Clean Monday was a bit of a wash-out for most, though I am sure everyone did what they could and had a good time. Remember, ‘If you can’t do what you want to then you do the things you can.’
We worked at home in the morning, and then went to the Harry house for a rather non-Clean Monday indoor barbeque complete with quizzes and regular boat check-ups. It’s become something of a pastime around here, clicking back to your tablet to check on the Live Ships app to see where the Blue Star Diagoras is and follow its trail as it hangs about off Rhodes waiting for the wind and swell to die down. It did though call into Symi yesterday on its way back to Athens. Let’s hope it got there in time to turn around and head back here tomorrow.
And on that note: no sign of the new furniture as yet, though there may be by the time this gets auto-posted on Wednesday morning. In case you were wondering: when you order from Ikea.gr you can get a text message saying when your things have left the warehouse. Then you might get an email to say they are on their way. We (or rather Jenine who is dealing with it) got a message to say things had been delivered, but that actually means delivered to the courier, I guess. So they could be sat at Piraeus still, waiting for the truck to be filled so it can be dispatched. They could then have been on last Tuesday’s boat that never was, and not actually been unloaded until last night. We shall never really know. But when the company says delivery has been made, it doesn’t necessarily mean delivered to you.
We had a similar courier problem just before Christmas when Neil’s order didn’t arrive even though the courier headquarters told us it was on Symi. We asked all the courier agents we could think of, and the postman, and never did find the delivery. Not until Neil had asked, in mid January, for his money back and the shop he bought the things from tracked down the courier agent on Symi who had had the package since well before Christmas but had not told anyone. And so it goes on: the joys of having deliveries made to Symi. I think there’s a section about this in ‘Symi 85600’ or ‘Carry On Up The Kali Strata.’ (See the links on the right and order copies if you’ve not got one already.)
And on the book news front: we are still editing and preparing ‘Lonely House’, my next horror novel to come from RC Publications – due out around March or April.
Now that I have my new ‘office’ more or less set up and am getting used to it, I can see that it’s going to be so much easier to be disciplined in this new house. I don’t mean told off or given the slipper, I mean self-disciplined. Leaving the living quarters part of the house and entering the ‘office’ side gives you a feeling of actually going out to work, rather than working from home. There are fewer distractions, with only the view of Yialos and Nimos to distract me from my tasks. So hopefully, soon, when it’s slightly warmer, I will get back into the coursework I want to do and the writing I want to do and put down another novel of some description ready for Christmas sales. Perhaps.
First though, I have shopping to do and an enthusiastically filled cat litter tray to empty. Ah, the life of a novelist eh!
