the point of it is but it's interesting to know. I apparently do between 18,000 and 30,000 keystrokes per day, which is much lower than many. Sounds a lot, but within email and forums and reviews and blogging, and taking the average word as having about 4 letters plus a space, it's only around 4,500 - 6,000 words per day.

Then this morning I signed up for the type blogs site that sorts blogs according to Myers-Briggs types. What a great idea.

Home Education today...

Daniel had a performance of 'The Little Man' this morning. So he had to be at the theatre by 9am. When he got back he did some drum practice, then spent some time online while listening to clarinet music. Last night he went to a classical concert by a Viennese orchestra of Mozart music, and said it was wonderful... that was after a day which involved an oral music lesson, a drum lesson, an art lesson and a music theory lesson.

Tim didn't get up till 10am today. He's in that mid-teenage stage of needing a lot of sleep in the mornings. Daniel was just the same at 16. When Tim had finished his shower and had breakfast, he decided to bake some crumpets. He found a Delia Smith recipe, then looked online to find a method of making crumpet rings out of aluminium foil. Yesterday Tim had an oral music lesson in the morning, spent some time online, cut half the 'lawn' in the back garden, popped into Richard's office for a bit, went to see if he could arrange some singing lessons at a local music school (unsuccessfully as it happened) and in the evening went to a YWAM meeting at our church hall - the last one for the current training school.

No 'academic' work at all... it gets increasingly difficult to get around to it, somehow. But I suppose if we were having to keep a schedule I could allocate music (for both), drama (for Dan), ICT (for both), domestic science (for Tim) and RE (for Tim).

Right now... they're watching an episode of 'Yes Minister' which we have on DVD. So that's a useful lesson in political studies...!

Blog Visitors!

Thankyou to people who left extra comments to let me know they have been reading. But I'm still glad I installed BlogPatrol, apparently I had 15 visitors here yesterday, and two this morning before I switched the computer on. Wow! I think I'll only see visitors rather than hits, so it won't show repeat visits, but even so... I'm amazed.

The far end of our garden, yet again...

Just for the record, this is how the far end of the garden looks now... the flowers are doing much better, though I have to water them every couple of days. The weeds are thriving without any help, and this is what they looked like after I'd done a good hour's weeding this morning! 

The Ability to Laugh

I'm slowly reading my way through Philip Yancey's 'Finding God in Unexpected Places'. What a great writer he is. I find more new insights in every one of his books than I've come across in church sermons in the past seven years.

He quotes WH Auden who apparently pointed out that man is the only creature to work, pray and laugh (among other things). Then he quotes CS Lewis, who said somewhere that even in the absence of any other evidence, we could argue the basic essentials of theology from the existence of dirty jokes, and our attitudes towards death.

Why? Well, as Yancey points out, most rude jokes are either about sex or about toilet functions. Two of the most natural processes in the world, which every other type of animal does when necessary, without any fuss, and frequently in public. Why do we humans find it all so embarrassing? Why do people poke fun at those who have difficulty with these natural functions? And indeed, why do we find big noses or beer bellies amusing?

Yancey suggests that deep within us all there must be a hint of our divine origins - the fact that we are spiritual beings cased within flesh and blood. I think he's right. Humour so often comes as a result of a clash between what is expected and a surprise - plays on words, or even slapstick. And yes, we humans who do share a good many features with other animals, are at the same time not animals. So sometimes we laugh because when we do what animals do, or hear of other people doing so, there's an anomaly. We're misfits in the animal world, and we're also misfits in the spiritual world because we do have the need for these natural functions.

As for attitudes towards death: again, what could be more natural than birth and death? It happens all the time, and for animals death usually comes peacefully at the end of their allotted span. Assuming they're not killed by other animals or (more likely) humans. But we spend millions of pounds ensuring that ill or elderly people can prolong their lives by just a few weeks or months. Life is good, and health is good, and I absolutely believe in the sanctity of life. But if someone is 95 and ready to die, why do we expend so much money and energy keeping them alive artificially. For what?

Then there's all the pomp and ceremony that surrounds our dying. Every human society has traditions associated with death - embalming, or burying, or burning. Just look at all the pilgrims who hurried to Rome for the late Pope's funeral. He was a good man, and of course those close to him will grieve, but many of the visitors had never met him; knew him only by repute. He was old, and he was ill. Now he's in heaven, and all the ceremony and mourning can mean nothing to him.

So all this too, Philip Yancey suggests, is an indication of our difficulty in resolving our spirit nature with our fleshly bodies. We somehow feel that life should go on, that death cannot be the end. Even those of us who believe in the afterlife find it difficult to come to terms with someone leaving behind their earthly body - even when they're old and sick. We want eternity on earth, somehow.

What has all this to do with living in Cyprus? I was weeding the end of the garden this morning, yet again. By 10am it was already too warm for me in the shade. And as I weeded (an endless battle, it seems), I wondered about this need to create something colourful and attractive. That's another thing that marks us out as humans, separate from animals. Birds create nests, it's true, but they're practical and warm. Being a thing of beauty is irrelevant to them. When the nest has finished its purpose and the baby birds have flown away, the adult birds get on with life.

My composting and watering the fruit trees makes practical sense: they provide us with tasty fresh food. But what is is about geraniums, and petunias, and above all bougainvillea that I want to nurture them when they're no practical use? Why is ugliness so unappealing, making me pull up nettles - which could be made into tea? Why did I even feel a bit disturbed even about the scarlet geranium growing next to the deep pink bougainvillea?

To me this too is part of my being created in the image of God. He didn't have to create thousands of varieties of plant, in myriad colours, but he did. My need to grow flowers has no practical use; the only reason I can see for it is that in some tiny way I'm reflecting the creative urges of God.

The bougainvillea and the scarlet geranium. With a few yellow and red antirrhinums (snapdragons) in front. Unfortunately this picture was taken in bright sunlight so they look a bit depressingly dull...  

Still, they look a lot brighter than they did last Summer - this picture shows them in August 2004 when they had just survived the summer, rather to my surprise. Then this picture shows the bougainvilla thriving in October last year, with the geranium just about surviving. Once the rains start things really grow fast here, though!

Site counter

I love getting comments on this blog, but there aren't a huge number... so I began to wonder if anyone else was actually reading it. I just updated my Geocities family site with journal pages for January to March this year (oops! Behind again...) and included some links to this blog. Actually the March page was stolen from parts of the blog..

I realised that I do like checking the stats at my family site, and seeing that every month at least forty or so visitors have a look at what I've written. So I searched for a suitable hit-counter for blogs and discovered BlogPatrol. Very easy indeed - I just registered, copied the code into my blog template (in the 'footer' section) and it all worked.

It was so easy I did the same for my book reviews blog - nobody's commented on any of that, so I've had no idea if anyone's reading it.

Getting warm

I keep hearing about snow in the UK, but here in Cyprus it's starting to get distinctly warm. This morning was the first day this year when I didn't even put on a sweatshirt after my shower - and haven't felt the slightest bit chilly. If only it would stay like this all summer!

I keep an eye on the weather in our town at the weather.com site - bizarrely it says that today's maximum temperature is 24C, but that it's currently 27C. Hmm. I would have thought the maximum would automatically get updated when the actual temp is higher! No wonder it feels a little over-warm today, although our house is very pleasant - it almost always feels cooler than outside. Several of the windows are open and there's a gentle breeze.

Tim says he's going to cut the grass in the back garden this afternoon. It does look as if it needs doing - unfortunately it has to be done about once a week at this time of year. Its growth slows down when summer starts (June) and then eventually it gets brown and stops looking like grass at all until after the first rains in the Autumn. We tried using a sprinkler on it a couple of years ago, and some of it stayed green longer than usual - but it took up masses of water, and was such a nuisance to keep remembering. And then the bits that stayed green kept growing, so we had to keep mowing. This year I don't think we'll bother though of course I'll keep watering the trees through the hot months.

The weather site tells me it's going to rain on Thursday and Friday this week, which would be good. But I'll believe it when I see it...

Strawberry Jam

Most fruit in Cyprus is very seasonal - but the seasons tend to be quite long. Winter has plenty of citrus fruits in the supermarkets as well as our garden, but the only other fruits that are available then are apples, pears and bananas. So we're always pleased when April begins and others start to appear; I particularly like the strawberry season, which is rather earlier than that in the UK, and also rather longer! They actually started a few weeks ago, at quite a price, then ten days ago were more reasonable. Yesterday our supermarket had some most delicious looking strawberries in the usual green plastic punnets, costing 80c for 500g - an excellent price.

I bought two punnets which we've been eating with breakfast, then today I walked there and bought some more, as I felt inspired to make the first batch of jam of the year. So this afternoon the house was filled with the wonderful aroma of strawberry jam in process... I made four jars in all. We've worked out that a year's supply of jam is about 40 jars: last year I made a bit more than that and when we checked the cupboard today, there are still five jars left from those I made. But strawberry is my favourite!

Home Education, looking back....

It seems strange in retrospect, what a huge deal it was to begin home education. Had we never moved abroad, I doubt if we'd have tried it. But I'm so thankful that we did. Still, I think of the times when I worried that we weren't doing enough, or that the boys would miss out on science labs or whatever, or that they'd regret not doing GCSEs and A-levels, or... or...

And here we are, at the end of compulsory education age. They seem to have plenty to do, both now and in the future. Of course we're still home educating in a way - they still plan to finish their NCSC coursework that will take them to A/S level standard but Daniel's not going to do any more than that and somehow I doubt if Tim will either, although at one point he thought he would do the third level, A-level standard, as well. But it's quite difficult to get around to actually DOING any of the work. Tim doesn't want me sitting with him most of the time, so I'm no longer as involved as I was. Of course I still check he's finished the relevant workbooks and supervise the tests when they come up, but he does his own scheduling and decides when he's going to do some of this academic work, and when he wants to do other things.

Daniel had another performance of 'The Little Man's Best Friend' with Theatre Antidote this morning - they left mid-morning to drive to a school in Kiti, about half an hour's drive away, and he was back just after lunch. In half an hour or so both the boys will be going to the jazz group Daniel started a few months ago. There are just four of them in it at present (Tim on keyboard, Daniel on drums or clarinet, plus an adult friend on trumpet and a teenage friend on Saxophone) and they seem to enjoy it thoroughly. It's the first time they've met for some weeks as they took a break over Easter. Dan's been downloading some jazz music since lunchtime.

Then we have a crazy rush in the evening... they should get back shortly after 5.30, and Dan has to be out again by 6pm. The older teenage drama group don't begin till 6.30 but he's going to help with the lighting for the younger (11-14) teenage group when they put on their end-of-year production so he needs to see what they're doing! Then Tim has a rehearsal with Narrow Gate (the youth band) at 6.30. So we'll be eating in a hurry around 5.40...

Back to the education thing. They're both learning a great deal of music. They both do a lot of computer-related projects. They both read a fair amount. Dan does plenty of art and drama. Tim is a good cook and helps in the garden. Dan does karate and stage combat. Tim does some wiring and soldering, and understands a fair amount about electronics.

Balanced? Well no, not really. But I suppose if we take into account the NCSC work, even though it's a bit sporadic, that currently covers maths, English grammar, history, Biblical studies, and physics/chemistry. Actually Dan only has the Biblical studies and science to complete but Tim's still working on all the level 2 subjects.

Does it matter if their education is unbalanced? I really don't think so. Five years ago this bothered me, but now I can see that they learn what they need to know for the paths they want to follow. Dan's immediate future includes two months on the Doulos (assuming he's accepted) and musical instrument repair. And playing the clarinet, of course. He doesn't need any academic qualifications for any of these. Tim's future will probably be in music and/or the computer world. Again, what he needs more than anything is experience and understanding. Music exams aren't too difficult to take, and there are computer qualifications that may be relevant - possibly the Microsoft ones, more likely one of the CISCO ones. But no GCSEs or other academic qualifications seem relevant. If we had our time over again I'm not sure we'd bother with the NCSC, although some of it has been interesting and I hope they don't forget everything they've learned from it.

Cleo

A picture of Cleo, since I've written about her. This was actually taken last August, but cats don't change much... and she's not the easiest of cats to photograph being almost entirely black. As usual she looks rather nervous... 

Coughing Cats

Cleo, our oldest and most nervous cat, started coughing last Thursday. Not all the time, and not a painful sort of cough - in fact it was like a cross between a cough and a sneeze. I thought perhaps she had a hairball and didn't worry about it as she didn't seem distressed or unwell in any other way.

On Friday she coughed a bit more, every time I stroked her. First she started gulping a bit as if there was something stuck in her throat, then sneezing, then jumping on the floor and coughing quite violently and half-retching. Cleo's the kind of cat who ignores us much of the time, then suddenly has an affectionate moment when she wants to nuzzle into our clothes - particularly if we're wearing something fleecy! - and purr loudly while kneading with her paws. Poor Cleo, she was abandoned as a kitten so she still has this need to 'suckle'.

But Friday was a public holiday for one of the Cypriot national days, and Cleo still didn't seem to be ill as such - just coughing whenever she started to purr. I checked online and found that coughing in cats can be due to various reasons, none of them particularly serious. So we didn't ring the vet's emergency number. For one thing, taking Cleo in the car would be so traumatic for her that it might make her ill.

On Saturday she was still fine, but still started coughing and sneezing every time she jumped on me. Same on Sunday. Richard suddenly remembered that she did something similar this time last year, and we wondered if it was an allergic reaction... however last year she sneezed when she was outside and there was blossom blowing about. Surely she couldn't have developed an allergy to me?!

By Monday she seemed to be better. She ran away from me rather than wanting a cuddle; perhaps she had realised the connection between me and her coughing fits. On Tuesday she ignored me completely. Then on Wednesday she jumped on me, nuzzled in, purred..... and no coughing. What a relief!

Then I heard another cat coughing in just the same way, and realised it was Tessie, our youngest cat. Tim thinks she might have a hairball, or an allergy of some sort. I wonder if she's caught something from Cleo, although they never actually get close to each other as Cleo's terrified of Tessie.

Ah well, they both seem to be better today. We'll just wait and see if the other two start coughing, but since Cleo is apparently fully recovered, I can't imagine it was anything serious.

Jeans

Finding clothes in Cyprus is quite a chance adventure sometimes. In previous years we used to buy all the clothes we thought we would need in the UK on our visits back there, as they were cheaper and more widely available. But last year we didn't go back at all, and although Daniel hasn't grown much, Tim has. The problem is that Tim is considerably thinner than the average Cypriot teenager of his age and height. So he was wearing an old pair of jeans (waist 30 inches) with a belt to stop them falling down... but in the past couple of months they've looked distinctly short. They claim to be 32 inch legs. I don't know why jeans can't be metric like everything else!

We went to Orphanides on Monday, actually looking for other things such as socks, and discovered that although it's not advertised, they seem to be having a sale of previous stock. There was an odd selection, including some jeans with the choice of either waist 30 inches or waist 40 inches! They all had length 33 inches so Tim tried some on and they were exactly right. Well... large on the waist, but he's used to that. It doesn't appear to be possible to get jeans with smaller waist size then 30 inches other than for children, and they're not expected to have long legs.

So Tim now has two pairs of jeans that fit. Unfortunately we didn't manage to find him any trainers (which he will need soon) or any for me either. Our favourite shoe shop, the Shoe Emporium, has moved to rather grand premises and their stock has gone up-market too with a lot of uncomfortable-looking fashionable shoes, and very few trainers.

Weeds!

This is - or rather, was - a patch of garden near the house, to the left of the patio. There's an old oil drum which we use for bonfires sometimes, and until last Friday there were weeds up to a metre high in places. This is what the whole garden would be like if we didn't keep mowing and weeding!  

With rain predicted for the weekend I set to work on this patch in the morning. I raked fallen leaves and pods, and pulled weeds. Then I realised the current compost heap was far too big to put anything else on, so I used the wheelbarrow to decant the last of the current compost, and thus declared it as a a new heap!

It did rain... mostly spitting on Friday with a few showers later. Then a major thunderstorm about 11pm, which led to Tim's bedroom ceiling leaking once again. Then it rained off and on during Saturday, and some of Sunday too. We needed the rain, but it's quite a shock when a whole month's worth arrives in the space of three days.

On Monday the sun shone, most of the time. Yesterday was lovely too, though not as warm as it had been last week. Tim got the mower out and did about half of the garden, then I did another third including the patch described above.

Weeds removed!

It looks rather bare now, but a great deal tidier. And there's even some grass poking through...