Grey skies and rams
Woke up on Monday morning to clouds and the aftermath of a thunderstorm, which I slept through thanks to my earplugs. I usually put them in for the cat, I mean so I don’t have to listen to his singing at night and alarm calls in the morning. He has a habit of using his litter tray and then shouting at it for five minutes, as if it had done him wrong. That’s all very well, but he likes to use it at Ungodly O’clock in the morning and I don’t need to listen to that.
So, I missed the rain pouring down on the roof, the overflow flowing over into the lane outside the bedroom window, and the thunder that was rattling around. I even missed the alarm clock. That is left out in the hallway so someone has to get out of bed to switch it off; you can only ignore it for so long. There had been no rain coming into the house which is a good thing, of course, and the plants had themselves a good watering. The sky in the morning still carried heavy clouds and a certain amount of rain, so I went up onto the roof to take a look at the view and found this chap watching me from up the lane.
It’s great at this time of year as you find yourself sitting there watching TV and then wonder what that sound is… A herd of sheep bleats it way past your window, even though we are not particularly rural where we are now. We all know, too, that the silence of the lambs will soon be upon us, around Big Friday in forty or so days’ time.
A quick mention of earthquakes as it came up the other day. Neil felt a tremor from the sitting room but I was in the kitchen and felt nothing. A couple of people have asked for a good site to check earthquakes up on and the one I use is here: http://www.geophysics.geol.uoa.gr/stations/maps/recent.html This site lists all recorded earth tremors and, if you look, you should see the one we had on Saturday at 15:44 (GMT). It was 4.1 and between Rhodes and Symi. But it’s nothing to be worried about, just our grumbling off-shore volcano I expect. Apparently there is something like that half way between Turkey and Rhodes and if it should ever surface, we are all expecting a great rush to see who claims it for their country. A few years ago now we had a November full of tremors, five or six noticeable ones in a day, at times. We probably have hundreds each day as old Mother Earth tries to get comfortable, but you don’t notice them unless they are very close to the surface, nearby, or big. Anyway, that site is run by the University of Athens Faculty of Geology, so it’s the one I trust most for local quake news. But, as I say, don’t worry about them; we’ve not had a biggie down here for many years. (2008 was the most recent fatal one, where one person died after they ran from their house and tripped over – this was not on Symi but further north in the Dodecanese chain. So, don’t panic!)
